Right, so those guerrillas in Nigeria’s oilfields have finally chucked in all that nonviolent stuff of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s and are blowing up oil pipelines, kidnapping engineers and shooting cops. They’ve even set a numerical target so as to let the markets price it in and do their work for them – they want to take one-third of Nigerian oil production offline.
It’s all very John Robb. And yes, yesterday they got a less-ugly member’s face in the papers. John’s prepared solution for this sort of war is to recruit loyalist paramilitaries (see his sidebar).
Only one problem. The Nigerian GGs were armed, heavily, by the government to assure security in their area for the 2003 election. They still felt the new parliament was giving them the shitty end of the stick, so they kept the guns. As I’ve said before, “loyalist paramilitaries” or “controlled chaos” is stupid. They aren’t loyal and it’s not. Think: like driving faster to get home because the brakes seem to be failing.