HENRY OKAH

From: Global Guerillas

Posted: 28 Feb 2008 10:14 PM CST

Henry Okah is likely someone you have never heard about. Despite that, he is one of the most important people alive today, a true innovator in warfare: a global guerrilla.

Henry is a burly man who speaks with a cultured British accent, a consequence of his upper class upbringing and his education in Nigeria's private school system. His mind is an interesting combination of the discipline of engineering, gained through his experience as an engineer in Nigeria's merchant marine, and the believability of an arms salesman that once used worries about personal safety to sell handguns to private citizens. In short, it is a combination of attributes that made him the perfect guerrilla entrepreneur. Since he moved with his family to South Africa in 2003, Henry was able to accomplish the following. He:

• amassed a personal fortune through arms sales and oil bunkering in the Niger delta.
• was able to orchestrate the shutdown of over a half a million barrels a day of Nigerian/Shell oil production for over two years, with a total market value of $29 billion -- a major reason why the global price of oil is currently over $100 a barrel today.
• pioneered in the development of a system of warfare that will plague nation-states and their corporate allies for decades.

A Bazaar of Violence

Nigeria is a mess, due to the combination of legions of legendarily corrupt politicians, buckets of oil money, and vast pools of neglected citizens. The Niger Delta, the wellspring of Nigeria's oil wealth, is particularly messy. It's where people, abandoned by their government, are living at a minimal subsistence level just outside the fences of the major oil company compounds, which sport European levels of convenience and lifestyle for their expatriate employees. As a result, it's little wonder that the Delta's political environment is a swirling maelstrom of actors -- from tribal chiefs to military commanders to gangs (aka "cults" in the local parlance of the Delta) to local/national politicians -- all competing for a share of the Delta's abundant oil wealth. Here how Henry was able to leverage this environment:

• Mercenary talent. The evolution of local Delta politics took a turn for the worse at the turn of the century. In order to stay in office, politicians began to employ young cult (gang) members as mercenary thugs to intimidate voters and opposition politicians. However, when the politicians regained office, they threw the gang members back onto the street, forming a large pool of young mercenaries hungry for more easy income from violence. The market that developed was fluid -- young violent men routinely hired themselves out to a cult on Saturday, to another gang on Monday and to a politician or wealthy individual on Thursday. It was a mess, but Henry saw this pool of mercenary talent as an opportunity. He hired them too, on an individual or group basis often through cell phone calls (there is a weak cell phone signal across the entire Delta swamp), to assemble ad hoc guerrilla forces that could do his work in the Delta. Since these gang members were only hired on an ad hoc basis, there wasn't any organization for the government's military and police forces to target.

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