What’s up in the restive oil region of Nigeria:

Controller of the Movement of the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) in Bayelsa and Rivers states, Commander Ebi, yesterday, warned that militants would blow up the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC)’s Bonga Oil Field in Ekeremor Local Government Area of Bayelsa state and other oil installations in the Niger-Delta region in the next few weeks if the Federal Government failed to swear-in ministerial nominee from the South-South, Mr. Godday Orubebe, who was left when others were inaugurated recently within a reasonable time.

Commander Ebi disclosed the planned onslaught while speaking with Saturday Vanguard on phone just as the national co-ordinator of the Movement for Peace and Sustainable Development for Niger-Delta Communities, Mr. Joseph Hitler called on the Federal Government to swear-in Orubebe to avert the plan by those he described as commercial militants to wreak fresh havoc in the region.

According to the MEND leader, “I am Commander Ebi, a militant controlling Bayelsa and Rivers states. Tell the Federal Government that they should swear in Orubebe who is from the Niger-Delta since President Umaru Yar’Adua have sworn-in others that were screened by the Senate, if not, we are going to make the Niger-Delta states to be ungovernable by destroying oil pipelines and oil installations. We will even go to the Bonga Field”.

[snip]

Speaking on behalf of the Movement for Peace and Sustainable Development for Niger-Delta Communities, Mr. Hitler asserted, “The exclusion of God-day Orubebe during the recent inauguration of ministers is what some commercial militants now want to use to start another trouble in the region, the federal government should avert this looming danger by swearing him in”. Article

Topically related:

Nigeria plans to alter terms at Royal Dutch Shell PLC`s (RDSA) deepwater Bonga field next year when the contract comes up for revision, a Nigerian oil official said Thursday.

Tony Chukwueke, head of Nigeria`s Department of Petroleum Resources, said that the Bonga concession — originally awarded under a production-sharing contract to Shell in 1993 and operated in partnership with Esso, a unit of ExxonMobil Corp., (XOM), Eni`s (E) Agip and France`s Total/Elf (TOT)– had a provision allowing for terms to be revised after 15 years if oil prices rose above $20 a barrel.

“The government is actually giving notice,” that the government will call upon that provision in 2008, Chukwueke told reporters on the sidelines of an oil conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Article

So go outside and look, already.

300 years — and phfft.

“The purer something is,” he said, “the dirtier it will become.” Article