Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)

Summary: The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) emerged in Nigeria's oil-producing Delta region in 2006, intent on claiming benefits from petroleum exports for local people. Before accepting a government offer of amnesty in the summer of 2009, MEND was blamed for up to a 25 percent reduction in oil production by Nigeria, which accounts for up to 12 percent of US petroleum. MEND targeted pipelines, ships, and foreign workers in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta region, which has long been the source of unrest and attacks by several groups. The group accepted amnesty and government promises of training and jobs in mid-2009. Still, the government failed to deliver on its promises, leading MEND to declare in January 2010 that it was ending its truce.

Territory: Oil-rich Niger River Delta on the South Atlantic coast of West Africa.

Religious affiliation or political orientation: MEND is thought to comprise members of poor ethnic peoples of the Niger Delta seeking compensation for the extraction of oil in their region.

Founded: The first attacks in MEND's name were recorded in 2006.

Stated goals:

• Complete control of oil production in the Niger Delta to benefit Indigenous peoples living in the region.
• Payment by Royal Dutch Shell of $1.5 billion was awarded by a Nigerian court in 2003 to compensate ethnic Ijaw communities for environmental damage caused by oil extraction.
• Release from prison of Ijaw ethnic leader Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, accused of treason.

Key leaders: Henry Okah (given amnesty and released from prison, July 2009). Jomo Gbomo (spokesman; may be a pseudonym for Okah). Major General Godswill Tamuno, a rival to Okah.

Alliances: Believed to be staffed by activists from the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF, primarily comprised of members of the Ijaw ethnic group), which has been largely inactive since its leader was jailed on treason charges. MEND has demanded his release while at the same time denying any ties to NDPVF.

Latest Developments: In June 2009, MEND launched several attacks on pipelines and oil production facilities, including in Lagos state, where MEND had previously been inactive. In 2009, MEND accepted a government offer of a general amnesty, plus training and jobs, in exchange for a truce. But in January 2010, the group said it was withdrawing from the cease-fire, complaining the government had failed to deliver on its promises. Analysts noted that the chief sponsor of the amnesty program, Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua, had been in a Saudi Arabian hospital since late November 2009, undergoing treatment for a heart ailment, and that little progress in implementing the payments and job training had been made in his absence.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is a group thought to represent ethnic minority groups in the three states of Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region (Delta, Bayelsa, and Rivers) on the Atlantic coast. The organization's attacks on oil production facilities and pipelines, starting in early 2006, substantially affected Nigeria's petroleum production, reducing output by as much as a third. MEND's core demand is that the state of Nigeria share more revenue from oil exports with the people of the Delta region.

After a MEND offensive launched in June 2009, the government of President Umaru Yar'Adua offered MEND an amnesty with jobs and stipends for militants who surrendered their weapons. MEND accepted the offer with a two-month cease-fire in July 2009, which was subsequently twice extended, once in September and again in October 2009, as talks with the government continued. For a time, it appeared that MEND's threat to Nigeria's oil production had ended. But in late November 2009, Yar'Adua left to undergo treatment for a heart ailment in a Saudi Arabian hospital, and little progress was made in implementing the government's offer of jobs and stipends. Subsequently, at the end of January 2010, MEND announced withdrawing from the truce agreement and urged its constituent member groups to resume attacks.

MEND has used three basic tactics—kidnapping foreign oil workers for ransom, bombing oil production facilities, including well-heads as far as seventy miles offshore, and attacking pipelines. On one occasion (May 3, 2007), MEND captured a ship owned by the Italian firm ENI and took its crew hostage.

MEND has used ransom payments to finance an expansion in its capabilities, including speedboats, armaments, and rocket grenades used to terrorize Western oil companies.

MEND has vowed to take control of Nigeria's oil output for the benefit of poverty-stricken residents of the Niger Delta. There is no evidence of MEND’s association with international terrorists or political networks. Some analysts have suggested that MEND's character is less political and altruistic and more like an elaborate extortion scheme run by, and for the benefit of, the group's leaders, notably Henry Okah. Nigeria's Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law's executive director, Anyakwee Nsirimovi, quoted Time magazine in May 2009 as saying, "I think Okah and MEND are in it for their personal profit. Oil is in short supply, foreign workers are flying away, and more and more people are out of jobs, so I don't see how this is furthering the cause of the people of the Niger Delta."

Some reports accuse Okah of hiring disenfranchised young gang members to carry out MEND's attacks. The government accuses Okah of earning a fortune as an international arms dealer and trading in the Nigerian oil industry.

Okah, MEND's founding leader, sometimes called Jomo Gbomo, has been challenged by a shadowy leader named Maj. Gen. Godswill Tamuno. Other groups have also risen in the area, possibly with a greater focus on raising ransom. These groups include the Coalition for Military Action in the Niger Delta (Coma), the Joint Revolutionary Council (JRC), the Niger Delta Vigilante and the Martyrs Brigade.

Since MEND's rise and its success in curbing Nigerian oil production and exports, the civilian government has repeatedly offered to negotiate. In June 2009, for example, the government offered an amnesty in exchange for MEND putting down its weapons. This approach has put the civilian government into conflict with the military, which wants to bomb rebel camps. At the same time, there have been signs that MEND has different views within different factions, some more willing to negotiate than others.

The election of President Olusegun Obasanjo, inaugurated in May 2007, raised the prospect of peace talks between the government and MEND. Still, a peace conference was postponed repeatedly, and violence resumed in the autumn of 2007.

During the first five months of MEND's campaign in 2006, Nigeria's oil output was reduced by up to 25 percent, contributing to a run-up in world oil prices. Some oil companies have threatened to withdraw entirely from the region. The largest oil companies active in the Nigerian Delta region are Royal Dutch Shell (Anglo-Dutch), AGIP (Italian), Chevron, Texaco, and ExxonMobil (American), as well as oil service firms like Schlumberger (US) and Petrobras (Brazil).

Nigeria's Role in World Oil Production

The Delta of the Niger River accounts for virtually all of Nigeria's oil production (including offshore platforms). The Delta, an extensive network of rainforests, mangrove swamps, and creeks where the Niger River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, is home to impoverished ethnic minorities who have never benefited from the petroleum industry. The most significant ethnic minority in the Delta is the Ijaw, numbering several million, who earn a living from farming, hunting, and fishing. The Ijaw have long complained that revenues from oil extracted from their homeland all flow to the country's center, leaving them with only the environmental damage.

Indigenous peoples only benefit from the oil industry by tapping into pipelines to obtain oil that can be sold on markets in West Africa, a practice locally called bunkering. It has been a tactic of resistance groups to sell oil siphoned off this way. Discontent in the region does not seem to have religious overtones: the predominant religion in the area is Christianity, particularly Catholicism.

Rise of Militias

In December 1998, an All Ijaw Youths Conference meeting issued a declaration promising direct action to address long-standing complaints about the lack of Ijaw control over oil companies—the statement called for foreign oil companies to suspend operations and withdraw from the territory.

In the same month, about 15,000 Nigerian troops came into the area to protect oil companies and thwart any resistance by the All Ijaw Youths Conference. On December 30, 1998, a protest march by young Ijaws was met by machine-gun fire from the army. Six protesters died.

Despite the army presence, Operation Climate Change, declared by the Ijaw Youths Conference, continued, marked by such actions as turning off valves of oil pipelines.

In the late 1990s, the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF), led by Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, emerged as a leading organization claiming to represent Ijaw claims to a share of the Niger Delta's oil wealth. The NDPVF clashed repeatedly with government forces and members of the Itsekiri ethnic group in Warri and Port Harcourt (the latter being the local headquarters of most foreign oil companies in the Niger Delta). Dokubo-Asari led an armed uprising in 2004 to back demands for local control of oil resources, an uprising blamed for pushing oil prices over $50 per barrel for the first time in 2005. His militia later agreed to a truce and turned in its arms for cash from the government. After Dokubo-Asari threatened in a newspaper interview to dismember Nigeria, he was arrested and imprisoned on treason charges.

Although NDPVF was the largest Ijaw militant group, it was not the only one. Also contending for leadership of disaffected Ijaws was Niger Delta Vigilante (NDV), led by Ateke Tom, along with scores of other small groups, most of which are allied with either NDPVF or NDV.

Emergence of MEND

In early 2006 a new group entered the spotlight: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). The sudden rise of the group followed directly after the Niger Delta's most prominent Ijaw militant group, the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF), sharply reduced its attacks at the behest of its leader, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, who was arrested on September 20, 2005, on charges of treason. The release of Dokubo-Asari remains a central charge of MEND, although NDPFV has explicitly denied any ties to MEND.

MEND's primary strategy is to exert political pressure by cutting into Nigeria's oil production. It has adopted two main tactics—attacking physical facilities, ranging from offshore platforms to pipelines, and abducting foreign oil workers for ransom. MEND often claims responsibility for attacks via email messages to Western news outlets. The size and composition of the organization are unknown.

Selected chronology of MEND attacks:

2006

January: Militants storm the offshore platform of Shell Petroleum Development Co. and abduct four foreign workers. A subsequent explosion ruptures a major oil pipeline. The kidnapped workers were released three weeks later. Gunmen in speedboats killed seventeen Nigerian troops guarding Shell's Benisede oil pumping station and damaged the processing facilities.

February: MEND claims responsibility for kidnapping nine foreign oil workers; they were released in April. Major-General Godswill Tamuno, describing himself as commander of MEND, tells BBC that MEND has declared "total war" on the oil industry in the Nigerian Delta.

May: Three Italian oil services company Saipem employees were kidnapped from a company bus in Port Harcourt and released the next day. MEND does not claim responsibility for the kidnappings. A gasoline pipeline, leaking fuel from an apparent effort to siphon off gasoline, explodes, killing up to 200 people near the fishing village of Inagbe, thirty miles east of Lagos. There was no immediate connection to MEND, but the deadly explosion again underscored the instability of Nigeria's petroleum industry in the Niger Delta.

June: MEND claims it kidnapped five Koreans and killed several soldiers at a natural gas plant operated by Royal Dutch Shell in the southern delta. Demands militia leader Mujahid Dokubo-Asari freed on trial for treason; MEND characterizes its demands as a prisoner exchange.

December: MEND exploded a car bomb in a Port Harcourt residential compound of Royal Dutch Shell. No one was injured, and at an Agip compound, the Italian company.

2007

May: MEND attacks Chevron's floating production platform, storage facility, and ship off the coast of Bayelsa. The group uses speedboats to capture a ship, the Mystras, owned by Italian ENI, taking hostages who were later released; attacks three pipelines, shutting production by facility run by Agip.

December: Gunmen attack ExxonMobil vessel in the Delta, killing one crewman. The attack coincides with three days of peace talks in Bayelsa State between local officials and militants. MEND was expected to sign a peace agreement with the province's governor.

2008

May: Attacks on Shell pipelines shut down 170,00 barrels a day of production. Nigeria launches attack on MEND enclaves after eleven soldiers are kidnapped.

June: Attack on Bonga oil platform, more than seventy miles offshore, run by Shell, shuts down 10 percent of Nigerian production. The platform had been assumed to be beyond the reach of MEND.

September: MEND declares an "oil war" throughout the Niger Delta, targeting pipeline and production facilities; inaugurates "Operation Hurricane Barbarrosa" with attacks in Rivers state. Declares indefinite cease-fire after intervention by Tribal elders in the region.

2009

January: MEND calls off cease-fire from the previous September.

February: MEND leader Henry Okah was secretly deported to Nigeria from Angola on charges of treason, terrorism, and gun-running. In July 2009, he was offered amnesty and released from prison.

May: Nigerian Joint Military Task Force attacks militia

June: MEND rejects an offer of amnesty by the Nigerian government in exchange for disarming. MEND threatens widespread attacks, dubbed "Hurricane Pipe Alpha," on oil facilities throughout the Niger Delta. The same day, the Okan manifold, which controls about 80 percent of Chevron's offshore production, is blown up. MEND says it attacked a Shell pipeline as a warning to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and other potential investors in Nigerian oil. Medvedev arrived on a state visit on June 24. Further attacks on "Hurricane Pipe Alpha" include attacks on Shell pipelines on June 21 and 25, severely curtailing Shell's ability to ship oil.

July: MEND attacks a Shell well head, claims responsibility for the attack on Okan oil manifold, which it says controls 80 percent of Chevron's offshore crude oil shipments to a loading platform. Two trunk lines of Shell and Agip in Bayelsa are blown up. Recently repaired Chevron pipeline is attacked. A jetty on Tarkwa Bay, Lagos state, is attacked, killing five—it is the first in Lagos state, suggesting an expansion of MEND's activities outside the three delta states. MEND leader Henry Okah is released after he accepts an "unconditional" amnesty offer, according to his lawyer, that includes dropping charges of treason for which he was on trial. MEND declares a cease-fire in exchange for the release of Okah, and the government says it will maintain its cease-fire.

August: A sixty-day government offer of amnesty, including job training and a $13 daily stipend to MEND fighters who surrender their weapons, begins August 6. Okah expresses doubts that it will succeed in ending attacks in the Delta.

October: The leader of a MEND faction that had resisted the government amnesty, Ateke Tom, agrees to accept the government offer. Government amnesty offer officially ends with mixed reviews: government officials hailed it as a success even though MEND had not officially endorsed it. No firm figures were made available on how many rebels had turned in their weapons. MEND declares its cease-fire, effective October 25.

November: President Yar'Adua, complaining of chest pains, departs suddenly for Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. A spokesperson stated he responded well to treatment. His absence—which continued for months—effectively removed the architect and chief promoter of the amnesty offer to MEND. Although an uneasy peace settled over the Delta region, some rebel leaders complain about the pace of instituting terms of the amnesty, notably stipends for rebels.

December: Rebels stage the first significant attack on an oil pipeline since the amnesty/cease-fire on December 22.

2010

January: Gunmen attack a Chevron pipeline, halting the flow of about 77,000 barrels per day. Several hundred demonstrators protested the continued absence of President Yar'Adua, telling BBC from his hospital in Saudi Arabia, "I am undergoing treatment, and I'm getting better from the treatment I'm getting, and I hope that very soon there will be tremendous progress which will allow me to get back home." MEND announced it is ending its cease-fire to protest the lack of progress in implementing the government's offer in 2009 to pay a stipend to rebels who surrendered their weapons. MEND threatens an all-out assault on Delta oil facilities.

February: MEND denies it is directly responsible for an attack on a Shell oil pipeline that came hours after it declared an end to its cease-fire but says the attack "was certainly a response to our order to resume hostilities by one of the various freelance groups we endorse."

2010s to 2020s

A cease-fire was enacted in mid-2014, but in 2016, Ekpemupolo "Tompolo," former MEND leader, was arrested on corruption charges that spurred a series of attacks. In the early 2020s, under President Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian government began employing former militant groups and armed political groups to protect the region's oil. Oil theft increased through the late 2010s, and by the 2020s, the country's financial state was in crisis, leading to further robbery of oil pipelines. The region continued to experience instability.

Bibliography

Adebayo J. O. & Matsilele T. (2019). Nigerian experience with post-conflict peacebuilding: Examining operation safe corridors and the Niger Delta amnesty programme. Journal of African Union Studies, 139–160. https://doi.org/10.31920/2050-4306/2019/7

Ford, Neil. (2006, April). Deadly mixture of guns and oil. African Business, 52. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=20547764&site=isc-live

Irabor H. C. & Gumede M. (2021). The role of international law in resolving the conflict in the Niger Delta Nigeria. African Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies, 41–57. https://doi.org/10.31920/2634-3665/2021/v10n3a3

Johnmary A. K. Chukwuemeka O. O. & Ojakorotu V. (2021). The quest for the attainment of relative peace in the Niger Delta. African Renaissance, 55–70. https://doi.org/10.31920/2516-5305/2021/18n4a3

Mann, Jonathan & Lindsey Hilsum. (2006, Jan. 18). Niger hostage crisis. Insight, CNN International. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=6FP0213405962&site=isc-live

Mouawad, Jad. (2007, April 21). Growing unrest posing a threat to Nigerian oil. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/business/worldbusiness/21oil.html

Oil prices rise on Nigeria tension. (2007, May 11). MEED: Middle East Economic Digest. 51(19), 1-2.http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=25244721&site=isc-live

O'Rourke, Morgan. (2007, July). Nigerian nightmare. Risk Management, 00355593. 54(7), 1. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=25612227&site=isc-live