20110221
reuters

OBIA, Nigeria (Reuters) - An explosion hit the offices of a Nigerian opposition party in the Niger Delta oil region on Monday just before the start of campaigning, in what appeared to be the latest act of thuggery ahead of April polls.

Labour Party officials said they had been preparing to go the office for the launch of their local election campaign in Obia, just outside the Bayelsa state capital Yenagoa, when the building was attacked with explosives shortly before dawn.

The windows of the single-storey compound were shattered and a tin shack next door was flattened, a Reuters witness said.

"We were preparing for the official kick-off of the campaign office at Obia when we heard that the office had been blasted ... We will not give up," said Patterson Ogon, the Labour Party candidate in state parliament elections.

Bayelsa state is expected to be one of the main flashpoints during presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections in two months' time in Africa's most populous nation.

The Labour Party office in Yenagoa was hit with explosives in January shortly after the state governorship primaries. Gunmen killed several supporters of its governorship candidate, Timi Alaibe, at his home a week earlier.

The Niger Delta is home to thousands of former militants, responsible for years of kidnapping and attacks on oil facilities, who are meant to be undergoing retraining and reintegration following a 2009 government amnesty.

But it remains awash with weapons and many of the armed gangs behind the unrest were originally sponsored by politicians who used them to help rig elections and intimidate voters.

There is a bitter rivalry between Alaibe, who was the main man on the ground responsible for implementing the amnesty, and Bayelsa governor Timipre Sylva from the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), who saw himself politically overshadowed by Alaibe's success with the programme.