The increasing number of kidnappings in Nigeria’s Nile Delta this year heralds a renewed urgency by militia groups to gain autonomy for the region. While the hostages form the body of news coverage, the plethora of groups behind the actions – including sabotage and weapons trade – often fade into a masked collection of brigands with equally ambiguous agendas.

Home to the majority of the country’s oil production, around 900 of the 4,000 British nationals in Nigeria currently live in the Niger Delta. Despite its position as Africa’s foremost oil-exporter and the fifth largest source of U.S. oil imports (surpassed by Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela), approximately 70% of Nigerians survive on less than $1 a day, while 90% subsist on less than $2 per day.

In such abjection militant groups have flourished, kidnapping a total of 94 foreign nationals in the Delta area this year alone – more than the total for the whole of 2006, when 80 foreign workers were abducted.  At the moment, at least ten remain missing, with three separate kidnappings taking place during the past eight weeks.

While the matter would be comprehensible had but one group vied for autonomy, the sheer number of movements renders events hard to follow. The most significant groups, however, are the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF) and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).

Dominant in the Delta with its vast cache of weapons, the NDPVF has been lead by Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari - freshly released on bail this month by President Olusegun Obasanjo – since its foundation in 2004. On emergence, the group bluntly outlined it’s objectives:

“The Nigerian government should immediately withdraw all its security forces constituting ‘occupational’ forces and terror groups in the Niger Delta. The NDPVF demands the immediate abrogation of all statutes that are inimical to the aspirations of the Niger Delta people towards resource control and self-determination within the context of the Nigerian state”

Since then, the group has sustained its bid to secure a portion of the government oil revenues to the region to assist the majority Ijdaw population. Largely financed by tapping oil from pipelines to be sold illegally to offshore tankers, it has been embroiled in heavy fighting with government troops and rival militas in Port Harcourt for several months.

Though more dimunitive in the arms department, MEND has surpassed its fellow militias in terms of activity. Led by Major-General Godswill Tamuno, the group’s surprisingly green manifesto calls for reparations for the pollution caused by the oil industry.

While many hostages have been freed, MEND has demonstrated a disinclination to negotiate. In January 2006 nine officials for the Italian petrol company Eni SpA were killed in Port Harcourt, while on 10 May, 2006, Baker Hughes, an excutive with a U.S.-based oil company, was also killed in Port Harcourt. In May this year, fourteen oil workers were kidnapped by MEND in three separate incidents within one week, including four Italians, an American and a Croatian.

Yet the region’s dramatic events have passed relatively unnoted. Rich in oil reserves, the Niger Delta should be revelling in affluence and comfort; instead, much of the population continues to languish in poverty while the movements initiated to bring hope and autonomy sporadically disintegrate into turmoil adding a further dimension to Nigeria’s already complex situation.