Steve Bloomfield, London Independent:
Oil spills have polluted their rivers and land, making fishing and farming impossible. Flares, burning constantly, have filled their air with soot. Billions of dollars have been pumped out of their land with nothing in return. Even the jobs the oil industry promised have gone elsewhere, to well-paid foreigners and Nigerians from less marginalised parts of the country. For those who live closest to the oil fields, the best they can hope for is casual labour: when there is a spill or a pipeline bursts, locals are employed for pennies to clear it up….
In the past few years, shadowy militant groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) have taken advantage of rising anger towards the oil industry. They kidnap foreign oil workers and attack oil installations. ….
At five cents a barrel, getting oil out of the ground is 10 times cheaper in Nigeria than in Saudi Arabia. But the cost of doing business in Nigeria is getting higher. Mend’s attacks on oil installations, including one on a Shell offshore field in June, have cut the country’s oil production by at least 20 per cent. As a result, Angola has now overtaken Nigeria as Africa’s largest oil producer.
Mend claim they are fighting for a fair share of oil revenues to be spent on the Delta….
Within a decade, the United States expects to extract around a quarter of its oil from the Gulf of Guinea. They see it as a safer option than the Middle East, and it has played a large part in the thinking behind the establishment of the US’s Africa Command – a plan for a series of permanent military bases on the continent. …
In reality, the money is controlled by one man, President Obiang Nguema, a dictator …
Now there’s a recipe for a stable oil supply: give one man a nickel a barrel, while leaving everyone else unemployed and desperate.