Using Maven for C/C++ projects

I'm putting Maven build around cluster of amateur, poorly written and frankly - primitive C/C++ code (meaning some C, some C++). Problem is - there's lots of it in circulation currently and cannot be easily replaced. Building it requires a lot of tribal knowledge (you have to go from cube to cube just to find out how to compile/build various parts) and releasing is total nightmare. (No - I'm not going to rewrite it, plz don't ask) My question is - should I use maven-native-plugin to replace multitude of short makefiles or use exec-maven-plugin to simply execute these? I had pretty good experience so far with the latter doing .NET and don't know if I should invest into native plugin or stay with exec? If you had experience with "Mavenizing" C/C++ I would love to get some advice.