After a week of protracted clashes between Niger Delta militants and soldiers of the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Rivers State, Nigeria’s economic prospect has dimmed, triggering fresh new fears of protracted financial despair and an impairment of the job of the Federal Government Technical Committee on the region. 

 The clashes began penultimate weekend, after the military, allegedy, deployed a fighter to unleash a missile attack on the militants’ position. The sortie - bombing raid – by the JTF, elicited a stern response by the militants, who issued a warning to the effect that they would trigger an oil war.

Since the initial incident, daily clashes, most fatal according to official sources, have occurred between the military and militants who operate under the canopy of the Movement For the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MENI), leading to casualties and the torching of vital oil pipelines and disruption of production.

The pipeline fires, and production disruptions, mean, in effect, that oil firms have to resort to shut-ins, in view of adverse security. This implies, in effect, that Nigeria has to suffer production deferment as the oil firm’s evacuate core staff and other movable assets to avoid the impact of the persisting military assault.

Nigeria is already losing about 500,000 barrels crude oil export daily to insecurity and related shut-ins on account of the persistence of the militants’ action.The massive shut in, has implied Nigeria’s loss to Angola of its leadership position in Africa, in terms of crude oil production and export.

Until the loss to Angola, Nigeria, an influential member of the oil production cartel, OPEC, was the world’s eighth leading exporter of crude oil. The loss is crucial for a country that is almost wholly dependent on its crude oil wealth, and has a consumption – patterned economy that is not only prostrate, but is set to be impacted by the further global financial crisis that has led central banks, the world over, to pump in more than N400 trillion to firm up the global financial system.

Now, the military clashes appear to have elicited deep concerns for the technical committee set up by the Federal Government on the Niger Delta. A member of the committee, Ledum Mittee, said the clashes had put his committee in an awkward position.

He reportedly told the BBC, in an interview, that he was surprised at the rising tempo of the clashes, even when most persons had thought the inauguration of the committee would boost confidence among the militants.

Mittee, head of the committee, said the Niger Delta crisis was being compounded by the varied interests of those he called the three cabals. He named them as the crude oil cabal, the arms cabal and the political cabal.

The Chairman said he feared that the cabals might not be genuinely interested in the resolution of the crisis in the region.