Guns, Millitants and Big Oil: My Week in Nigeria

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Pre-emptive Saffa

It was ten o’clock in the evening, I was at home, I’d had a beer or two. I was just watching an old TV show with a friend when the phone rang, and I picked up to a very up-front South African man.

After a few brief pleasantries he got straight to the business of my security briefing and proceeded to inform me of the myriad ways in which I was likely to get blackmailed, arrested, kidnapped, or shot on my upcoming “adventure” (including a warning to not get into any elevator with a woman… because she will strip naked, good, and accuse you of raping her, bad). I use the word adventure here as it puts a good spin on the concept, after all, being positive is much preferred over being a realist. Perhaps a more apt word would be “experience” or “oddity”, but for now I will consider my week in Nigeria as an adventure of the sort undertaken by explorers of old.

Three weeks prior I was busy doing what I normally do. Then, out of the blue, my boss calls and asks if I’d be interested in going to Nigeria. “Hell yeah”, I said before I realised quite what I was in for. Not that I was scared of going to Nigeria, I was actually extremely excited about the prospect, but I think I might have been just a little more cautious had I read up on the area before I was asked. It was a work trip to an oil drill ship off the coast of Port Harcourt; where the Niger River meets the Bay of Biafra.

To quote the Australian travel advisories:

We strongly advise you not to travel to the riverine area in Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers (including Port Harcourt and Bonny Island), Cross River, Akwa Ibom and Anambra States in south-eastern Nigeria because of the high risk of kidnapping, armed robbery and other armed attacks against foreign oil companies in the area and localised conflict and violent civil unrest. Militants have declared “all out war” in the Niger Delta region, warned of further kidnappings and attacks and threatened to resume attacks against Nigeria’s oil industry from mid-September 2009.

Hmm. . . certainly not a positive outlook there. But oh well, it could be worse, it could say something like “most boring place on Earth, nothing to see here”; that would be far more disheartening. After all, what is Nigeria like? What are the people like? It is one of those countries where the sum total of western conception about the place revolve around the bad news. All I knew before leaving was that Nigeria could be a very dangerous place to be if you were the wrong sort of person in the wrong place. I really wanted to find out what the other side of the coin looked like, learn about the 99%!(NOVERB)of the people in the country that weren’t militant, and see all that I could see while I was there.

As it happened, I was the wrong sort of person, in the exact wrong place, at a not so good time, who effectively had a giant target painted on me at all times proclaiming “I’m the bad guy, if you want to kidnap someone, may I suggest myself”. So let’s see how that turned out.

Getting There

Nigeria is a long way from Seattle I’ve discovered. For me though, a 24 hour plane transit is not a big issue, it’s chump change. After a short stopover in the world’s worst airport (Charles de Gaulle) and a quick hop southwards I emerged from the plane into the tropical heat. To the left and right, aside the runway, there was lush green jungle, the likes of which I hadn’t seen in a long time. Palm trees intermingled with denser greenery to make a vibrant green that reeked of fertility. This was the Niger delta.

Passing through immigration was a breeze; only one man asked, rather pathetically, for “something extra” and told me of his daughter’s birthday which happenstance had it was that very day so I ought to give her a present. I laughed and left, feeling like my old self again, back in the real world. Out the front of the miniscule airport building there was a metal fence behind which crowded about 40 or so taxi drivers, official escorts, police officers and random people selling, well, random stuff. Amongst the crowd I managed to find a man holding up a piece of white paper with the name of the oil company I was there to work for scrawled across it in black marker. Hardly the official seal of approval I was looking for, what was to say that he wasn’t an imposter looking to kidnap me (damn, that South African security briefing had gotten to me).

With a lack of better options, I decided to take the chance and followed him to a car, a very nice, big, American four-wheel drive that seemed extremely out of place among the lemons in the rest of the carpark, where I sat and waited while he searched for a second man that he had to pick up. While I waited I looked at my surroundings. Near the car there stood two policemen, very much like policemen everywhere else in the world except for the slightly more military style of their uniforms and the AK-47s slung across their shoulders. I’m not a big fan of guns I must admit, and even though they were in the hands of the police I felt ill at ease in their presence.

Eventually the second man arrived, he was an older engineer from South Africa who turned out to be very energetic and never stopped thinking, talking or doing work, which made for interesting companionship over the coming week. As soon as he was in the car we left the carpark and headed out of the airport and quickly I found myself hurtling down the dirt roads of Nigeria. Our driver was crazy, completely and utterly crazy. I think perhaps he had open ended instructions prohibiting him from ever stopping the car while on the roads (for security reasons of course) which created some interesting situations. What does one do when you come to a traffic jam? Moreover, what do you do when traffic is diverted off the road due to roadworks and you are forced to drive though what is essentially a small swamp, through a traffic jam, without stopping? Somehow the driver managed it, thanks mostly to another big car that we seemed to be following. At first I assumed that it was another car load of westerners coming from the airport, until I realised that they had lights on the roof, and a Nigerian man with an AK-47 and a smile bigger than his own head leaning out the back door keeping an eye on us. This was in fact our police escort. Here I was, in a convoy of shiny new 4x4s with sirens, smiling young policemen, and two white men, careering through traffic in any way we could. To me this was about as subtle as punch in the face, if there were bad guys out there looking to disrupt the oil companies they certainly didn’t have to look very hard for targets. If I were a filthy backpacker in a dodgy taxi stuck in traffic, I’m pretty sure everyone would assume that I was just a poor tourist and leave me alone. Nevertheless, the police with their guns must know their job, and the security was welcome.

The view outside my window was incredible. This was Africa. Similar to parts of Asia, the road was lined with thousands of tiny stores connected to tinier houses. Everything from car parts to fruit baskets was lined up beside the roadway as commerce went about its business. Women and men, tall and lean, walked slowly along with loads piled atop their heads. Some were small and simple, some were giant piles of everything strapped together, but all were balanced with seemingly no effort, as if the person didn’t even have to think about the 20kg of stuff rising a meter above them. It was exactly like I had imagined it would be, and I loved finally seeing it with my own eyes.

I arrived at my hotel after an hour or so; by American standards it was a hovel, by my standards a palace, and the buffet of “local food” taught me that stew and plantains rule the world. Unfortunately I was not allowed to leave the hotel, not that I had much time or any clue of where I would go, so I spent my night in the restaurant sampling a local lager that, well, tasted just like every other local lager that you can buy for less than a dollar.

The Reality of Oil

I’m not a big fan of oil companies, but at the same time, I understand their necessity at this point in time. Either way, there I was in Nigeria about to do some work for one of them to ensure that they could more successfully find oil to fuel things and destroy the atmosphere etc. etc. I did feel guilty to a degree for what I was about to do, but if it wasn’t me then someone else would be doing it, and at least I knew that I’d do it right. To settle my mind though, to convince myself that I wasn’t evil, I did two things: the first was to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” on my flight over there, which only resulted in me hating myself more, and the second was to vow to work on the side of good when I next change employers. I plan to hold myself to that.

Anyway, I digress. On my first morning in Nigeria I was to begin work which meant that I had to be taken out to the ship. Unlike previous jobs where the boats have always been docked at a nearby facility, allowing me to come and go freely (or in the worst case, to come and go with a minimal amount of security checking), this particular boat was some 30 nautical miles offshore, parked, so to speak, on top of one of the world’s great oil fields. To get out there I was taken to a military airfield when I went through customs (because apparently I would be leaving Nigeria) and was summarily loaded onto a helicopter. Now, helicopters are expensive no matter where you are, but apparently Waldo (the South African with whom I had shared the ride from the airport) and I were valuable enough to have a helicopter chartered just for us. A whole 12 seat chopper for just the two of us!

Helicopters are strange machines to me, they seem to defy a lot of the basic principles that I hold dear. Planes do too, but I guess I’m used to them now, but when that helicopter finished the pre-flight checks and almost instantly jumped upwards, my body decided that it wanted to jump straight back down again. For the first two minutes I was in that strange situation where your nerves are completely on edge, frantically firing with warning signals, while your mind is ecstatic with adrenalin, urging the ride to never end. And that was before I even saw the view. The helicopter flew over the small city of Port Harcourt, a mish-mash of tiny slums and crumbling two-storey buildings, with the occasional clump of nicer houses or businesses. Everything man-made was tinged blue, from the blue taxis, to blue iron roofing, to blue walls, blue boxes and blue everything else. Once again the cheap blue paint from Russia (presumably, I’m assuming the source is the same as that of the identically coloured and ubiquitous paint in Mongolia and Central Asia) colouring the world.

Very quickly we started to see the delta proper. It began subtly, with the ground below becoming noticeably wetter to the point where we were flying over abandoned slums where the whimsical river had decided to change course and flow right through a dozen houses. Pretty soon the river seemed to be everywhere, a trace here, a stream there. It was hard to figure out exactly where the water started and ended as the thick green jungle must have extended out through the fertile shallows a good distance. Even the “solid” ground was dubious as long straight gashes could be seen through it that I could only guess to be roads during the dry season (if there is one) but for now were swamps and rivers in their own right.

As we flew yet further out the myriad streams began to coalesce together into larger channels until finally we came across what would be considered the true mouth of the river; a kilometre or two across, the mighty Niger River finally met the ocean, and on it’s bank sits an oil refinery. Way to ruin the scenery. From that point onwards the ride was over the ocean, mostly through clouds, so the view was limited, that is until we emerged from the cloud and saw our destination ahead of us: a rusty sided old ship called the Duchess, with her derrick rising midship and the helipad on her bow. This was to be home for the next week or so, and it was going to be a very interesting time.

A Short Note on Life Aboard a Drillship

I am not going to detail what I did onboard the Duchess, or tell much of the life there. Mainly because it’s boring, but also because I’m not sure if I’m allowed to. Being on a ship isn’t at all fun, for starters, and if I didn’t have a lot of work to do while I was there I simply would have gone crazy. Each morning I would wake up at six in order to make breakfast before the cafeteria closed, by half past I was dressed in bright orange overalls that were the right height for me but more suited to a two-hundred kilogramme footballer than my slender frame. I did, to be quite honest, look like a jellybean. I would work all through the day in the tropical heat, stopping for smoko (a word that I had sorely missed since leaving home) and a lunch that made airline food seem gourmet until dinner time at 6pm. After that, the people that I had been working alongside would disappear into their cabins until the following morning when they would repeat the process. Twelve hours of work, a few hours reading or watching Nigerian cable TV, and then sleep. Repeat that for 28 straight days before you spend a further two days in transit back to your home (most of the expats on board were Aussies or Kiwis) where you get 24 days to relax and do what you please. They all swore that they loved the lifestyle, as the pay is good and the days back home are brilliant, but for me it was painful to sit in my cabin staring at the wall with nothing to do till the next morning. So, instead of staring blankly I decided to get back into my now sweaty orange jumpsuit and get back to work till I could concentrate no longer. Not a great deal of fun, but awfully productive.

The view from the ship was odd to say the least. When I got a chance to sit back and enjoy it (which was rare as I was usually deep in the bowels of the ship working on things) I really did like the peace of the calm ocean waters lapping against the hull. Apart from one day when a storm came through, while we were doing some deck work mind you, the water was almost perfectly still. Giant fish, pale white and a couple of meters long, would come alongside and mill about. Some of the fish even turned up in the moon-pool, the opening in the middle of the ship where the drill bit goes down, and fishing was a popular pastime for the crew. On our port side, a few kilometres away, a gigantic vessel, an FPSO to be precise, sat quietly, almost broodingly, going about its business with a long tail of yellow flame billowing from its derrick. Such a waste, yet no one in Nigeria will bat an eyelash over it. In fact, at night when the sky was dark, I could see ten or twenty flares on the horizon, evidence of the big business going on around me. It made for an eerie evening companion, that and the gunboats constantly circling us of course.

The Return Journey

So, after a week on board the ship, doing nothing but working and pretending to know what I was talking about, I caught a helicopter back to shore, once again flying over the dangerous delta, supposedly full of people with guns who hated me, and found myself in the hotel lobby sipping a beer (no alcohol was allowed on the ship of course, so I was thirsty) with Waldo. A couple of hours after that I was whisked back to the airport where I passed through the world’s longest bribe queue (every single person in the ticketing/immigration/customs process asked for a bribe in pathetic ways such as “do you have something for me?” or “what are you going to give me?”. At one point I was actually taken into a private room which was full of posters talking about what will happen to you if you traffic drugs in or out of Nigeria where I was actually a little worried that I might have to pay to get my passport back). Another couple of hours waiting for the plane, drinking $5 Heinekens with two English engineers (even an airport in Nigeria has inflated prices) and then I was headed home. After a week in Nigeria I felt as though I had not seen Nigeria, had barley spoken to a local person, hadn’t learned very much about the country at all, and had simply done a whole lot of work for an industry that I’m not a big fan of. It certainly was an interesting week, and I saw a side of this world that I was previously not privy to, but I don’t really feel like repeating it all. Next time I visit Nigeria I will have to do it on my own terms, as a filthy backpacker of course.

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