Royal Dutch Shell Plc  .com Rotating Header Image

Associated Press: Oil gives unhappy Nigerians leverage

EXTRACT: Nowhere is the decay more pitifully on display than in the Niger Delta, where the crude is located. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil have been drilled, but few villages have basic schools or health clinics.

By EDWARD HARRIS — Associated Press Writer
    
KOROKORO, Nigeria (AP) Young boys scamper along weed-entangled pipes, transforming an oil-pumping station marked ‘Not In Use’ into a jungle gym in the heart of Nigeria’s lawless oil region. Nearby wells rust under the palm trees, and gas-flaring chimneys have gone cold.

The scene in Ogoniland, where villagers ousted oil companies in the 1990s, offers a glimpse of the industry’s worst-case scenario: an absolute shutdown of production across the Niger Delta, where strife has already cut production by a quarter.

That would send already high oil and gasoline prices soaring. Particularly hard hit would be the United States, which relies on the turbulent West African nation for more than 10 percent of its crude needs. Therein lies the leverage for unhappy and impoverished Nigerians.

Protests against oil companies began here in Ogoniland, 500 square miles of oil-rich land where villagers drove out the oil companies in the 1990s. That brought relative peace – but not prosperity – because there are no oil company payments to fight over. Similarly, the democratic experiment that has emboldened militants elsewhere in southern Nigeria has brought new liberties, but no framework for peaceful resolution of grievances.

The end of military rule in Nigeria was meant to be a start. Civilian rulers took over from the military in 1999, and that trend was apparently cemented when deeply flawed elections set up the first civilian-to-civilian handover since independence from Britain in 1960.

‘At least we have our freedom,’ says Kelvin Agbam, a community development leader in the Niger Delta. ‘But that means freedom for everyone – even the militants.’

When oil began flowing from Nigeria in 1958, the country had a growing industrial base, vast farms and some of the best universities in Africa.

Now, after disastrously corrupt military and civilian regimes, Nigeria – branded the ‘Open Sore of a Continent’ by its Nobel Prize laureate, author Wole Soyinka – has seen its bounties squandered. Most of its 140 million people have grown poorer. Few Nigerians enjoy electricity or running water.

Nowhere is the decay more pitifully on display than in the Niger Delta, where the crude is located. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil have been drilled, but few villages have basic schools or health clinics.

Children wander naked in dank alleys. Men and women of 30 show the wear of toil from farming or fishing – palms hardened, faces haggard, reliant on a poor diet of starchy root vegetables and the few fish remaining in their polluted lands.

Glory Ikolo, 20, is a high school graduate reduced to peddling peanuts and sharing a one-room shack with six others outside the concertina-wire ringed walls of an oil company compound in the main oil city of Port Harcourt.

‘I’m supposed to be a graduate,’ Ikolo said. ‘But look at somebody like me, doing nothing. No jobs.’

Long before the wider region’s restless and underemployed began taking up arms, the 500,000-strong Ogoni ethnic community was protesting such conditions.

The primary focus was Royal Dutch Shell, which was operating most of the wells in the area. Oil companies, which have sponsored some development projects, say chronic regional underdevelopment is a problem to be addressed by the government, which receives a majority of the oil revenues.

During the military period, when leaders were stealing much of the oil wealth, militants would likely have met with a brutal reaction by security forces. Ogoni leaders instead used largely peaceful protests, shutting down oil infrastructure beginning in the early 1990s. In late 1995, one of the region’s leaders, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was hanged along with eight others after being found guilty on murder charges widely believed to have been trumped up by then-military leader Gen. Sani Abacha.

President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 1999 election, which ended decades of near-constant military rule, was supposed to give Nigerians a voice. Instead, cronyism, corruption and electoral hanky-panky undermined the nascent democracy.

Delta residents say militancy began blossoming during elections in 2003, when politicians armed young men and set them against their rivals or used them to rig votes.

In this way, the militants are a direct product of democracy, the people of the Delta say.

Moses Siasia, a youth activist in the Niger Delta, said the solution for the region is ‘massive development.

‘We want this place to be like Kuwait.’

But the glittering high-rise buildings of Kuwait are nowhere to be seen in the Niger Delta, where poverty as profound as anywhere in Africa can be seen. Since a new militant group arose in late 2005, violence has reached its worst levels ever, with the kidnapping of nearly 200 foreign workers and the cutting of a quarter of the country’s normal 3 million daily barrel production.

That has sent prices of crude and gasoline sharply higher, and for the first time raised concerns that the entire region could go the way of Ogoniland. Last month’s elections haven’t helped calm the Delta, where billboards thank residents for supporting the ruling party candidates.

The opposition rejects the vote as rigged, and international observers said it wasn’t credible.

President-elect Umaru Yar’Adua took over from Obasanjo on May 29 – and militants are promising to press on with their campaign after a month’s unilateral cease-fire to give Yar’Adua a chance to consult about the crisis.

‘I doubt if the incoming regime will have the weight to attend justly to our demands,’ the spokesman of the biggest militant group, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, told The Associated Press.

‘There were no elections as you know. These people were installed by the outgoing regime and will not walk a radically different path,’ he said by e-mail.

Ogoniland is at least free of the pipeline bombings, oil worker kidnappings and occasional firefights that are the main tactics of the militants elsewhere in the Delta who claim to be fighting for a greater share of oil wealth. It also is spared the pollution of oil flares and spills. But it has seen little development.

Ogonis demand promises of more oil resources before they allow oil companies to return. The oil is their sole bargaining chip, but distrust of the government runs deep.

‘We have seen several military and civilian rulers. But since democracy came the last time, we’ve seen no change,’ said Sunday Badon, a 45-year-old Ogoni activist.

‘The mentality is the same. The civilian rulers just use tricks,’ he said. ‘They don’t carry the gun, but they control the gun.’
 
Published: Tuesday, June  5th, 2007

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Comment Rules

  • Please show respect to the opinions of others no matter how seemingly far-fetched.
  • Abusive, foul language, and/or divisive comments may be deleted without notice.
  • Each blog member is allowed limited comments, as displayed above the comment box.
  • Comments must be limited to the number of words displayed above the comment box.
  • Please limit one comment after any comment posted per post.