PORT HARCOURT: The sister of Nigeria’s powerful petroleum minister has been kidnapped in the oil hub of Port Harcourt, police said on Friday, in the latest abduction targeting a prominent political family.

Osio Agama, whose brother Diezani Alison-Madueke leads Africa’s largest oil industry, was seized at gunpoint as she approached her car on Tuesday night, Rivers state police spokesman Ahmad Muhammad said.

Muhammad said police “were not aware if any ransom demand had been made “and the motive for the abduction was unknown but the southern oil-producing

Niger Delta region has seen waves of ransom kidnappings in recent years.

One of the most prominent cases came in December 2012, when Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s 82-year-old mother Kamene Okonjo was abducted from her home, in neighbouring Delta state. Okonjo-Iweala and Alison-Madueke are widely seen as the two most powerful members of President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet.

Jonathan’s 70-year-old uncle was also kidnapped earlier this year in Bayelsa state, also in the Niger Delta.

Some have sought to attach a political motive to attacks targeting Nigeria’s most powerful families. The finance minister implied that her mother was seized because of her ministry’s crackdown on oil companies which had abused the country’s rotten fuel subsidy scheme.

Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2014