Beneath Nigeria’s Oil Glut Lie Barren Lives--and Fear : Africa: Brutal regime has drawn global censure for what could be rich nation. Half its oil exports go to U.S.

Deep in the steamy Niger River delta, with thick mangrove swamps and chocolate-brown rivers stretching to the horizon, drilling supervisor Funsho Amoo shouts to be heard above the hissing steam, thumping machinery and groaning metal of a Shell oil rig.

“This well produces 2,000 barrels a day,” Amoo hollers beside a giant hoist that shudders and shrieks as it pushes pipe into the muck. “But something is damaged, so we are repairing the pipe.”

On the water below, fishermen in ragged shorts and shirts paddle dugout canoes. Naked children with bloated bellies play on the muddy shore near tiny thatch-roofed huts. Barefoot women tend a scraggly patch of cassava, the starchy tuber that is the country’s staple food.

What about them? Do they complain about the racket and roar? Do oil slicks foul their fishing? Do they mind the helicopters and tugboats? Or the constant stench and glare of huge orange flames as gas burns off from nearby wells?

Amoo shrugs. “This is Shell property,” he shouts. “They have no right to complain.”

Many in Africa’s most populous nation are struggling to be heard, however.

Nigeria is the continent’s largest oil producer and potentially richest nation. Oil exports have fueled a $210-billion bonanza in the last two decades, and the giant rigs that dot the delta and deep waters offshore have barely tapped the vast reserves of crude oil and natural gas.

But there is little to show for it. Nigeria’s annual per capita income of $320 is no higher than before the oil boom. Most of its 95 million people still lack running water, electricity or decent roads. Malnutrition is endemic, hospitals and schools barely work, and order is enforced by a brutal security force that is widely accused of systematic human rights abuses.

Government Brutality

The bloodshed has been worst here in the oil fields, especially in a lush corner known as Ogoniland.

Over the past two years, witnesses and human rights groups say, government security forces have killed hundreds of ethnic Ogonis, jailed their leaders and looted, burned and razed their villages.

“I witnessed myself, with my own two eyes. I saw women and children, mothers with babes in their arms, who were burned by the soldiers. They burned them alive,” one resident told a Times reporter who made a surreptitious tour of the area. “For the rest of that week, they knocked down everything standing and shot anything that moved.”

The Ogonis’ uphill battle to stop environmental degradation of their land and gain visible benefits from the oil has echoes in similar campaigns by indigenous groups against multinational corporations in the Amazon, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere.

But few other countries face the grim problems of Nigeria today.

Staggering corruption, political repression, economic mismanagement and a much-deserved reputation for business scams and drug trafficking under Gen. Sani Abacha’s military regime have brought global condemnation--but few signs of hope or change.

By all accounts, Abacha’s military dictatorship, the seventh since Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960, has continued its predecessors’ practice of plundering oil wealth.

A government-appointed commission last year concluded, for example, that at least $12 billion in recent oil revenues had disappeared into overseas bank accounts. The report was quickly quashed and the panel fired.

Abacha seized power in November, 1993, after playing a role in three previous juntas. The stocky, 54-year-old general is a reclusive, enigmatic figure given to dark sunglasses and odd working habits.

“An important meeting doesn’t start until midnight,” says a Western diplomat in Lagos. “I usually have my meetings with him at 1 or 2 in the morning.” But the envoy says Abacha has “played a nice game of divide and rule” to keep critical Western governments and local opponents at bay.

The most recent example occurred Oct. 1, when Abacha announced that he would commute the death sentences of 14 military officers and politicians convicted in a secret trial in June of plotting a coup.

The stay of execution bought time from Washington and London, which were prepared to impose harsh new sanctions if the accused were shot.

As a result, the West issued only mild complaints about the rest of Abacha’s speech--no democratic elections for another three years and no release of hundreds of political prisoners and detainees.

The detainees include Moshood K. O. Abiola, the presumed winner of a quickly annulled 1993 presidential election that international observers had called free and fair.

Abiola has been charged with treason and held in solitary confinement for the last 16 months.

Imprisoned Dissenter

In her home in north Lagos, Doyin Abiola complains that she was last allowed to visit her husband in May. She was given only 10 minutes; guards surrounded them and insisted they speak English. She says he is denied newspapers, books, radio and TV.

“His spirit is high, but physically he’s not good,” Mrs. Abiola says. “He doesn’t even know what time it is. A person’s mind, when you leave it to waste like that--it’s torture.”

The United States already enforces limited sanctions to protest policies of the regime. It has cut all but humanitarian aid and refuses visas to Nigerian government and military leaders. It votes against the country in international financing institutions and has halted lucrative flights to the United States by Nigeria’s national airline.

Other punishing steps could include a halt to new investment or a freeze on overseas assets of Nigerian leaders.

An international oil embargo is “the only real choke point,” another diplomat says. “But that’s the least likely option. There’s too much money at stake.”

Production each day of nearly 2 million barrels of lightweight crude--ideal for refining into gasoline--pumps about $10 billion a year into Nigeria’s coffers, or 80% of government revenue.

Half the oil goes to the United States, making Nigeria the fifth-largest American supplier.

An embargo could raise prices at U.S. pumps, experts say, a dubious prospect in an election year.

Not surprisingly, oil companies also oppose an embargo.

Despite myriad problems, Nigeria is among the world’s most profitable places to drill. It still attracts more direct foreign investment--$1.1 billion a year since 1990--than any other sub-Saharan nation.

Nigeria is a colonial map-maker’s creation. Fierce ethnic rivalries led to bitter civil war in 1967-70 over the secessionist state of Biafra. Up to 1 million people died in the conflict.

But many analysts blame the post-Biafran oil boom for the current economic and political crises.

With little other industry or economic base, a steady gusher of oil contracts since the 1970s has meant vast wealth and power for an elite few but no trickle-down to the impoverished masses.

The southern city of Port Harcourt, the country’s oil capital, is an example. The Airport Hotel offers a $450-a-night Oilman’s Suite. Oil-rich Nigerians in flowing robes drive gleaming Mercedes sedans. Armed patrols and tall fences guard an ersatz American suburb built for expatriate workers.

But the frontier oil town is no Houston. The night sky glows eerie orange from constant burning of excess gas at wells. A stench fills the muggy air. Most residents live in tin-roofed shanties in squalid slums. Muddy roads, open sewers and grinding poverty are the norm.

So is crime, especially by bandit-like police. They operate roadblocks at nearly every intersection to prey on the populace.

Highway Extortion

On a recent afternoon, a dozen or so uniformed police stopped every car and taxi on busy Aba Express Road and threatened to impound the vehicles and arrest occupants unless they paid summary fines for supposed infractions.

“We are a mobile court,” an officer explained. “You do not have a fire extinguisher. It’s best if you pay some money.”

A demand for 20,000 nairas--about $250, nearly a year’s salary for a policeman--ultimately was negotiated down to $12.50.

Nearly a dozen multinational oil companies work in the surrounding delta. The major U.S. companies--Mobil, Chevron and Texaco--mostly drill offshore. So do Elf, of France, and Agip, an Italian company. Last year saw the arrival of Exxon and Conoco and the return of British Petroleum.

Royal Dutch/Shell, the Dutch-British petroleum giant, is Nigeria’s oldest, largest producer in a joint venture with the government.

Most of Shell’s rigs are onshore, often near crowded villages, and it has become the chief target for local opposition. “We’re on the ground so we bear the brunt of the ire,” Precious Omuku, the Shell spokesman, explains at company headquarters in Port Harcourt.

He says Shell has lost $40 million from sabotage and hundreds of “community disturbances,” or anti-Shell protests and attacks.

The worst damage has been in Ogoniland. Shell suspended operations at its 96 wells there two years ago after pipes were cut, valves opened and wells vandalized. “Our equipment continues to be sabotaged,” Omuku says. “We’re really fighting a losing battle.”

But Shell’s Ogoni opponents are losing far more.

Local resistance has been spearheaded by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or Mosop.

Formed in early 1993, Mosop has accused the regime of “genocidal persecution” and has demanded that Shell pay $10 billion in royalties and compensation for environmental damage--including contaminated rivers, ruined farmland and acid rain--since drilling began in 1958.

Shell denies causing widespread damage and insists that it is committed to cleaning any spills or other pollution it causes.

The government’s response to Mosop’s charges was sharper: It launched a brutal crackdown against the group from May to August last year.

A recent Human Rights Watch/Africa report accused Nigerian security forces of “extrajudicial executions, shootings, arbitrary arrests, floggings, rapes and looting” in the assault.

The report quoted soldiers who admitted machine-gunning unarmed Ogonis and burning their villages and homes.

Fearful Testimony

Military officials say such charges are anti-government propaganda. They blame any deaths or other abuses on terrorism by the Ogonis themselves or on conflicts with rival ethnic groups.

But nearly all Mosop leaders are dead or in jail today, the group is officially banned, and police have ransacked and padlocked its offices.

Ken Sara-Wiwa, a Mosop founder and one of Nigeria’s best-known authors, has been imprisoned with 15 others on murder charges that human rights groups say were trumped up to crush the movement.

A special military-led tribunal, now hearing the case, could impose the death penalty.

Omuku, the Shell spokesman, says he has read none of the human rights reports and can’t confirm any abuses in Ogoniland. Shell bears no responsibility for the crackdown, he adds.

Ogoniland is about 400 square miles of dense jungle and malarial swamps just east of Port Harcourt.

Most of the estimated 500,000 Ogonis are fishermen and subsistence farmers. And many can testify to government policies.

“Anybody they saw, they shot,” recalls a priest in the town of Gokhana, which was attacked by soldiers in mid-1994. Like others, he asked not to be named.

“They burned houses, stole everything and killed the animals. Women they found, they raped,” he says.

In nearby Biara, a 24-year-old Ogoni man said soldiers shot his younger brother in the leg when he ran away. He later died from his untreated wounds.

“We wept so much,” the man said bitterly.

The military siege has eased now, and Ogoniland is quiet.

Villagers again bathe in muddy streams, tend meager fields and live in huts of sticks plastered with mud.

But the anger remains.

“We have produced billions of dollars for the government and Shell,” complains a 32-year-old farmer, weeding a field with his machete. “We don’t have electricity. We don’t have water. We don’t have schools. We don’t have hospitals. We have nothing.”