Italians Advised To Leave The Niger Delta
MP,
Yes, it seems some of the information I saw was a bit out of date and that some Shell workers were due to return today. to celebrate this the Niger Delta continues its violent slide into almost total anarchy. Today in Port Harcourt another expatriate worker (Lebanese) was shot dead and his companion injured in an ambush on the road to the airport. Two Italians were kidnapped and the Italian foreign ministry has now advised all Italians working in the Niger Delta to evacuate the area.
It would be easy for those just living in supposedly-secure compounds, travelling to work in armed convoys and seeing nothing of what's going on to think that the place is no more dangerous than it ever was, but that would be a mistake. The danger you can't see is far worse than that which you know about. A lot was made of the fact that after a Red Alert was declared, there was no sign of more troops in and around Port Harcourt, but this was because they were deployed out into the riverine areas and the creeks as evidenced by many new fortifications around swamp helipads, with sangars and bunkers having been constructed and some fairly serious automatic weapons now being out there.
One problem is that the President is too busy using the government instutions to coerce his party's opponents in the forthcoming elections. Things are now getting so bad in this respect that the chairman of the influential United Senate Committee on the Nigerian Election, Sen. Ross Finegold, has threatened to withdraw its "financial, moral and material support" for the April elections.