With Nigeria facing economic turbulence following sustained attacks on oil infrastructure by the Niger Delta Avengers, pressure is mounting on President Muhammadu Buhari to negotiate with the militant group. The advocates of dialogue include former Head of State, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and Mohammed Barkindo, a former group managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Also, American officials have enjoined the government to bargain with the militants. After seeing crude oil production nosedive from 2.2 million barrels per day to 1.5mbpd, Buhari is between a rock and a hard place on whether to open talks with the group or not.
The case for negotiation is a strong one, according to its proponents. National finances are in turmoil, with 60 per cent of oil revenue wiped off. The downturn in the global economy, the financial profligacy of the recent past, and low international crude oil prices have knocked the Nigerian economy out of shape. Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, said last week that the Federal Government was borrowing to cover its N165 billion monthly wage bill. Governor Samuel Ortom said Benue State had borrowed N53.5 billion in the one year to June, mainly to pay salaries. Twenty-seven out of the 36 states are insolvent and so have not been paying salaries.
The greater headache is that because of the renewed militancy, the economy won’t improve soon. Data from the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee showed a shortfall of N203.9 billion out of the N509.1 billion projected for May, leaving the three tiers of government to share just N305.1 billion. In contrast, they shared N409.3 billion in May 2015 and N683.9 billion in May 2014. Even before the upsurge in militancy, the Nigerian economy had recorded a negative growth of -0.36 in the first quarter of 2016, says the National Bureau of Statistics. Going by projections, Q2 is equally forlorn, while the 2016 budget, predicated on a production target of 2.2mbpd, is in jeopardy over the virulent activities of the NDA.
It is in this light that some groups are calling on the Buhari administration to be flexible and negotiate with the NDA as a means of restoring peace and economic revival to the region and the country at large. Certainly, it is a Catch-22 situation, a perplexing dilemma for the President. Whichever option he chooses, he has to consider the short- and long-term implications of his choice.
Negotiating with a militant group has inherent landmines. It is like dealing with a blackmailer: he keeps on making all sorts of demands, reasonable and otherwise. Worse, there is a high probability that other splinter militant groups will emerge based on the negotiations with the NDA. They will threaten the state, expecting to be negotiated with. At the end of the day, the government would have numerous groups to contend with than it can handle.
Buhari’s assignment is made more difficult by the weakness of the state security forces. The military and intelligence services, which were supposed to have mapped out strategies to thwart the militants, who had been openly threatening attacks even before Buhari won election in March 2015, are in some disarray. The NDA and other militant groups have dared the Nigerian Navy to come after them after blowing up oil installations. They kill soldiers and police without any repercussion. Negotiating with the NDA, therefore, could create a new set of problems for the government.
Discouraging negotiations with militants, The Economist, a British newspaper, recommends tough military action. It says, “Buhari should not try to buy them off. Rather, he should arrest those who have committed acts of violence or extortion.” We agree. The paper’s view can be seen in the light of the amnesty programme implemented by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua in 2009. Repentant militants were granted a state pardon, training in vocations and given monthly stipends in return for laying down their weapons, but it motivated other Niger Delta youths to take up arms against the state in the belief that they will be compensated for their criminal acts.
Negotiation with non-state actors doesn’t always work. In a 2013 deal, described by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “incomparably difficult,” Israel released 104 prisoners as part of a peace deal with Palestine. The result: the peace process between the two nations collapsed shortly after. In 2011, Israel had also released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for its soldier, Gilad Shalit. Instead of engendering peace, it instigated renewed violence. It was a similar story when Madrid negotiated with Basque separatists ETA in 1989. The deal triggered fresh violence.
So, what to do? A leader must make tough calls. Any negotiation now will be costly because the government is dealing with the NDA from a position of weakness. Any negotiation must be a one-off thing in order to restore peace and drive up oil production in the Niger Delta. Ultimately, the government must reform its security machinery, equip and train its operatives and use intelligence-led systems to sufficiently address the criminal aspects of the militancy.
But Buhari must carry the aggrieved Niger Delta communities along by implementing infrastructure policies that will produce tangible impact on the lives of the ordinary people in the region. It is absolutely vital that they are given a sense of belonging, seeing that they have derived little benefit from oil exploitation in their land. So, there should be concrete re-investments from the revenue being generated from the Niger Delta.
The people should be empowered as a collective and educationally instead of wasting resources by giving money to the criminals. There should be more projects like the clean-up of the polluted environment in Ogoni, Rivers State, which Abuja commissioned in May. These projects will endear the government to the people if, in the end, farmers and fishermen can return to their devastated land
