Nigeria: Private Military Companies in the Niger Delta

Enter the PMCs in Niger Delta?
By Tony Iyare
Recent report by the highly investigative newspaper, Next on Sunday that the Niger Delta is now awash with British and American private military companies (PMCs) engaged in security services for their clients in the oil and gas industry, is particularly chilling.
The story titled The mercenaries take over and published on February 22, says no fewer than 10 such companies, prominent among them Control Risk—which has on its payroll the former body guard of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, Erinys International and ArmorGroup, currently operate in the restive Niger Delta, some through spurious partnerships with local companies.

That this practice which runs against the grain of the country’s laws that negates the operation of foreign security and para-military force, holds a looming disaster for the raging crisis in the Niger Delta, is worrying. It also evokes a disturbing picture of an imminent cataclysm in a region now credited with one of the largest concentration of small arms in the world.
With the resolve of President Barack Obama to finally bring the false security-induced Gulf War 11 to a close with the planned phased withdrawal of American soldiers, the possibility of more PMCs drifting to a new gold mine here as Iraq winds down appears frightening.
A great deal of the trillion of dollars expended in Iraq where $10 billion was spent monthly was savoured by the PMCs hired for counter insurgency, counter terrorism, intelligence gathering, private security and sometimes open combat operations.
Private Military Firms (PMFs) present a more edifying name for mercenary armies whose feverish need to rebrand their insipid role, is what has propelled their latest rebirth as PMCs or PMFs.

Essentially, PMFs offer to assist in everything from combat operations and strategic planning to intelligence support and troop training. They sell the service side of war as opposed to manufacturing the weapons of war.

PMFs range from small consulting firms that offer the advice of retired generals to transnational corporations that lease out battalions of commandos. They number several hundreds around the globe, have earned a combined annual global revenue of as much as $120 billion and have operated in more than 50 countries since the industry’s rise in the early 1990s.

The image of mercenaries and hired guns in many conflicts in Africa since the Congolese war of 1960 has been inglorious. From the Great Lakes to the Mano River where Executive Outcomes (EO), Sandline International and their ubiquitous mining concerns have ripped off the rich mineral resources of the continent, the people of those regions have been further impoverished.

As soldiers of fortune, their itchy role to undermine the stability of many countries in Africa can be gleaned from their infamous activities in the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia where they were freely hired by both state and non state actors. Given their ignominous role in iraq where the US has been involved in a war since 2003, it would be unthinkable to expect the PMCs to be clad in a new image in the Niger Delta.

While the Spokesman of the Defense Headquarters, Col Christopher Jemitola and his counterpart for the Joint Task Force (JTF), Col Musa Sagir, deny any knowledge of the existence of such a force, analysts anchor some of the major routing of the militants by the JTF to the supportive role of the PMCs.

It may not be too clear in what way the PMCs have been culpable in the series of JTF indiscriminate attacks by helicopter gunships which has virtually reduced some Niger Delta communities to rubble, but the series of violations cast on US soldiers in Iraq were actually carried out by PMCs numbering about 30,000 which represents their greatest involvement in any war.

Apart from their sordid role in the looting of choice artefacts and ferreting of billions of dollars from Iraqi banks, notable PMCs like CACI and Titan translators were indicted over gross human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib. United States Army investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal found that employees of CACI and Titan participated actively in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

A report by Army Major General George R. Fay says that a translator for Titan raped a young man. Another report by Major General Antonio Taguba also indicted a Titan contractor for advising the military police to use interrogation techniques that “equated to physical abuse.”

Other PMCs like the Blackwater forces whose personel were indicted for brute force even in the US where they were hired to maintain security in New Orleans after the destruction wrought by hurricane Katrina, were deeply involved in rights violations in Al Fallujah while Hallibuton was also guilty of over invoicing.

Although U.S. military personnel charged with abuses were court-martialled, none of the military contractors were charged. Before sovereignty was returned to Iraq on June 30, 2004, U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer III curiously declared contractors “immune from the Iraqi legal process..”

The neo liberal argument for privatising security and hiring the PMCs to end the various theater of operations in Africa has been hinged on efficiency and cost. Another view for contracting the PMCs for peace keeping roles is stengthened by the increasing lethargy by many Western countries to heed the UN call to contribute troops particularly to raging flashpoints on the continent.

A prominent example always bandied to underscore efficiency and cost is the clinical role of the EO which was hired by the Strasser government in March 1995 for $36 million to flush out rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) from Freetown, Sierra Leone. This is usually weighed against the huge cost of maintaining the UN Peace Keeping Force to that country, UNAMSIL. Faced with increasing hostility from UNITA which then controlled 85 per cent of the countryside, the MPLA government in Angola also engaged EO for $40 million in September 1993 and recorded significant mileage in its war against the rebel army. That explains why there has been a heightening call to contract the PMCs for $750 million to end all wars in Africa.

But this position is often times simplistic and reductionist. Apart from the ethical and moral crises evoked by hiring a mecenary army, it is not completely true that they are cost efficient. For instance the cost of engaging DyneCorp for counter insurgency in Columbia was found to be higher than the cost of using the US Army for similar operation.

The more fundamentally critical view is the possiblity of the mecenary army casting in shreds the national sovereignty of the contracting country and circumscribing its independence. We must be wary to barter what remains of the semblance of the country’s independence on the alter of privatising security.
Regulating the role of the PMCs which have the reputation of deploying quickly with proven military skills, has been problematic globally. They can neither be treated as prisoners of war (POW) under the Geneva Convention nor indicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC)..

Apart from South Africa which under the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act took stern action that led to the relocation of EO’s headquarters, other countries have merely treated the nefarious activities of mercenary armies with kid gloves.

In the US, even the activities of the PMCs which carries less political baggage and are unaccountable, are not covered under the Freedom of Information Act. It is intriguing therefore whether Nigeria is not too enfeebled to regulate the mushrooming of the PMCs in the oil rich Niger Delta.

While understanding the need to stabilise the region now characterised with hijacking, gang wars and bunkering for oil production, the country’s economic mainstay, we may be threading on a minefield by contracting the PMCs to guarantee security.

It merely reinforces the paranoid that the problem of the Niger Delta is that of maintaining “law and order” rather than accelerating the pace of infrastructural development, to engender massive jobs and replace the pervading gloom in the region.

The issue of privatising security and prunning the size of the military has been a sore point. It struck a controversial tone for the retirement of former Chief of Army Staff, General Victor Malu who was piqued over the hiring of the Military Professionals Resources Initiatve (MPRI) the Virgina, USA based PMC which specialises in training to restructure the Nigerian military.

Discarding the heroic popular rage against the involvement of foreign forces in domestic squabble evinced by the upturn of the planned Anglo-Nigeria Defense Pact in 1960, the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo contracted the MPRI to conduct rudimentary training of the country’s military which Malu found awry.

That the Americans had no record of any successful peace keeping role as against the Nigerian military that has demonstrated its prowess since the 1960 crisis in the Congo, was lost on Obasanjo.

The “dial an army” image of the PMCs, which are out to fight for you
only because of the desire to reap from your hard earned dollars is
odious. The patronage of mercenary army has imperilled many nations
almost throughout history. Writing on the evil effect of mercenary
armies in The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli says,

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous. If a prince bases the defence of his state on mercenaries, he will never achieve stability or security. For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy.
Although Machiavelli died in 1527, his prosaic thoughts on mercenary army, is still relevant today.

Iyare is a journalist and public affairs analyst.