ABSTRACT
It is a measure of a certain sort of notoriety when Nigerian politics reaches the pages of Vanity Fair, penned no less by a prize winning journalist and writer who, to the best of my knowledge, knows nothing of Africa or in this case the Niger Delta (Unger, 2007). Sebastian Unger’s account of Ijaw militants operating in the oil-rich creeks of the Niger Delta is little more than tabloid journalism
but the realities to which it speaks have been, over the last eighteen months, an extraordinary combination of the theatrical and the incendiary, worthy perhaps of any tabloid’s scrutiny. On 15 September 2005, the Governor of Bayelsa State (Diepreye Alamieyeseigha), a major oil producing state in the heart of the Ijaw homeland, was arrested by the British security agencies at London airport (a trip purportedly made to undertake cosmetic surgery) on three counts of money laundering (to the tune of one point eight million pounds). The Governor’s arrest – designed to send a signal to unruly Governor’s everywhere in the run up to the 2007 elections and Obasanjo’s ultimately fruitless effort to run for a third term – clearly involved close collaboration between the Obasanjo and Blair governments. Released on $1.25 million bail in early October, Alamieyeseigha dramatically escaped from house detention in central London (disguised as an old woman) and appeared rather magically in the capital of Bayelsa, Yenagoa, on 20 November to adoring crowds after, as far as we can tell, an extraordinary escape via Paris, Yaounde and finally by small boat along the creeks along the Cameroon-Nigeria border. On 9 December amidst considerable political confusion, he was seized by police in Government House after the state House of Assembly had voted 17-24 to impeach him – all under tight security presence of the Joint Task Force and the State Security Services (SSS).
