It looks like your main problem is that my lesbian phallus is too big, signified by your repeated references to my "high horse." :->
> In fact I'm trying to encourage discussion. Your habit of
> broadcasting long articles to multiple lists - and mostly on a narrow
> range of topics with no regard to context - is the very opposite of
> discussion.
The context is the multinational empire, led by the government of the country where you and I live, surely the context relevant to not only this but also any mailing list on the Left that is for general discussion.
As for the kind of discussion you encourage, it generally ranges from Democrats to The Sopranos to socialites (or perhaps The Sopranos + socialites are the Democrats), much of the rest of the world, where people who do not think like you live, appear to be a topic that is not very welcome.
Nigeria's political economy and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND gets a mention in Michael Watts, "Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa," Monthly Review 58.4, September 2006, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906watts.htm>) is one of those topics that have not been often discussed. The most detailed discussion that I can find is Sebastian Junger's Vanity Fair article, "Blood Oil." How about encouraging discussion on topics like this?
<http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/02/junger200702> Blood Oil
Could a bunch of Nigerian militants in speedboats bring about a U.S. recession? Blowing up facilities and taking hostages, they are wreaking havoc on the oil production of America's fifth-largest supplier. Deep in the Niger-delta swamps, the author meets the nightmarish result of four decades of corruption.
by Sebastian Junger February 2007
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In January 2006, less than seven months after the first Oil ShockWave conference—almost as if they'd been given walk-on parts in the simulation—several boatloads of heavily armed Ijaw militants overran a Shell oil facility in the Niger delta and seized four Western oil workers. The militants called themselves the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and said they were protesting the environmental devastation caused by the oil industry, as well as the appalling conditions in which most delta inhabitants live. There are no schools, medical clinics, or social services in most delta villages. There is no clean drinking water in delta villages. There are almost no paying jobs in delta villages. People eke out a living by fishing while, all around them, oil wells owned by foreign companies pump billions of dollars' worth of oil a year. It was time, according to MEND, for this injustice to stop.
The immediate effect of the attack was a roughly 250,000-barrel-a-day drop in Nigerian oil production and a temporary bump in world oil prices. MEND released the hostages a few weeks later, but the problems were far from over. MEND's demands included the release of two Ijaw leaders who were being held in prison, $1.5 billion in restitution for damage to the delicate delta environment, a 50 percent claim on all oil pumped out of the creeks, and development aid to the desperately poor villages of the delta. MEND threatened that, if these demands were not met—which they weren't—it would wage war on the foreign oil companies in Nigeria.
"Leave our land while you can or die in it," a MEND spokesman warned in an e-mail statement after the attack. "Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil."
Because Nigerian oil is so vital to the American economy, President Bush's State Department declared in 2002 that—along with all other African oil imports—it was to be considered a "strategic national interest." That essentially meant that the president could send in the U.S. military to protect our access to it. After the first MEND attack, events in the Niger delta unfolded almost as if they had been scripted by alarmist Pentagon planners. In mid-February, MEND struck again, seizing a barge operated by the American oil-services company Willbros and grabbing nine more hostages. Elsewhere on the same day, other MEND fighters blew up an oil pipeline, a gas pipeline, and a tanker-loading terminal, forcing Shell to suspend 477,000 barrels a day in exports. The nine hostages were released after a reportedly huge ransom was paid, but oil prices on the world market again started to climb. MEND had shown that 20 guys in speedboats could affect oil prices around the world.
The problem was one of scale. The Nigerian military—as poorly equipped as it is—can protect any piece of oil infrastructure it wants by simply putting enough men on it. But Shell has more than 3,720 miles of oil and gas pipelines in the creeks, as well as 90 oil fields and 73 flow stations, and there is no way to guard them all. And moving the entire industry offshore isn't a good option, either. Not only is deepwater drilling very expensive, but there are still immense oil and gas reserves under the Niger delta that have not yet been exploited. And—as it turns out—the deepwater rigs aren't immune to attack anyway. In early June, militants shocked industry experts by overrunning a rig 40 miles out at sea. Offshore oil platforms generally sit 40 or 50 feet above water level, but their legs are crisscrossed with brackets and struts that are not difficult to climb. After firing warning shots, dozens of militants scampered up the legs and ladders to the main platform, rounded up eight foreign oil workers—including an American—and forced them at gunpoint into their boats. They were back in the creeks within hours.
The militants are also capable of striking in the cities. In January of last year, about 30 militants ran their speedboats straight into the Port Harcourt compound of the Italian oil company Agip, killed eight Nigerian soldiers, robbed the bank, and made their getaway. In May, a man on a motorbike shot an American oil executive to death while he sat in Port Harcourt traffic in his chauffeured car. In August, members of another militant group walked into a popular bar named Goodfellas and abducted four Western oil workers. By the end of September, militants had kidnapped—and released for ransom—more than 50 oil workers, and onshore Nigerian oil production had been cut by 25 percent, or about 600,000 barrels a day. That represented a loss of nearly a billion dollars a month to the Nigerian government.
In early October, two separate attacks in the creeks reportedly killed at least 27 Nigerian soldiers and sank or captured two navy gunboats. In response, militants claimed, Nigerian helicopters strafed and then torched an Ijaw village named Elem Tombia. No one was killed, but it was a clear escalation of the conflict. By mid-October, the Niger River delta was on the brink of all-out war.
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According to the World Bank, most of Nigeria's oil wealth gets siphoned off by 1 percent of the population, condemning more than half of the country to subsist on less than a dollar a day. By that standard, it is one of the poorest countries in the world. Since independence in 1960, it is estimated that between $300 and $400 billion of oil revenue has been stolen or misspent by corrupt government officials—an amount of money approaching all the Western aid received by Africa in those years. Former president Sani Abacha and his inner circle stole at least $2 billion. In a recent crackdown on corruption, the president of the Nigerian senate had to resign after accusations that he had solicited a bribe in exchange for pushing through an inflated education budget (which presumably would then have been plundered by others). A former inspector general of the national police, after being accused of stealing between $52 and $140 million, was recently sentenced to six months in prison for a lesser charge. And two Nigerian admirals were put on trial for trying to sell stolen oil to an international crime syndicate.
The list of wrongdoing continues almost without end. With top government officials so brazenly violating the social contract, everyone downstream inevitably follows suit. The Nigerian constitution stipulates that just under 50 percent of national oil revenue must be distributed to state and local governments, and that an additional 13 percent must go to the nine oil-producing states of the Niger delta. Last year that amounted to almost $6 billion for the nine delta states—plenty, it would seem, to take care of basic social services. The problem, however, is that the money goes to the governors' offices and then simply disappears. A financial-crimes commission was recently formed to investigate all of the country's 36 governors, and it wound up accusing all but 5 of corruption. The most apparently egregious case was that of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who was accused of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars while he was governor of Bayelsa State. He fled to England, was arrested for money-laundering, jumped bail, and slipped back into Nigeria dressed as a woman. (The English authorities had taken his passport.) When asked how he managed to make the trip, he said he had no idea. "All the glory goes to God," he explained. He is now in custody awaiting trial.
"It's going to be tough," human-rights activist Oronto Douglas said when I asked him about reforming Nigerian politics. "Nobody who has privilege surrenders it easily. The struggle is to get people to give up power who got it illegally."
The problem isn't purely a Nigerian one, either. Oil companies have long been thought to pay for the allegiance of local youth gangs, and Jomo claims that Agip offered to pay MEND $40 million in exchange for "repairs" to the company's pipelines. (An Agip spokesman strongly denies any payment to or contact with MEND.) The American corporation Halliburton has admitted that its then subsidiary KBR paid $2.4 million in bribes to the Nigerian government and is under investigation for its role in earlier bribes totaling $180 million. And House representative William Jefferson, of Louisiana, is being investigated by the F.B.I. for allegedly accepting bribes from the vice president of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar. These were said to be in exchange for help steering lucrative business contracts to Africa. (Jefferson has denied any wrongdoing, despite the fact that the F.B.I. found $90,000 in cash in his freezer.)
Because of this corruption, most of Nigerian society has been starved of money and is effectively cannibalizing itself. Between Port Harcourt and the delta city of Warri there are 20 or 30 police checkpoints—some within sight of one another—where drivers simply hand cash out the window in order to pass. I was told that when police arrive at the scene of a bad car accident they won't call for medical help until the injured and dying have paid them off. There are car accidents all the time—I saw two fatal accidents on as many drives across the delta—because the roads have not had major repairs since the early 1980s. Even expressways have collapsed, turning a drive that once took several hours into a terrifying ordeal that can last days.
Every sector of society has been left to fend for itself. The airline industry, for example, is so slack in its maintenance that it has seen three catastrophic plane crashes in the past 16 months, which together have killed more than 300 people. The airport at Port Harcourt was shut down in 2005 after an incoming Air France flight plowed into a herd of cows that had wandered onto the runway; it still has not reopened. Tens of millions of people live in urban slums without water or sanitation, restaurants have to hire guards with AK-47s to protect the diners, and the levels of chaos and street violence rival that of many countries at war. A dead man lay on the street near my hotel for two days before someone finally came to take him away. Even during Liberia's darkest days of civil war, the dead were usually gathered up and buried faster than that.
When Nigerians are asked about these problems, few can offer more than anger and despair—or the promise of violence. A typical Nigerian reaction came from President Owei, the Ijaw priest who tried to help with our first trip into the creeks. Owei is the head of an organization that promotes Ijaw rights and protects their communities in the delta. At first, my questions just provoked a torrent of indignation. "The people of the Niger delta don't need theory—they need practical things," he declared. "We need to be made to feel like human beings. There is an economic blockade of the Niger delta—they don't want money to flow here. With the wealth that Nigeria has, the whole nation should have roads and free education."
Owei lives in the great, seething slum of Bundu-Waterside, on the outskirts of Port Harcourt. Bundu-Waterside is a community built literally atop garbage and mud. High tide and raw sewage continually threaten to rise up over the thresholds of its thousands of plank-and-corrugated-iron shacks. People are packed into Bundu-Waterside with such desperate ingenuity that almost every human activity—cooking, fighting, eating, sleeping, defecating—seems to be observable from almost anywhere at any given moment. When I met with Owei, he and several of his assistants were seated on a wooden bench beneath a canopy of corrugated iron that serves as an open-air community center. Young boys swam in the tidal muck while, a few feet away, other young boys squatted to relieve themselves. Every 20 minutes or so, an oil-company helicopter thumped past on its way to one of the offshore rigs.
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-- Yoshie