A militant crisis in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, could lend support to falling oil prices this year if a cease-fire agreement with former Niger Delta militants is not renewed,  forcing oil companies to cut their crude supply to the international markets, analysts have said.

The West African nation, which has been fighting ISIS-linked Islamic militants Boko Haram since 2009, is now facing a possibility of former Niger Delta militants taking to arms again if an agreement they made with the government in 2009 is not renewed.

Acoording to the agreement, the Nigerian government was to extend amnesty to the militants and provide monthly cash payments to the militants in exchange for co-operation.

This agreement came to an end in 2015 and the President Muhammadu Buhari might not be able to afford to extend it due to financial difficulties the country is facing due to low oil prices that have hurt the country’s main source of revenue.

According to Helima Croft, the managing director and global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets,  Nigeria appears “acutely poised for a showdown” between President Buhari and the former militants.

“A lengthy Nigerian production outage would help to eat into the daily supply overhang and help expedite a return to daily equilibrium,” Barron’s quotes Croft and her team saying in a report.

A return to insurgency in the oil-rich Niger Delta will take back Nigeria to the early 2000s, when armed militants routinely cut crude flow from the region, keeping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil off the market.

One group in particular, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), managed to slash the OPEC member’s oil output by half at the height of its activity, according to data cited by RBC Capital Markets.

Before the March 2015 Presidential election in Nigeria, MEND threatened to cripple oil output from the country if the incumbent Goodluck Jonathan was defeated.

As fate would have it, Buhari defeated Jonathan in the elections, beating him with over 2.5 million votes, and became the country’s first ever opposition candidate to win a Presidential election.

Croft believes that MEND could act on this threats in an attempt to arm-twist Buhari to renew the groups agreement with the government.

“Given the high financial stakes for these individuals and their proven track record of taking down production, their threats cannot be entirely dismissed,” Financial Post quoted Croft saying in a report after last year’s Presidential elections.

Already, there has been reports of violence in the Niger Delta after a Lagos High Court issued an arrest warrant for the ex-leader of MEND and the country’s former “most wanted man,” Government Tompolo, Business Insider reported.