Nigeria Potentially Unstable, CIA Chief Warns

In a dramatic warning to U.S. oil companies doing business there, the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency warned yesterday that Nigeria may suffer instability as ethnic militias continue attacking oil facilities in the southern Niger Delta region and Muslim unrest grows.

CIA chief Porter Goss also told the U.S. Senate that “extremist groups are emerging from the country's Muslim population of about 65 million.”

The CIA warning warning came as furious investors on the Raging Bull ERHC Energy message board repeatedly slammed Nigeria and Sao Tome for their failure to make awards as promised in the Nigeria-Sao Tome Joint Development Zone. At least a dozen posters repeatedly criticized the agencies responsible for announcing the awards, which were first promised for the end of December and then for the end of January, and now, according to JDA public relations director Sam Dimka on Tuesday, are expected "soon."

The JDA delayed announcement of awards in Block 1 of the JDZ last year for six months, and then awarded only one block.

That block went to ChevronTexaco (51 percent), ExxonMobil (40 percent) and Energy Equity Resources (EER), a Norwegian firm that got nine percent. A report in the occasionally reliable Afrca Energy Intelligence newsletter on Feb. 16, however, said EER is said to be selling its interest, and ExxonMobil has told JDZ officials it wants to farm out its two 25 percent entitlementsd in Blocks 2 and 4 rather than participate in the second licensing round for five blocks that ended Dec. 15.

A report in This Day Online, a Nigerian site, bannered the CIA story across its front page. Here is a relevant excerpt:

Nigeria Worries US
By Moses Jolayemi with agency report, 02.17.2005

WASHINGTON -- Nigeria is one of the potential areas for instability, the United States director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Porter J. Goss, told the Congress yesterday.

“In Nigeria, the military is struggling to contain militia groups in the oil-producing south and ethnic violence that frequently erupts throughout the country," he said.

According to the CIA boss in a report titled “Global Intelligence Challenges 2005: Meeting Long-Term Challenges with a Long-Term Strategy” delivered to Senate yesterday “extremist groups are emerging from the country's Muslim population of about 65 million.”

He told the Senate that such chronic instability found in Africa “will continue to hamper counter-terrorism efforts and pose heavy humanitarian and peacekeeping burdens.”

Yesterday’s briefing, Goss explained, was to discuss the challenges facing America and its interests in the months ahead. He pointed out that “these challenges literally span the globe.”

“My intention is to tell you what I believe are the greatest challenges we face today and those where our service as intelligence professionals is needed most”, he added.

The U.S. officers, he said, are taking risks adding that he will encourage them to take more risks because “I would much rather explain why we did something than why we did nothing.”
Last week, basketball superstar Nigerian-born Akeem Olajuwon was accused of using a mosque he established and funded to donate money to a group which acts as a front for al-Qaida and Hamas terrorist groups. More than $80,000 given to charities were later determined by the US government as being for the groups, according to financial records obtained by The Associated Press.

Olajuwon told the AP he had not known of any links to terrorism when the donations were made, prior to the government's crackdown on the groups, and would not have given the money if he had known.