By David Bacon
On June 15, a week after the death of Nigeria's military strongman, General Sani Abacha, Frank Kokori and Milton Dabibi walked into the sunlight after years behind bars. Their imprisonment had become a global symbol of trade union repression. Nigeria's democracy and trade union activists cheered their release, ordered by the latest general to rule Nigeria.
Kokori and Dabibi, leaders of Nigeria's two major oil workers' unions, would be the first to point out that Nigeria is still not free. The release of nine political prisoners leaves Moshood Abiola, elected president in 1993 and imprisoned when he tried to take office, behind bars.
Kokori, Dabibi and Abiola's long incarceration demonstrates the influence of oil over politics, not just in Africa's most populous and potentially richest country, but over US policy as well.
Oil still rules Nigeria. Oil continues to flow from under the earth and onto the huge tankers that carry it to refineries in New Jersey, Texas and California. Over US$12 billion in oil is pumped out of Nigeria every year, and over 40% of it goes to the US.
Like the oil, the money leaves too. Under a structural adjustment program mandated by the Washington-dominated International Monetary Fund, nearly 30% of Nigeria's national income goes to service a foreign debt of over $30 billion.
Behind Nigeria's military rulers tower five companies — Anglo-Dutch Shell, Italy's AGIP, Elf-Aquitaine from France, and US giants Chevron and Mobil. They split their oil revenues 50-50 with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, a government-run corporation.
Control of the NNPC is rumoured to have made Abacha, who became dictator in 1994, a billionaire, and his military associates millionaires.
According to Emmanuel Abisoye, a retired general who headed a 1994 investigation into oil-related corruption, "The unwritten code in the NNPC style of management would appear to be everyone for himself and God for us all, make hay while the sun shines, and loot all lootables".
On June 8, Abacha's heart gave out. He left millions of looted oil revenue in his Swiss bank accounts, and a legacy of political repression and violence. He was replaced by General Abdulsalam Abubakar, Abacha's close associate, hand-picked by the ruling junta.
Abubakar is a member of the northern Nigerian elite, which has dominated military and political leadership since independence from Britain. He has close ties to the US, having received advanced military training there from 1975 to 1979.
In public, the Clinton administration praised the release of prisoners, and made hopeful noises that it would "help all Nigerians come together to work to support a credible and open transition to civilian democratic government". But the administration's true policy owes more to the stake of US companies in Nigerian oil than to a commitment to human rights.
In the face of calls for sanctions against Nigerian oil imports, the administration has advocated "constructive engagement" with the brutal Abacha dictatorship.
This was the name Reagan gave to his notorious policy of breaking the international boycott against apartheid South Africa. In Nigeria, the policy criticises the junta for human rights abuses while permitting its oil to flow unchecked.
As San Francisco taxi driver Linus Oha, a member of the Free Nigeria Movement in exile for 10 years, remarked bitterly: "Without that oil revenue, we wouldn't have had the generals governing us for 28 of the last 38 years. The relationship between the companies and our government is a marriage of convenience, blessed in light crude."
In 1994, Nigeria's oil unions brought the country's biggest industry to a halt, shutting off the military's main source of earnings. NUPENG, the blue collar union headed by Kokori, and PENGASSAN, the white collar union led by Dabibi, sought to force the military to recognise the validity of the 1993 presidential election won by Moshood Abiola.
NUPENG and PENGASSAN attacked the generals and the oil companies, and Kokori and Dabibi paid the price.
On July 4, 1994, the oil workers went on strike, called for Abiola's release and his installation as the legitimately elected president. Oil provides 95% of the west African nation's foreign earnings, and has made Nigeria one of the continent's most industrialised countries.
Although it was legal, the strike was a direct challenge to the government. The union leaders had to go underground. For the first few weeks, they moved from place to place while the generals searched for them.
The strike paralysed Nigerian industry. Factories shut down, and government was losing $34 million a day in oil revenue. Public sector workers joined the strike in support. In Nigerian cities, students built barricades, which troops brutally dispersed.
Lacking oil to fuel generators, electric power plants began to stop operation, and blackouts spread. Air traffic ground to a halt as planes could not be refuelled. Air traffic controllers joined the protest.
After weeks of waffling, the Nigerian Labour Congress, with close ties to the government, was forced by pressure from below to declare a general strike. Although its leaders called it off after just a day, many workers refused to go back to their jobs.
AGIP and Elf-Aquitaine cut production to 60%. Their operations were on the mainland, where the strikers could exercise effective pressure. Shell maintained its regular volume.
But California-based Chevron and New York-based Mobil took a different tack. The two companies flew in strikebreakers to keep oil wells flowing, mostly oil rigs off the coast, and increased their output 120%.
The strike produced windfall profits when shortages raised the price of light crude from $14 to $20 a barrel. According to Dabibi, troops occupied the installations at the companies' request.
The US-owned operations guaranteed continued income and saved the life of the Abacha regime.
In a meeting of Abacha's ruling council on August 17, his generals told him he should release Abiola to end the strike. Seeing his ruling clique starting to fracture, Abacha ordered the army to take control of all oil union offices, and those of the Labour Congress as well.
At 10pm on August 19, Kokori walked into a trap set up by a friend and was seized by soldiers. Other union leaders were captured as well. In the days that followed, workers were forced back to work by a combination of military threats and economic deprivation. Dabibi stayed one step ahead of the soldiers until 1996.
Abubakar's prisoner release will undoubtedly gain him some breathing room. It included democracy leader Beko Ransome-Kuti, General Obasanjo, journalist Christiana Anyanwu, Islamic leader Ibrahim Dasuki, former governor Bola Ige, and democracy advocates Olabintan Durojaiye and Uwen Udoh. Numerous other political prisoners remain in jail, including 16 journalists, and of course, Abiola himself.
Speaking for the Free Nigeria Movement, a grassroots Nigerian pro-democracy organisation in exile, president Tunde Okorodudu called Abubakar's action a "token release" and "a tactic by the Abubakar regime to confer legitimacy and support for itself while it consolidates its hold".
Okorodudu noted that previous dictators also released prisoners at the beginning of their stays in power. He called Abiola's restoration the only path to national reconciliation.
"The real question", asks US Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union vice-president Calvin Moore, whose union has campaigned strongly for the Nigerian oil workers' leaders, "is whose interests will now be served, and especially which will determine US policy — those of oil companies, or those of the Nigerian people?".