Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (62 page)

In September 2005, on the cusp of taking power in Irving, Tillerson had flown into Abuja. President Obasanjo had been making noise about forcing Western oil companies in Nigeria to move beyond pumping crude and into the refining of gasoline and other products for local consumption. ExxonMobil had steered clear of Obasanjo because “he tended to pound tables” and make demands. Nigeria was about the last place in the world Lee Raymond wanted to spend time. Tillerson decided to engage, however. He met with the Nigerian president, flew down to Lagos, where he stayed in the corporation’s Waterfront Guest House, traveled by helicopter to a few production sites, and departed. The corporation’s message to American diplomats in the country was that they should “encourage deregulation” and work on “improving the investment climate.”
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Tillerson remained hopeful—if not in a state of denial—about ExxonMobil’s place in the hearts and minds of Akwa Ibom’s population. After the Eket kidnapping, local insurgents took periodic potshots at ExxonMobil transport vans. Speedboat pirates menaced the corporation’s offshore platforms. Still, Tillerson believed that ExxonMobil remained “largely . . . insulated” from the worst Delta violence and political dysfunction. In Akwa Ibom, Tillerson boasted, the “community in effect protects us when militants from outside . . . try to create problems. . . . We have good relations down there. That is because we made some good decisions at the beginning. And we look to that as a model.”

The trouble the corporation endured as M.E.N.D. rose was “criminal in nature,” Tillerson believed. He was “mindful of the security situation,” but felt nonetheless that ExxonMobil had a winning formula for obtaining community allegiance in Akwa Ibom. This strategy was rooted, Tillerson thought, in firmness. He sought to imbue in locals the expectation that ExxonMobil knew “how you say no” and that the corporation “could not be intimidated and would act consistently.”
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Exxon had inherited its operations in the Niger Delta from Mobil. The corporation’s subsidiary, Mobil Exploration Nigeria, Inc., won its first license to explore for oil offshore of Akwa Ibom State in 1961; the first wells flowed later that decade. By the time of the merger, Mobil was on the way to becoming the second-largest international producer in Nigeria, after Royal Dutch Shell. Large volumes and the light, sweet quality of the oil made its Nigerian offshore properties exceptionally valuable.
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Mobil and then ExxonMobil recruited, paid, supplied, and managed sections of the Nigerian military and police assigned to protect the Eket compound, the roads that led from there to the Qua Iboe Terminal on the Atlantic, and the roads around Akwa Ibom’s state capital of Uyo, a fume-choked city that housed the outsize development projects of Victor Attah. These included the shopping centers Mountain of Fire and Miracles Plaza and, after 2007, the equally ambitious, divinity-inflected construction projects of his successor, Godswill Akpabio. (Akpabio enjoyed a fortunate name for a career in politics in a faithful state; he handed out T-shirts to his youth gangs with slogans such as “Stop Social Vices” and “Support Godswill.”)

The Mobil Police, as they were known locally, carried automatic rifles and wore black shirts emblazoned with a white arm patch that displayed the Mobil red Pegasus flying horse symbol first adopted in 1931 as a trademark by Mobil predecessor Standard Oil Company of New York. After the upsurge of violence in 2006, ExxonMobil’s Chaplin reported, militants often stripped the Mobil Police of their weapons and “many officers have taken to removing their uniforms at the slightest hint of militant activity.” The corporation’s police established layered checkpoints, spaced every kilometer or so, on the major roads to and from ExxonMobil properties. “ExxonMobil: Take Ownership” declared the sign at the Qua Iboe Terminal entrance, surrounded by warnings posted by Mobil Police squadrons: “Military Zone,” “No Stopping,” and “No Waiting.”
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The Nigerian military deployed a mechanized battalion to reinforce security in the state, but most of the Nigerian government’s support for the Mobil Police came from the S.S.S. ExxonMobil’s Global Security unit in Nigeria appointed liaison officers to joint security task forces to coordinate convoy protection, perimeter security at ExxonMobil installations, and executive protection services. In addition to the Mobil Police, ExxonMobil hired and supervised an eight-hundred-man unarmed unit of the “supernumerary” or “spy” police in Akwa Ibom. The scope of their duties is unclear. The spy police carried corporate identity cards even while technically in the employ of their own government. At one stage, the supernumerary unit in Eket sued ExxonMobil for employment benefits. They argued that they were, in effect, corporate employees, not government police officers.
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Prior to the merger, Mobil had operated a successful program of community relations in Akwa Ibom, at least as local politicians perceived it. The corporation funded a soccer club, community buildings, water projects, and road building. Nigerian and expatriate Mobil executives curried favor with local political leaders. The corporation acted as “a neighbor and a brother,” recalled Esseme Eyiboh, who represented Eket in the Nigerian House of Representatives. After the merger with Exxon, it became a “purely commercial drive.” The corporation withdrew from a memorandum of understanding that Mobil had negotiated with local leaders and produced a new program, which they wanted “the community to accept . . . without making any inputs,” said Nduese Essien, who negotiated with the corporation after the merger.
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With Mobil, Victor Attah recalled, political liaison was “a lot less mechanical,” but with ExxonMobil, “it became a lot more rigid.” He pleaded with the corporation to build a power plant, but its managers refused, declaring that such projects were “not their core area of business.” Under ExxonMobil’s rules, Nigerian politicians could not ride corporate airplanes unless it was strictly for oil business; special projects of the sort Mobil had accommodated before the merger were refused; the soccer club and local athletic programs were abandoned; and the corporation issued a new list of local projects it would support. “They have been operating on their diktats,” said Essien.
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“You have to be willing to say, ‘No, we aren’t going to do it that way, we are going to do it this way; if we can’t do it this way, we won’t be here,’” Tillerson explained, speaking specifically about ExxonMobil’s strategy in the Niger Delta. “This is the way my company has operated throughout the world throughout my entire career. We will walk away if we don’t have an acceptable situation on the ground. That doesn’t mean it’s not tough, it doesn’t mean we don’t have problems. We manage it, but it can be done in a way that the local community benefits tremendously—and the Akwa Ibom state has benefited enormously. That is why we enjoy good relations.”
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Tillerson’s opinions echoed those of Governor Akpabio, who promoted a slogan, “Akwa Ibom
Ado Okay!
” or “Akwa Ibom Is Okay!” He sought to protect ExxonMobil. At a “gala night” to honor Chaplin, the governor declared, “Akwa Ibom cannot be safe for criminals; they will soon know that the state is not safe for kidnappers. Let oil companies and other firms know that the state is safe for them.” In fact, Akpabio’s supporters were engaged increasingly in a complex war with rival gangs, played out through tit-for-tat kidnappings. Nigerian-born ExxonMobil managers and employees, with their attractive salaries, were not immune. Governor Akpabio “has strong cult connections,” said a U.S. official who tracked the governor’s activities. “I’m told that many of the attacks on the roads . . . are being carried out by his militia—whether because he orders it or because they don’t feel they are getting enough money is not clear.” As Eyiboh put it: “We are an inch from insurgency.”
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If the corporation enjoyed a measure of periodic stability in comparison with Shell and Chevron, it was hardly the result of its corporate strategy; it was because most of its oil production was offshore and therefore harder to steal or disrupt. Harder, but not impossible: M.E.N.D.-branded pirates were a determined lot.

I
n September 2006, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 50, outlining American security strategy in Africa. The directive’s stated objectives included building African capacity to govern and deliver social services, consolidating democracies on the continent, and bolstering fragile states. On November 15, 2006, about a month after the Eket kidnapping of ExxonMobil contract workers, Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, spoke at a maritime security conference in West Africa organized by the United States Navy. The conference was meant to rally regional governments into partnership with the Pentagon to improve maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea, as the Atlantic Ocean waters off Nigeria were known. “Achieving coastal security in the Gulf of Guinea is key to America’s trade and investment opportunities in Africa, to our energy security, and to stem transnational threats,” Frazer said. She continued: “Let us consider oil.” If African governments protected oil commerce, they could prosper. But they required the goodwill of international oil giants. “If kidnapping of their workers and attacks on their facilities continue,” those companies were unlikely to stay.
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African politicians, scarred by a century of resource-driven European colonialism, feared that the Bush administration viewed their oil as analogous to the oil of the Persian Gulf: as a vital American interest, one that might warrant military intervention, at least in extremis. Bush officials imagined themselves striking a more nuanced, postcolonial posture, one that emphasized encouraging African states to modernize and to rise from poverty. When an American official stood at a lectern flanked by U.S. Navy flags and spoke about oil security, however, the message was unavoidable: West Africa mattered to the United States in part because it possessed critical supplies of energy, and the American military stood ready to ensure oil flowed.

Would a U.S. military response to the Gulf of Guinea’s struggles with piracy and insurgency serve ExxonMobil’s interests? Before the M.E.N.D. uprising of early 2006, the major American oil corporations in Nigeria preferred to handle their own security problems in the region. Bunkering exacerbated corruption, militia violence, and inequality, but it was not necessarily a problem for ExxonMobil, because its contracts were written to absolve it from the costs of any thefts, and it was not necessarily a problem for global oil supply, because the stolen oil ultimately reached international markets. (As a practical matter, there was nothing to be done with stolen Nigerian crude but sell it.) Connie Newman, Jendayi Frazer’s predecessor at State, recalled that in 2004 and 2005, as the trouble in the Delta first began to bubble, oil representatives seemed to have little interest in sharing intelligence or otherwise taking on the problem in partnership with the Bush administration. State officials who visited Nigeria flew over the Delta in Chevron or ExxonMobil helicopters, from which their guides would point out barges of the type routinely used in oil thefts, as if such larceny were part of the natural landscape. “You guys know about this bunkering—the militants don’t have tankers,” Newman argued when oil company liaisons visited her at Foggy Bottom. “I’m not saying you’re doing it—but you know who’s doing it, and you could share that information with us.” But the companies demurred.
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The kidnapping and offshore piracy of 2006 started to alter their attitudes. “The cooperation of the oil companies turned one hundred eighty degrees,” recalled a U.S. official in Nigeria at the time. The companies offered new levels of “coordination and information sharing.”

The kidnapping surge was not the only new challenge to ExxonMobil. The corporation had begun to tow into Nigeria’s deep water, one after another, massive offshore production vessels known as F.P.S.O.s, which stood for floating, production, storage, and offloading. These were oil production platforms in the form of enormous ships that hovered above oil fields, obviating the need to build pylons and platforms in such deep ocean water. The vessels were so huge and economically important, however, that they presented “a significant terrorist target,” a U.S. government assessment concluded. The question facing Chaplin, ExxonMobil Global Security, and Tillerson was how to protect this investment. The corporation projected that by 2010 it would have one of the world’s largest fleets of F.P.S.O.s floating off the Delta, some of them away from Akwa Ibom and in territory more accessible by Nigeria’s most aggressive speedboat militants. Each vessel would produce 100,000 to 250,000 barrels a day of oil and other liquid products. Among other things, they were potentially combustible.

As trouble rose in Akwa Ibom, Chaplin had been reluctant to militarize ExxonMobil’s response or to encourage Nigeria’s government to do so. ExxonMobil initially decided against asking the Nigerian navy to protect its offshore fleet. Chaplin saw the navy as “amateurish with broken boats and no fuel,” and some of its officers were probably involved with the militants in oil theft rings, as everyone in the Nigerian officer corps “retires with money.” As for encouraging the Nigerian army to enter the Delta and attack the militants operating there, “The military was not an option that ExxonMobil hoped for,” Chaplin said, because an incursion “would aggravate the problem by antagonizing local communities.”

The corporation “has decided to go light on security out of concern that the presence of security would not function as a deterrent, but would be seen as a challenge to the militants to attack the facility,” the Lagos consulate reported. “That a company would have to engage in these types of calculations for an investment of this magnitude demonstrates the extent to which the security environment for oil companies has descended.”
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