The Odi Massacre

On 20 November 1999, less than six months after the return to civilian rule, federal troops under orders from President Olusegun Obasanjo conducted a punitive military operation against the Ijaw town of Odi in Kolokuma/Opokuma Local Government Area, Bayelsa State, in response to the killing of twelve police officers by local youths during a police-community confrontation earlier that month. Almost every building in the town was destroyed or burned. Estimates of the dead vary widely between hundreds (federal accounts) and over two thousand (Niger Delta civil-society accounts). Obasanjo never visited Odi and never publicly apologised. In 2013 Justice Lambi Akanbi of the Federal High Court ordered the federal government to pay ₦37.6 billion in damages to the people of Odi for breach of fundamental rights — a judgment that was, after appeals, partially complied with in subsequent settlements. The Odi operation is one of the earliest and most-cited examples of Fourth-Republic state violence and a foundational reference for the Niger Delta militancy that followed.