In Port Harcourt, despite some people having expressed optimism that the security situation would improve after the election of a new president, the violence is continuing unabated. In the last 24 hours, an American-based British professor Michael Watts a Berkeley, California-based expert on oil-related violence in the delta who was in Port Harcourt to attend an awards ceremony at a local newspaper office was shot along with a security man. The attack carried out by unknown robbers who arrived on motorcycles and carrying handguns was probably motivated by straight robbery motives.
Ibiba Donpedro, the journalist for whom the ceremony had been organized, said the gunmen arrived at the newspaper office on at least two motorcycles.
"The next thing, we heard shots all over. Young men came in, shot the (professor) on the hand, ransacked the offices, shot up the windows, shot the security guy on the leg, and left," she said.
"They were saying, 'Where's the white man? Where's the money from the bank?'" she says.
She could not say whether the attack, in which the office was destroyed and two laptops were stolen, was a simple armed robbery or linked to the paper's recent investigation of alleged links between local politicians and criminal gangs.
Many Nigerians are also now being targeted as with numbers of expatriates in the region falling and many of them having better protection:
Gunmen who kidnapped the mother of the Bayelsa State local assembly speaker in Yenagoa arrived in two boats on Tuesday night, a local vigilante group leader said.
The kidnapping was the third attack on officials - or those close to them - this week in the volatile oil-rich Niger Delta.
A politician from neighbouring Delta state was found dead on Monday.
On the same day, gunmen in Port Harcourt stormed the house of a newly appointed energy official and killed two family members.
More than 150 foreigners - mostly oil workers - and many Nigerians have been kidnapped in the region so far this year
Nobody has been arrested for any of these attacks or for the kidnapping of children in the area, as crime spirals out of control with thousands of illegal weapons in the hands of criminal gangs. Much of the new circle of violence is motivated by robbery to fuel the increasing drug trade in the delta, but politically motivated kidnappings also continue. The present government talks a lot but seems as incapable or unwilling of doing anything at all to remedy the situation as its corrupt predecessor.
I'm sure the employees of CHC and Bristow feel their recent amazingly generous increases of up to 5%
really do reward them for the joys of working in what is now classified as the second most dangerous place in the world for expatriates. At least it's quite plain how much their company managements value their services, as they sit back in their well-protected compounds in Intels camps or luxury residences in Ikoyi and Victoria Island, have a well-deserved gin and tonic after a hard day at the office and wonder why the internet is so slow this evening