Twelve sailors taken hostage by pirates off Nigeria had been safely released today. Pirates boarded the German cargo ship Palonia Friday night off the coast of the Niger Delta, taking hostage the crew of twelve, which included sailors from Germany, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.
Pirate attacks have become very frequent in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, with thousands being kidnapped in recent years. Most hostages are released after a few days or weeks in captivity, following payment of a ransom. Basil Venitis points out the Niger Delta environment has been destroyed by oil spills, and the people are desperate, leading to piracy and robberies. Disparate spills lead to desperate piracy.
Venitis notes the Niger Delta area is the most polluted on Earth. Nigeria has seen over 10,000 oil spills since 2005, many of them left to fester in the creeks of the Niger Delta. Decades of government mismanagement and corruption have lined the pockets of a small elite, while the vast majority of Nigeria's 150 million people survive on less than 2 euros a day. Because Niger Delta is so full of water, when spills do occur they impact much deeper than just the immediate site. A single spill can affect up to fifty communities, contaminating the water they depend on for drinking, cooking, and other every-day purposes.
Oil spill handling in the Niger Delta, when it happens at all, is often haphazard and inadequate. They dig six foot pits that are then filled with the contaminated soil and set on fire. The process not only emits further toxins into the environment but often leads to the uncontrollable burning down of crops and economical trees.
The average lifespan in the Niger Delta is 40, and you see people counting their days. Their days are filled with anguish and despair. No longer able to survive on the fruits of the earth and the bounty of the ocean, local communities have become dependent upon fish imported from other parts of Nigeria or abroad. And pollution has also rendered farming untenable. In some communities people grow what they can just to keep their families from starving, while in others the pollution has become so bad that residents have been forced to move, often into urban slums.
The predicament of Nigerians is due to kleptocracy. Nigeria is the second most corrupt on Earth, after Greece. The Dirty Dozen most corrupt kleptocrats on Earth were Costas Caramanlis of Greece, Costas Simitis of Greece, Suharto of Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos of Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, Alberto Fujimori of Peru, Pavlo Lazarenko of Ukraine, Arnoldo Aleman of Nicaragua, and Joseph Estrada of Philippines.
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