GULF OF GUINEA, Benin -- The U.S. military is stepping up its activity in the countries of West Africa to help local forces fight piracy and other criminal activity in a region that is now on par with the Persian Gulf in terms of U.S. oil imports.
The effort, already under way in Benin, is an example of the type of security and social partnering the U.S. military hopes to replicate under a new U.S. command center focused on Africa. The idea is to bolster fragile nations and prevent failed states from breeding radical groups, like the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
The new U.S. military command, dubbed Africom, is expected to officially start operations in October from Stuttgart, Germany, where the U.S. military's operations center for Europe is located. But efforts in individual African nations are already happening.
The move comes as the world's biggest oil companies -- including U.S.-based Exxon Mobil Corp. and France's Total SA -- are investing billions of dollars to boost production in Africa. That push is making West Africa increasingly important to the world's energy supplies -- even as the region remains under threat from lawlessness and piracy.
In most months, the energy-producing countries of West Africa -- primarily Nigeria and Angola, but also Gabon and the Republic of Congo -- ship as much or more oil to the U.S. as Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations.
But violence in Nigeria's oil-producing delta region has hurt production there for more than a year, and especially in recent months. Currently, West Africa supplies about 15% of the U.S.'s oil imports -- a share that could rise to 25% if violence in the region can be subdued and investment in new production continues to flow.
In Benin -- a former French colony of eight million people just west of Nigeria on the Gulf of Guinea -- the U.S. military has been helping the country's tiny navy step up its operations against pirates who help distribute stolen cargoes of crude oil and gasoline from Nigeria. Those cargoes end up being sold in jerry cans on street corners along the West African coast.
It won't be an easy fight. Benin's navy has just 600 sailors and two old patrol boats, with an annual budget of about $200,000. They are facing heavily armed pirates who move under the cover of darkness in speedboats.
"The sea bandits are still winning out here," says Capt. Maxime Ahoyo, a 21-year navy veteran and one of Benin's top naval officers.
Oil theft costs Nigeria and energy companies in this region hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue every year, according to industry estimates.
"You see stolen Nigerian oil come through here all the time. But we don't have all the means to control this," says Capt. Ahoyo. The navy goes out on patrols twice a week and never at night because its two boats are old and prone to breaking down, he adds.
Benin's patrol boats also have top speeds of only about 25 kilometers per hour, and have been frequently outrun by pirates.
Despite the big challenges they face, Benin's sailors are now more skilled at engaging boats and using navigation instruments, and they have apprehended more suspect vessels in recent months, Capt. Ahoyo says. U.S. military officials say U.S. personnel have visited Benin over the past two years to provide training and aid to the country's navy.
Illegal fishing and trafficking of weapons and drugs are also major problems facing Benin's ill-equipped navy. The flourishing criminality, paired with the region's deep poverty and porous borders, is troubling to the U.S. and Europe because of the risks of radical groups gaining a foothold.
Indeed, some people worry that an expanded U.S. military presence in the region could attract more of the radical groups that the U.S. is trying to stamp out, just as the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has made that country into a key battlefield in the fight against al Qaeda. Elsewhere in Africa, U.S. forces based in Djibouti have in the past year fought alongside Ethiopia against al Qaeda-linked groups in Somalia.
"Wherever our troops go, the 'war on terror' seems to go there too, and then humanitarian needs become secondary," says Nicole Lee, executive director at the TransAfrica Forum in Washington, a nonprofit organization that focuses on U.S.-Africa policies.
The U.S. says no new troops will be based in Africa and that U.S. agencies such as the State Department will play a key role in diplomatic work with groups like the African Union, which promotes greater economic and social unity between African nations.
Theresa Whelan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, says U.S. intervention under Africom would be in partnership with regional actors and in "extraordinary circumstances in extremis after all other options had been exhausted."
For reasons of nationalism and dislike of the U.S. war in Iraq, Africom has gotten a tepid reaction in North African Arab states like Libya, but is likely to find a better reception in sub-Saharan Africa, says Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, Africa analyst at Eurasia Group in New York. The U.S. wasn't a colonial power in Africa, he notes.
In Benin's commercial capital of Cotonou, street vendor Laurent Chabi is mindful of the issues of a potential U.S. presence here. "Beninese like the U.S. Having the U.S. here would help us, but it could bring terrorists," he says.
Write to Spencer Swartz at spencer.swartz at dowjones.com
<http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8Q2TF101.htm> June 30, 2007, 12:08AM EST Oil boom, politics shape Africa's future By EDWARD HARRIS BW Exclusives
PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria
Europe's great powers once scrambled for dominance across vast, underdeveloped African lands rich in raw resources, including the scarlet palm oil used to grease the first cogs of the industrial revolution.
A century later, a new group of nations are competing for a different valuable, viscous material, with Sub-Saharan Africa closing in on the Persian Gulf as the prime overseas supplier of oil to the last remaining superpower.
As China and India increasingly prospect for resources here, terrorism concerns rise and the U.S. military seeks a permanent military presence in Africa, the continent has its greatest international influence in decades. Whether Africa can use its newfound might to end its longtime blight is a separate issue.
"There's a new dynamic in play" for African nations, says Antony Goldman, an independent risk-analysis consultant based in London. "And the challenge for those countries is how to manage that."
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An AP analysis of U.S. oil import figures shows the stakes.
In 1993, the earliest year for which there are full figures, the main African oil producing countries -- Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon -- shipped about 494,000 barrels per day of oil to the United States, data from the official Energy Information Administration show. That's about 7 percent of total U.S. imports. In the same year, the Persian Gulf nations averaged 1.6 million barrels per day, or about one quarter of all U.S. imports.
By 2006, sub-Saharan African oil constituted about 18 percent of all U.S. imports, or about 1.8 million barrels per day; the Persian Gulf made up 2.2 million barrels per day, or 21 percent of total daily imports.
But the oil producers are among the sickest countries in Africa. While poorer nations such as Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Burundi, Ghana and others have made democratic advancements, the oil countries are still mostly run by weak, or illegitimate leaders.
Angola is emerging from one of the continent's longest-running civil wars. Chad, which has only been exporting oil for a few years, is in the depths of one. Chad's crude reaches African export terminals in oil-rich Cameroon, whose president has been in power for a quarter of a century.
Next door is Equatorial Guinea, where per-capita gross domestic product boosted by oil revenues is among the highest in the world, while its ranking on the United Nations human-development index is near the bottom.
And then there is Nigeria, where the challenges facing Africa, and particularly its petroleum producers, are on desperate display. Nigeria is Africa's biggest producer of oil and among the top three outside suppliers of crude to America.
Among the first Europeans to arrive here centuries ago were slave merchants and traders seeking palm oil, which women still produce in Nigeria's crude-rich Niger Delta by crushing bright-crimson, palm-tree kernels on potholed roads outside massive oil installations that belch smoke and flames.
Crude oil was first exported from Nigeria in 1958, two years before independence from Britain. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars of oil revenues -- there was another massive oil boom in the 1970s -- the country's 140 million people remain desperately poor. Some 70 percent of the population live on less than $2 per day, U.N. figures show.
Much of the oil money has been stolen by corrupt leaders or misspent on wasteful government boondoggles. In Nigeria alone, the World Bank estimates about $300 billion of government oil funds can't be accounted for. By contrast, oil-rich Norway has about that same amount in a government-controlled fund where the petroleum surpluses are kept.
Norway sits atop the U.N.'s 2006 human development index, which groups social indicators like literacy and infant mortality. Nigeria is among the worst performers, at 159 out of 177 countries surveyed.
The late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha is estimated to have salted billions of dollars away in overseas bank accounts, with about $730 million in Swiss accounts having been returned. In Nigeria, basic infrastructure rotted. Today, none of Nigeria's main oil refineries are operable, leaving one of the world's top oil producers completely reliant on fuel imports. In the oil region, vines climb up abandoned on-ramps to superhighways planned, but never completed.
Meanwhile, military leaders or weak corrupt administrations racked up tens of billions of dollars in loans, including many by Western countries or their funding bodies in hopes of setting up friendly bulwarks against Communism in Africa.
But that dynamic began to shift in the late 1980s, as the Cold War ground to a halt. The easy loan money stopped flowing, and markers were called in. Overseas governments began insisting good governance be linked to aid.
While few Africans lived in multiparty democracies in the 1970s, most do today. But in many of those countries that hasn't translated into better daily existences for the people.
Corruption still keeps governments from acting accountably, as has happened in Nigeria's southern oil delta, where electricity is fitful, pipe-borne potable water virtually nonexistent.
The little government spending there has been has been ineffectual. The few new streetlights here in the heart of the oil city of Port Harcourt are solar powered -- an apparent admission by town planners that no electricity will soon reach the lamps.
Most people live in teeming slums, including John Isah-Aaron, a 32-year old fisherman who's constructing his new home next to open latrines on a riverbank in the vast wetland region where militant attacks have cut oil output by nearly one-third.
"Look, here is where we bathe, and also where we toilet," he says, gesturing at the befouled riverbanks. "We're very poor."
The movement toward democracy encouraged by the West since the end of the Cold War hasn't made much improvement in his life, he says. Nigeria's civilian leaders have proved as corrupt as the military junta they replaced.
"They're saying democracy is government for the people, by the people. But we're not seeing any dividends," he said recently in his village, which is just outside a compound run by the Italian oil-company Agip.
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Nigeria's oil industry, like those of many other African countries, is primarily run by Western energy concerns. The companies who operate crude-pumping operations and share the proceeds with Nigeria's federal government include Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, France's Total SA, Eni SpA from Italy, and US-based Chevron Corp.
But increasingly, China and India have been moving in, too. Chinese and Indian companies won big in a recent round of bids for exploration licenses, for example, and have become big consumers.
Much of Africa's estimated 5.5 percent economic growth last year was attributed to China's near-insatiable demand for the continent's oil, gas, timber, copper and other natural resources. Economic growth for sub-Saharan Africa is expected to reach near 7 percent in 2007, according to the IMF.
Two-way trade soared 40 percent to $55.5 billion last year, and Beijing says it believes that figure will rise to $100 billion by 2020.
At the same time, the United States is also ramping up its influence in Africa. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, diminishing reliance on oil from the Middle East has become a stated goal of the U.S. government.
Washington recently announced it intended locate a permanent military command for Africa on the continent.
"There clearly is an energy component in this," said Navy Rear Admiral Bob Moeller, who's helping arrange the new command.
"Overall, Africa is growing in global strategic importance and setting up this command allows us to help them help themselves in enhancing security in their countries, and across the continent writ large," he told the AP in a recent telephone interview.
Analysts say the post-Sept. 11 focus on terrorism, combined with high oil prices around the globe, gives Africa a new shot at ending decades of disease, wars, corruption and, above all, the poverty that drives it all.
Africa can use its oil-fueled influence to play more powerful nations off each other. It can lobby for more-favorable trade deals, increased direct assistance and better loan rates. Africa is also lobbying for a permanent seat on an expanded U.N. Security Council.
The West may not always see Africa's power as productive -- Sudan has been able to stave off pressure over the war in Darfur because of support from China, an oil customer.
Already, Africa is paying down or having its debt written off from Western lenders, with many countries turning to China instead for funding that critics say comes without any demands for governmental transparency.
While graft, poorer educated populaces and inter-community strife still typify many African nations like Nigeria, those countries are looking better each day for the West compared with other oil-rich nations, like Iran and Venezuela. Africa can no longer be ignored, analysts say.
"Before, on a day-to-day basis, places like Nigeria seemed like a bad bet," said Goldman, the London-based analyst. "Now people would prefer the day-to-day problems of Nigeria compared with those of the Middle East."
Peter Pham, a professor of international relations at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., said, "Africa can no longer be safely ignored ... that era of benign or not-so-benign neglect is over."
Oil will get the attention of policy makers, but Africa's security has become a national security issue for the U.S., said Pham.
"If 9/11 taught us anything, it's that weak nations can cause threats," he said. "There's an interest in building up the capacity of African states to handle their own problems, provide services for its people."
It all adds up to a rare moment of potential influence for Africa, he says, but only if African leaders can at last end their own self-enrichment at the expense of their people.
"It's a question of whether African leaders rise to the occasion," said Pham, "or if it just becomes another moment to support themselves."
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Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur in New York contributed to this report. -- Yoshie