Meet The "Niger Delta Avengers" - They Hold The Price Of Oil In Their Hands

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/17/2016 15:31 -0400

As Goldman famously declared on Sunday night when it boosted its near-term oil prices targets (while cutting its 2017 estimates as a result of what it admits will be a delayed rebalancing of the oil market), the biggest upside risk to oil over the next months remains the threat from unexpected supply disruptions...

... such as the Canada wildfire which has mothballed up to 1.5 million barrels in daily production (and which took a turn for the worse earlier today, when new evacuations threatened the restart of oilsands facilities), but mostly the ongoing attacks shaking up, or rather down, Nigerian production, specifically affecting the region of the Niger River delta.

It is here where we meet a recently unknown group of militants, better known as the "Niger Delta Avengers" who are thought to be behind recent attacks on oil pipelines in the south.

As Bloomberg notes, "the Niger Delta Avengers have certainly been busy, forcing Shell's Forcados terminal to shut in about 250,000 barrels of daily exports; and breaching an offshore Chevron facility in the 160,000 barrels per day Escravos system. In April, ENI had to declare force majeure, letting it stop shipments without breaching contracts -- on exports of its Brass River grade after a pipeline fire.The country's oil production has been severely disrupted by the attacks."

To be sure, Nigeria has had a long history of dealing with militants who use attacks on oil to gain leverage. The previous wave of discontent, which hit a peak in 2009, only came to an end when President Yar'Adua offered amnesty, training programs and monthly cash payments to nearly 30,000 militants, at a yearly cost of about $500 million. Some leaders of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the militant group, got lucrative security contracts. In other words, the "solution" was appeasement, and as Europe knows very well, appeasement never works, and instead invites increasingly greater problems.

As BBC adds, the amnesty program, which provides tens of thousands of former oil militants with a monthly stipend from the government, stemmed the level of violence in the region after its introduction in 2009. But in the latest budget, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari reduced funding for the program by 70%, and has spoken of phasing it out entirely by 2018.

Yes, in Nigeria paying blackmail is part of the state budget.

It gets better: critics accuse Mr Buhari, a Muslim northerner, of unfairly targeting communities in the southern, mainly Christian oil-producing regions, as part of his anti-corruption drive. Mr Buhari's predecessor Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, comes from the Niger Delta region.

In other words, the indirect accusation is that the current president of a country whose primary source of revenue is oil exports, has unleashed the current Nigerian oil supply crisis on his own due to his reduced support for the same militant groups which he knew would promptly step in an hold the country's oil production for ransom until they too got paid off.

And this is where the Niger Delta Avengers come into play: the group who, by keeping half a million barrels in oil from the market, have catalyzed not only the latest rally in oil, but now effectively hold the fate of the price of oil in their hands.

But who are the Niger Delta Avengers?

Luckily, the group has its own website called, not surprisingly, Niger Delta Avengers, which while somewhat unoptimized is very social-media friendly and even has a convenient section allowing outside parties to contact the millitants.



Some other notable oddities: the website was created on February 3, 2016 using godaddy as registrar.

The website has its own news blog, where it has posted such stories as "Niger Delta Avengers Zero Chevron Operations", "STOP KILLING NIGER DELTANS IN THE GUISE OF ESCORTING OIL TANKERS", and "KEEP YOUR THREAT TO YOURSELF MR. PRESIDENT; WE SHALL CONTINUE TO DO WHATEVER IS NECESSARY TO PROTECT THE NIGER DELTA INTEREST", all authored by the same person, one Col. Madoch Agbinibo, NDA spokesman.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-17/meet-niger-delta-avengers-group-which-holds-price-oil-its-hands

Lol.you must be deluded if you think oil prices works the way the press tells the public.it is fixed by an international fossil fuel cabal to intentionally reduce shale fields and oilsands and slow dow fundings on research on alternatice sources.