Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Delta Blues - Part 1
Imagine, if you will, living in a densely populated slum in the capital city of a country with the 10th-largest supply of oil of any country in the world -- and having a pipeline of "black gold" run through your neighborhood. Then imagine crooked oil companies puncturing the line to illegally siphon the oil into a truck for the black market, and then leaving the pipeline to leak. Stuck in an impoverished situation and with a window of opportunity to collect the valuable petroleum, hundreds of people crowd around the hole while filling containers of all sizes with hopes of either selling the fuel or using it themselves to cook food. It is a chaotic scene at best, and that is before there is an accidental spark or someone lights a cigarette and the entire scene goes up in a huge ball of flame. Hundreds of men, women, and children are incinerated instantaneously in the inferno, along with homes and shacks in the immediate vicinity.
The sad truth is that not only has this exact circumstance happened in Nigeria, but it happens there with unfortunate regularity. According to the BBC, at least 1,750 people have lost their lives in similar pipeline explosions in the past 10 years. Over 250 people were burned alive -- most beyond recognition -- in Lagos, Nigeria in December 2006, the latest of this series of grim "accidents."
Nigeria, with an estimated reserve of between 16 and 35 billion barrels of petroleum in the ground, receives almost 98% of its export revenue from oil. Flush with oil and needing the technology of the modern oil industry to harvest the valuable resource, it is little wonder that the Nigerian government has long considered multinational oil corporations to be their friends and partners. Since discovering oil in the 1950s in the southern region of Nigeria called the Niger Delta, Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum -- known to those of us in the "Western World" as simply Shell -- has been complicit with corrupt regime after regime in doing what they do best, making gobs money from the harvesting and sale of fossil fuels.
Generations of Nigerian people have been relegated to abject poverty as the Nigerian government and Shell Corporation executives have been raking in billions upon billions of dollars. So who is it, you may ask, who sponsors this negligence and corrupt behavior? The unfortunate answer is: US. The United States imports over 1 million of barrels of oil each and every day of the year from Nigeria. One million barrels per day.
The sad truth is that not only has this exact circumstance happened in Nigeria, but it happens there with unfortunate regularity. According to the BBC, at least 1,750 people have lost their lives in similar pipeline explosions in the past 10 years. Over 250 people were burned alive -- most beyond recognition -- in Lagos, Nigeria in December 2006, the latest of this series of grim "accidents."
Nigeria, with an estimated reserve of between 16 and 35 billion barrels of petroleum in the ground, receives almost 98% of its export revenue from oil. Flush with oil and needing the technology of the modern oil industry to harvest the valuable resource, it is little wonder that the Nigerian government has long considered multinational oil corporations to be their friends and partners. Since discovering oil in the 1950s in the southern region of Nigeria called the Niger Delta, Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum -- known to those of us in the "Western World" as simply Shell -- has been complicit with corrupt regime after regime in doing what they do best, making gobs money from the harvesting and sale of fossil fuels.
Generations of Nigerian people have been relegated to abject poverty as the Nigerian government and Shell Corporation executives have been raking in billions upon billions of dollars. So who is it, you may ask, who sponsors this negligence and corrupt behavior? The unfortunate answer is: US. The United States imports over 1 million of barrels of oil each and every day of the year from Nigeria. One million barrels per day.
