A Day in the Delta

It is almost amusing that if one dredged the backwaters of history, one would be hard put to find anything spectacularly unique about this soggy, mangrove-fringed ridge of West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea. But today, after Royal Dutch Shell struck oil there in 1954, after oil multinationals swarmed the area like termites on Prozac, and after the CNN swung the spotlight on the kidnap jamboree there by youth militants that has netted among others 24 Filipinos (and counting), the former fish-trapping, stilt-house-living locales of Nigeria’s mangrove rainforests wake to the reality of instant celebrity status, however infamous, just by being citizens of the Niger Delta. That’s the miracle of cable, folks.

Of course, the poisonous oil slicks have asphyxiated to endangerment the edible fish population, and the fisherman’s career along with it; the gas flare stacks blaze interminably like a hundred statues of green-house-gas liberties, making the Niger Delta the only region in Africa visible from space at night besides South Africa; and the average man here can barely scrape together one US dollar to his name each day. But that’s ok. For you see, if you believe the news media (a.k.a. the ‘formal grapevine’) these days, a young man here has so many options. You could join the rash of oil bunkering ‘entrepreneurs’, mostly bankrolled by unscrupulous statesmen, and enjoy the dividends of democracy directly: by vandalising oil pipelines and selling the pilfered produce (gasoline is most preferred) to renegade trading shippers from Russia or the Ukraine. Cool dollars, baby! That’s just the day-job. You could then engage in the oil-for-guns programme and hustle your way into the presently lucrative hostage-taking business. If you’re lucky, you might make breaking news on the CNN, dashing across international waters on a speedboat with a Kalashnikov in hand and a cotton condom on your head. And the plot thickens: at night, you get to rendezvous at a five-star hotel with high-powered executives wielding suitcases literally bursting with foreign currency – your foreign currency. Oh, and the champagne is on the house. 2007 is a good year, no?

No doubt, there are a couple of occupational hazards – government operatives hard at your heels, the occasional pipeline blast, and with every passing day, it seems there’re as many white men staying in the Delta as there’s hair on Britney’s head – but it shouldn’t matter. All in a day’s work. And as long as the Delta bleeds oil, they’ll be back. So until government gets it act together and the world finds a cure for the ‘Dutch Disease’, let us, as we say here in the Delta, “make hay while the Sun sets…”