Nigerian oil region militant leader Henry Okah, jailed in South Africa for terrorism, speaks to The Africa Report about what he terms his unlawful detention.
“These people arrested me illegally,” Henry Okah says in a phone interview from his prison in Pretoria, South Africa. “The law itself under which they tried me said they didn’t have jurisdiction. They tried me under that law all the same. I am a prisoner of war.”
Okah, 59, is widely believed to be the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), an armed group that emerged in the country’s southern, oil-rich delta in 2005 to fight alleged decades of exploitation and pollution by international oil companies working for the Nigerian government.
He was arrested in South Africa in 2010 in connection with a car bomb attack in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, that left 12 people dead and 17 others injured. He was subsequently convicted under South Africa’s terrorism laws and jailed for 24 years.
Using the Geneva Convention selectively
Okah maintains he is a prisoner of war held in violation of the terms of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
He says he finds it “sickening to listen” to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government citing the Geneva Convention in defence of Palestinians and Hamas following the 7 October attack on Israel and the consequent war. The antecedents of the African National Congress (ANC) as a liberation movement that used violence make it more so, he adds.
The Geneva Convention recognises internal conflicts, such as the one that unfolded in Nigeria’s delta region, according to Okah, where armed groups fought skirmishes with troops, bombed oil installations and held oil workers hostage to press for a greater share of the petroleum wealth for their region.
This culminated in a 2009 amnesty under which the fighters laid down arms on the promise that the government would address their demands.
Okah, who had been arrested in Angola on suspicion of weapons smuggling in 2007 and extradited to Nigeria, was among the beneficiaries of the amnesty. He was released from jail and allowed to return to South Africa, where he was a resident.
My problem is that when I’m in prison, I have no access to the courts.
He remained critical of the government for not going far enough to tackle “the core issues” affecting the region as specified in the amnesty agreement, and choosing instead to award lucrative contracts to militant leaders to ensure the flow of crude.
When MEND threatened to resume hostilities and followed up with car bombs in the southern oil town of Warri and Abuja in 2010, suspicion fell on Okah and his associates.
The South African authorities said he was tried under a provision that allows their courts to try foreign terror suspects and wasn’t extradited to Nigeria because he would have faced the death penalty there.
South Africa’s Constitutional Court, the final court of appeals, dismissed Okah’s efforts to get his conviction overturned in 2018.
However, the jailed militant, who alleges he was beaten by security guards last September, among other forms of maltreatment, said his efforts to file a habeas corpus application to the courts on the violation of his rights have been frustrated by judicial officials.
“My problem is that when I’m in prison, I have no access to the courts. I can’t complain anywhere. I just have to do everything by letters, which are just destroyed,” he says.
Okah specifically accused South Africa’s Chief Justice Raymond Zondo of frustrating his efforts to get a hearing on his claims of unlawful detention. In February he petitioned South Africa’s Public Protector’s office with his allegations.
In a response seen by this reporter, the office of the Public Protector wrote that it ‘does not have the jurisdiction to investigate your complaint and cannot be of any assistance to you’.
‘Vested oil interests’
The marine engineer-turned-militant alleges a conspiracy between South Africa and Nigeria to keep him out of circulation at the behest of vested oil interests. He says that even his former militant colleagues who are now government contractors want him permanently out of circulation so they can enjoy their wealth in peace.
“These guys had come together and taken an oath to make sure that they keep me in prison,” he says, without offering any evidence.
Nigeria’s oil region hasn’t fared much better even in Okah’s absence. On 15 March, an armed group ambushed a military gunboat patrol, killing 16 soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel and two majors near the western delta town of Okuama.
An ongoing reprisal campaign by troops has left dozens of people dead and thousands displaced, a cycle that has played out repeatedly across the region for the past three decades.
By 2005, when MEND burst on the scene, Nigeria was pumping as much as 2.6 million barrels of oil daily (bpd). Following attacks and disruptions caused by militant groups, output fell under 1 million bpd, forcing then-president Umaru Yar’Adua to negotiate with MEND and free the likes of Okah.
Under President Goodluck Jonathan, who succeeded Yar’Adua upon his death in 2010, oil output hovered around 2.2 million bpd, never quite returning to the previous peak as energy companies avoided volatile onshore oil fields.
Production plunged once more under president Muhammadu Buhari in 2016 with a resumption of attacks that severely cut production and forced Nigeria into its first recession in 25 years.
Since then, output has yet to recover as it became apparent – and the authorities acknowledge this – that large-scale oil theft was now being abetted by high-placed industry and security officials, using the same foot soldiers who were former fighters.
Since 2021 Nigeria has been unable to meet its OPEC export quota, with production dropping lower than it fell at the peak of armed attacks in 2008, all due to theft and the attendant sabotage.
If I step out of prison now, they’re afraid that everything will just go haywire
Production has hovered around 1 million bpd in the past three years, forcing a massive weakening of the naira, which is the source of more than 90% of the country’s foreign income.
Output volumes started to pick up after the government engaged a former militant leader named Government Ekpemupolo (better known as Tompolo) to protect the pipelines and arrest the oil thieves.
Production currently stands at about 1.67 million bpd, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Ltd’s Chief Executive Officer Mele Kyari told a parliamentary committee on 14 March – a far cry from the export benchmark of 2 million bpd that the government needs to balance its budget.
“We have removed 4,876 illegal connections to a pipeline out of 5,570 that we discovered,” Kyari said. “Some of the scales of the infractions that we see are unbelievable. When you remove one connection, the next day in the same location, someone will replace it.”
Even in jail, he says he still is an influencer
Okah claims to have influence over most of the armed groups active in the region.
“The reality is that I have control over 90% of the people who are able to fight,” he says. “It’s for that reason that they have kept me. Many people there are aggrieved with all these arrangements with Tompolo and the rest, but they’re more or less leaderless.”
“That is where the problem is. If I step out of prison now, they’re afraid that everything will just go haywire. Especially now that Nigeria is unstable,” he says.
Even if we characterised the Niger Delta situation as a non-international armed conflict, it is still difficult to recognise Okah as a prisoner of war
Okah says offers of parole made to him were rejected because he considers the idea “an insult”. He also fears a plot to deport him to Nigeria if he accepts.
“They’ve been begging and trying to force me to take that,” he says. “But I can take that thing, get out of prison and they’ll kill me the same day. Now my family would not be able to make any claims against them because I would have died as a convicted felon.”
The Nigerian presidency officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comments in response to the jailed militant’s claims.
Faint hope to clear his name in court, say experts
Legal experts don’t share Okah’s optimism in finding a way out through the courts. International law broadly recognises wars between nations and civil wars, according to Anselm Chidi Odinkalu, Nigerian human rights lawyer and professor at the Fletcher School of Law at Tufts University in the US.
“The main difference between non-international armed conflict and international armed conflict is that you really do not have prisoners of war in a civil war under the Geneva Conventions,” Odinkalu tells The Africa Report.
“So, even if we characterised the Niger Delta situation as a non-international armed conflict, which I would, it is still difficult to recognise Okah as a prisoner of war. If it is true that he is being subjected to beatings, which could fall foul of the prohibition against torture,” he says.
For now, Okah is hoping to have his new application heard by the Constitutional Court. “That application says that I’m unlawfully detained, it’s not about my conviction or the merits of it,” he says.
“Once somebody files for an application, you must give a judgment. And they know they’re wrong, so they’re trying to block the courts from giving that judgment.”
(The Africa Report)
