A cease fire had been called in the Niger Delta area of Nige­ria. This is where a rebel group has been dis­rupt­ing oil pro­duc­tion and demand­ing more action from the gov­ern­ment to ease poverty there. The rebel group wants the gov­ern­ment to give more oil rev­enues to the peo­ple. Nigeria’s econ­omy is almost com­pletely depen­dent on oil.

Niger­ian gov­ern­ment will prob­a­bly now be pres­sured by the big oil com­pa­nies to nego­ti­ate with the rebels as fight­ing dis­rupted oil pro­duc­tion in the area. How­ever some Niger­ian res­i­dents are afraid vio­lent rebels will receive more ben­e­fits from the oil and take away their share.

From this analy­sis of the cease fire from the Guardian, reporter Michelle Faul pro­files the rebel group and their issues.

The Move­ment for the Eman­ci­pa­tion of the Niger Delta has been attack­ing oil instal­la­tions, kid­nap­ping petro­leum com­pany employ­ees and fight­ing gov­ern­ment troops since Jan­u­ary 2006 in what it calls a protest against the unre­lent­ing poverty of peo­ple in the Niger Delta. Nigeria’s mil­i­tary has fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle against oppo­nents using guer­rilla tac­tics in an intri­cate net­work of lagoons, creeks, estu­ar­ies and man­grove swamps stretch­ing across a mil­lion square miles — home to sev­eral minor­ity groups and some of Africa’s largest oil deposits.

The poverty there has been deep­ened by more than 50 years of oil pro­duc­tion: soil once used for crops is sticky from crude oil leaks, rivers that used to pro­vide fish are slick with oil and the air is acrid with fumes from decades of gas flaring.

The Move­ment for the Eman­ci­pa­tion of the Niger Delta called the cease-fire Wednes­day say­ing the gov­ern­ment had met one of its demands by releas­ing ail­ing rebel leader Henry Okah. It said it wants to nego­ti­ate with the gov­ern­ment, is busy iden­ti­fy­ing envoys and hopes the 60-day cease-fire will cre­ate “an enabling envi­ron­ment” for negotiations.

Pres­i­dent Umar Yar’Adua’s spe­cial adviser on the south­ern Delta region, where all Nigeria’s oil is pro­duced, responded that the pres­i­dent was “sin­cere and com­mit­ted, and is truly poised to turn the Niger Delta into a bas­tion of peace and development.”

But the rebel group has called cease-fires before, the gov­ern­ment has made sim­i­lar promises and all has come to naught. In Jan­u­ary, the group called off a four-month cease-fire alleg­ing that the gov­ern­ment had bro­ken it, though the gov­ern­ment denied that.

The most press­ing issue, one the gov­ern­ment can address most speed­ily, is the 13 per­cent share of national oil rev­enue allo­cated to the delta under Nigeria’s fed­eral sys­tem. Var­i­ous groups in the region have been demand­ing an increase that would bring that share up to any­where from 25 per­cent to 100 per­cent of revenue.

But Yar’Adua’s gov­ern­ment, like its pre­de­ces­sor, is show­ing lit­tle enthu­si­asm and faces polit­i­cal resis­tance from other parts of the coun­try that auto­mat­i­cally must accept less rev­enue if more goes to the delta. The econ­omy of Nige­ria, Africa’s most pop­u­lous nation of 140 mil­lion, is almost totally depen­dent on oil.

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