Pollution and poverty stain a land divided by oil

Amid the serpentine creeks and rivers; in the ramshackle wooden huts perched on stilts above the oozing mud; among the muddy puddles where children gather to collect drinking water, there is little hint of the vast oil wealth on which the entire Niger Delta is sitting.

Nigeria might be the world's eighth-biggest oil exporter, but these villagers remain mired in poverty. Getting to the nearest clinic means a day navigating the waterways; in the absence of proper schools, children idle their days away among the swamps.

The people of the Delta do not get to see even the most meagre crumbs from a table that is ever more bountiful as oil prices reach record highs. What they get instead is the pollution.

The big oil companies, such as Shell and Chevron, burn off around 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas that comes out of the ground with the oil they pump. The practice is known as flaring. Round the clock, flames shoot from the ground, turning the sky black with acrid smoke, and coating everything with a fine, soot. At night, as one analyst put it, the area resembles a scene from Tolkien's Middle Earth – a Nigerian Mordor. Residents blame these gas flares for polluting the fields and waterways, making it impossible to fish or grow food.

The Nigerian government was supposed to start fining companies that had not shut down their flares at the beginning of this year, but rolled back the deadline after pressure from oil multinationals who said they would not be able to comply without shutting off production.

President Umaru Yar'Adua – dubbed "Baba go-slow" for the lack of progress in his first year at the helm – could ill afford further cuts to Nigeria's oil output. A campaign begun two years ago by Mend (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) has already slashed production by a quarter. This April, Nigeria suffered the indignity of losing its place at the head of the African oil pecking order, with Angola outpumping it for the first time.

Mend is the largest of the militant groups in the Niger Delta. Its double-pronged attack has been to kidnap foreign oil workers – creating a climate of fear in the Rivers state capital Port Harcourt where many of the multinationals are based – and attacking oil installations.

Once dismissed as a group of amateur bandits, Mend has become increasingly sophisticated despite its arsenal of rusty Kalashnikovs. Proof of this came three weeks ago with their audacious night-time raid on the Bonga offshore field, forcing Shell to shut down the 200,000-barrel-a-day operation, and serving notice that deep-water facilities, once seen as safe, were no longer out of bounds.

The group communicates with the outside world through a mysterious spokesman who goes by the name of Jomo Gbomo and is only contactable via email. He issues statements of responsibility for attacks and in recent months has also tried to lure big-name celebrities over to the Mend cause, including an appeal to George Clooney to lobby for them at the UN. Their commando-style approach is a far cry from the days of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer who led peaceful protests against the polluting oil companies before being hanged in 1995 by Nigeria's military junta. But the anger at the pollution by the oil companies and the siphoning off of crude profits by political grandees at the expense of local people remain the same.

Now they are ending their ceasefire and a recent email, saying that "when our patience finally runs out the real picture of a cyclone on the Nigerian oil industry will be revealed", may no longer be an empty threat.

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