Nigerian President Umaru Yaradua announced June 25 an amnesty program for militants in the country's Niger Delta region. The amnesty program will begin Aug. 6. Militants will have until Oct. 4 — about 60 days — to turn themselves in. The amnesty announcement followed a meeting of the Council of State, whose members include the president, vice president, former presidents, state governors and leaders of Nigeria's Senate and House of Representatives. Yaradua said the amnesty program is based on recommendations submitted by the Presidential Panel on Amnesty and Disarmament of Militants in the Niger Delta. The panel's recommendations included spending about $336 million on the Niger Delta, including $128 million to go toward establishing coordinating centers throughout the region to receive militants and their weapons (part of this funding includes a $1,500 allowance for each fighter). Publicly, the amnesty program is meant to rid the oil-rich Niger Delta of armed militants; however, the program likely has more to do with laying the groundwork for the government to manage the militants throughout the Niger Delta during Nigeria's national election, scheduled for 2011. The amnesty program is aimed particularly at the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the umbrella militant group responsible for carrying out attacks since 2006 that have shuttered a quarter of Nigeria's oil output, or about 600,000 barrels per day. The amnesty offer follows a spate of pipeline attacks by a MEND faction, the Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), located in Delta state, and FNDIC sympathizers in neighboring Bayelsa and Rivers states. The program will not lead to a cessation of violence; there will always be disgruntled militants looking to prove they deserve attention (gained by attacking energy infrastructure sites) and the payoffs that accompany it, as well as criminally motivated militants carrying out illegal bunkering activities against oil pipelines crisscrossing the region. However, the program aims to keep militant violence in the Niger Delta to a level low enough that it does not disrupt oil output significantly. More than a means of reducing violence, the amnesty offer could be part of the early preparations for a national election in April 2011. Politicians throughout Nigeria — and certainly in the Niger Delta — have long relied on armed gangs as a tool to ensure their election victories. Gangs are hired to carry out attacks (including assassinations) against rival politicians during campaign season. Violence occurs not only between political parties but within parties as incumbent and upstart politicians fight — literally — to win the nomination for a particular post. During elections, gangs are used to intimidate voters and to attack gangs hired by rival politicians. The People's Democratic Party (PDP) dominates Nigerian politics, holding a majority of the country's state governorships as well as the presidency and vice presidency. Nigeria last held national elections (comprising voting for president, state government, and local government posts) in April 2007 when incoming PDP politicians succeeded then-President Olusegun Obasanjo's PDP government, which was finishing its second four-year term. Though the 2011 elections will largely consist of PDP candidates seeking re-election and using the advantages of incumbency to support their campaigns, the incumbent officeholders will not automatically win second terms. Obtaining political office in Nigeria depends on developing working agreements with a network of patrons. In the case of the Niger Delta, state governors and local government officials are beholden to regional elders in the PDP who are in turn beholden to national-level elders in the PDP. An individual who runs afoul of the patronage agreement risks losing patrons' support and could be blocked from nomination for re-election and/or removed from the PDP. The recent rash of militant violence concentrated in Delta state, with some secondary attacks in Bayelsa and Rivers states, could indicate that trouble is brewing with Delta state Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan, who had been a patron of the FNDIC faction led by Government Tompolo. It is not clear if the relationship between Uduaghan and his patron, tribal Ijaw Chief Edwin Clark, has broken down, though it was a tenuous relationship to begin with; Clark was reluctant to allow Uduaghan, an ethnic Itsekiri, to become governor in the first place. But according to STRATFOR sources in the Niger Delta, Uduaghan is under pressure and is paying particular attention to his relationship with the federal government and his patrons. Sources also report that the FNDIC had been seen as getting too big. Attacks by Nigeria's Joint Task Force against FNDIC camps in Delta state, which Clark has recently said should be called off, may have been an effort to force Uduaghan and his militant proxy into renewed compliance with their patrons. Amnesty programs in Nigeria do not lead to long-lasting peace; rather, they lead to deals with the Nigerian and Niger Delta governments for geopolitical control in the oil-rich region. While MEND is likely to denounce the amnesty program by stating that the group will never yield what it calls its birthright over the region's oil wealth, its members will take money and orders from the region's politicians and get ready to help the PDP win the 2011 elections.