Swampie,
Actually the number of hostages has fallen since the release of the 24 Filipino seamen from the Bacoliner yesterday. Sadly, the 3 hostages taken from Brass are now in their 70th day of captivity and there seems no prpospect of their release until after the elections.
Road travel in the Port Harcourt area is considerably slowed down by huge fuel queues which also are unlikely to go down until after the elections. There's little sign of the military deployment on the streets since the Red Alert - this is because the majority of the troops have been deployed into the riverine areas to help in trying to weed out some of the militants from their camps in the creeks and the swamps.
The Nigerian Minister for Information, in characteristic fashion made a complete fool of himself in his efforts to discredit the CNN report by Jeff Koinange, featuring so-called MEND fighters in the swamps with the kidnapped Filipinos. MEND actually say that the CNN report grossly underestimated the numbers of fighters and weapons (many captured from the many police and military who have been killed in the Delta), and if he had been more accurate the report would have been far more disturbing.
Back in the real world, Bristow is having great trouble getting any expat staff to go to Port Harcourt because of the 'security situation' or to keep those it has there. Some of the security situation is just being whipped up by the press, like CNN. Sadly, the staff of both Bristow and CHC now have night time curfews (though not, of course those of Caverton - they probably just stay in some 1* doss house with no security, so they're not targets and the militants know their company wouldn't pay a kobo for them anyway
). Both companies staff can also be seen being escorted to work by armed escorts now. At least CHC staff in Port Harcourt live fairly close to work, have internet in their houses, a company bar (even if it is a gay bar
), have good individual rooms which are reasonably equipped with essentials like refrigerators and en-suite bathrooms and know that if they are injured in an incident or accident, they can get treatment in the SOS clinic at Intels (probably the only clinic in Port Harcourt worth a damn). Bristow, on the other hand, have a long, nasty journey to work as they move into more secure housing a long way out of town, may well be sharing bathrooms, find the fridge is only good for putting things on top of as it doesn't work, probably have no internet access either at work or at home and if they're shot or injured at night, have to try and find a driver or a friend to take them to some crummy bush clinic (if anyone even knows where it is
). Many of the Bristow staff have still not been paid their accrued leave pay, months after it was promised and a lot of employees on an 'accompanied' deal are angry that their increase was proportionately much lower than anyone elses and that they still have to work 22 weeks on site before they get any leave. Communication from upper management is almost non-existent. I forecast another sizeable of exodus from Bristow, just leaving Nigeria and great difficulties in being able to fulfil their contracts in Port Harcourt because of staff shortages.
However, the Nigerian Minister of Tourism claims that Nigeria is on the verge of a tourist boom, with tourism set to take over from oil as the main earner in the Nigerian economy by 2009!!!
. Nigerian immigration officials are being despatched to frontier posts to start a count of the number of tourists entering. Unfortunately they only have one pencil and 2 pages of paper between them, but luckily this should be about 2 pages of paper and one pencil more than is required
. One travel site proudly proclaims:
The main tourist attractions in Nigeria have to be the animals: Hippos, elephants and even lions, all in their natural habitat. There are also over 600 species of birds to see while hiking across vast stretches of parks.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's a travel site or a new comedy site!
So, what else did you want to know?