While this deal may have ended the rebellion’s politicized element, the genie of widespread oil theft was by then out of the bottle and too lucrative to pass up. Since theft and the illegal refining and sale of stolen crude had become by then a widespread tactic of the rebellion, the transition to “peace” simply meant that many armed groups operating in the delta went from being political militants to organized criminal gangs overnight.

These gangs, by now well entrenched in the social fabric of the Niger Delta, very often collude with government officials, including the very police and military forces tasked with protecting the delta’s oil resources. As result, companies like Shell have increasingly abandoned the mainland to pursue opportunities in Nigeria’s equally oil-rich offshore waters. Still, not even the Gulf of Guinea is safe from the trepidations of Nigeria’s determined oil thieves, who have recently struck offshore platforms and taken hostages from them.

Given the importance of oil to Nigeria’s economy, the inability of the Nigerian state to stamp out rampant theft of the country’s most precious commodity is disturbing in the extreme. It calls to mind the situation in post-Saddam Iraq where a collapsed state, communal violence, and similarly weak and corrupt institutions created a law-and-order vacuum which sectarian militias quickly filled. Today, Iraq, and its oil industry, is still dealing with the fallout from this era – suggesting just how far Nigeria has to go in combating the collapse of state authority in its most vital economic sector.