Criminal Politics: Violence, “Godfathers” and Corruption in Nigeria

There are widespread complaints among these youth and their leaders that rather
than fulfill these promises, their sponsors including then-Governor Peter Odili simply
“dumped” them once comfortably ensconced in office. As one civil society activist
who works to discourage youth from participating in cult activities explained to
Human Rights Watch, “The armed groups, particularly the youth, felt betrayed by the
kind of contracts they made with the politicians in 2003. They felt that having
participated in rigging the election, they deserved a stake.” 287
The result of these broken promises was a rapid deterioration of relations between
many armed groups and their former sponsors. Rivers State has been awash with guns
since the 2003 polls, when politicians sparked the ongoing influx of arms into the
region to arm their proxy gangs. 288 Many groups subsequently moved into using their
weaponry to spark an ongoing wave of violent crime, providing protection for or
asserting control over oil bunkering operations and other criminal activities to make
up for their loss of lucrative political sponsors. 289 Local civil society groups, along with
many current and former Rivers state government interviewed by Human Rights Watch,
are unanimous in pointing to the mobilization by politicians of gangs—most of them
linked to cult groups—to rig the 2003 elections as the beginning of the state’s current
epidemic of violent crime and proliferation of unaccountable armed gangs. 290
The trend towards armed criminality sparked by the emergence and political
sponsorship of armed groups during the 2003 elections has now spiraled out of
control in Rivers. Militias and gangs have proliferated, maintaining camps of fighters
in the creeks that engage in oil bunkering and stage bank robberies and street
battles in Port Harcourt. Some of these groups have turned kidnappings for ransom
of expatriate oil workers, wealthy Nigerians and their family members into a
profitable business. Kidnappings have become commonplace since the beginning of
2006 and armed gangs seized more than one hundred oil workers in the first six
287 Human Rights Watch interview, Port Harcourt, April 11, 2007.
288 See Human Rights Watch, Rivers and Blood, pp. 4-6 and 9-10.
289 See Human Rights Watch, Rivers and Blood.
290 Human Rights Watch interviews, Port Harcourt, August 2006 and April 2007.
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