FEATURE ARTICLE

Leburah GanagoFriday, September 3, 2004
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Atlanta, GA, USA

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WESTERN INTEREST IN THE NIGER DELTA


he Daily Independent of Monday August 9, 2004, quoted the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Mr. Richard Gozney as having said that Britain has a special interest in the Niger Delta: "Britain eyes Niger Delta for oil supply". This interest, Mr. Gozney was further quoted to have explained, has to do with the rich oil deposit in that most abused and most exploited region of the world. According to the report, the British High Commissioner went even deeper to reveal that his country's interest in the Niger Delta does not just end with the projected 10 per cent oil needs which the region would satisfy but also for the fact that Shell, the largest oil company operating in Nigeria, with quite a number of its workers in the region, happens to be a British concern. In Mr. Gozney's words: "It is enough reason for us to take special interest in Delta. Within the next few years, as British's own oil under the low seas begins to dry up and reduce, we may be dependent on Niger Delta oil for up to 10 per cent of our energy supply".

The second interest which the British High Commissioner referred to has to do with the safety of his country's citizens who are Shell workers. The disclosure of these interests in the Niger Delta which Britain share with other western nations, notably the United States, is no news. It has since been apparent to those of us from the region how much the west "values" the Niger Delta. However, what is intriguing is the uncharitable manner Mr. Gozney has chosen to present his case.

While one would understand the concern of the western nations over the safety of their nationals working with the oil companies in the turbulent terrain of the Niger Delta and the steps being taken to protect them in the light of the recent kidnapping and killing of seven oil workers including four of their own, it is amazing that the British High Commissioner to Nigeria in outlining the interests of his country in the Niger Delta said nothing concerning the plight of the inhabitants of the region. In this regard, Nick Ashton - Jones, a British Environmental Rights activist remarked: "Also during 1993, I visited other parts of the Niger Delta. What I saw profoundly affected me: I concluded that if European and American standards of living depended on the environmental and human degradation resulting from the oil mining in the area, then European and American values were worthless as a guide to human progress".

The British oil giant, Shell, accounts for over 60 per cent of oil prospecting activities in Nigeria and has been at the center of the crises in the Niger Delta. Recently Shell in a published report admitted albeit tamely, to have contributed to the crises in the region.

For more than four decades, since 1956, when it drilled Nigeria's first oil well at Oloibiri in present day Bayelsa State, Shell the European buccaneer, had continued to terrorize the Niger Delta. It operates a racist and conquest policy which ensures that its victims are either bent or broken. Shell, while refusing to compensate its host communities for ecological damage would resort to bribing locals and setting them against their people. The company has perfected an amazingly crude tactics of divide and rule whereby those locals who have fallen to its bribery trap are recruited and armed as thugs to bloody the nose of agitators who have refused to be bent.

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And of course, the security forces of Nigeria are readily at the call of the transnational oil corporations in the Niger Delta. The Obasanjo "civilian" dictatorship has embarked on the largest deployment of troops (on land, air and sea) in the Niger Delta, to protect the oil workers and to ensure un-interruption of oil production in the region . Usually, there is an interesting cooperation between the transnational oil corporations, their home governments and successive corrupt Nigerian regimes. It is the oil corporations that drill the oil which oils the country's corruption cartels. So any attempt to stop oil production is viewed as an economic crime which is severely punished. The United States and Great Britain scandalously applauded the grand fraud that was the 2003 general elections in Nigeria, even after local and international observers had reported what transpired. This is understandable. The outcome of such a fraudulent exercise does not affect western interest in the Niger Delta.

The importance of oil in the world today cannot be overemphasized. Without this precious mineral life would grind to a halt. This is even more so for the Nigerian ruling cabal and their western collaborators. Pointer: When Shell conspired with the General Abacha led military dictatorship to murder the Ogoni Nine- Ken Saro Wiwa, John Kpuinen, Dr. Barinem Kiobel, Daniel Gbokoo, Baribor Bera, Nordu Eawo, Paul Levura, Saturday Dorbee and Felix Nuate on November 10, 1995, the world was outraged, the west led by the United States and Great Britain responded by imposing some token of sanctions but failed to imposed oil embargo against the Nigerian regime even when they knew that it was oil embargo above all that would have hurt that barbaric and corrupt regime most.

Yet, this poser, where does the oil money go? And what happens to the area where the oil is drilled and the people who bear the incidence of oil exploration and exploitation?

Here is a clue: The Vanguard (Nigeria) newspaper of Sunday August 2004, quoting a World Bank source reported that the money stolen by Nigerian government officials and lodged in foreign accounts has risen from $50 billion in 1999 to $170 billion in 2003. However, this discovery by the World Bank even as it does not include those already committed into investments, including acquisition of landed property around the globe, may be just a tip of the iceberg. What is more, the 2004 loots have not been computed.

In Nigeria when the government talks of privatizing public enterprises, we know what this means-sharing public enterprises among government officials and their cronies. A new deal in town is the acquisition of oil refineries by the retired thieving army generals and serving government officials. This is how the deal works. While the country's refineries are crippled and prices of petroleum products are hiked every now and then, contracts are awarded to the same thieves who own oil refineries abroad to import refined products into the country at exorbitant prices. This way, the poor Nigerian masses are robbed multiple times.

Yet at every occasion when Obasanjo is being confronted with the unprecedented treasury looting penchant of his government officials he continues to demand for proof. When a concerned Nigerian confronted Obasanjo with the looting question during a recent visit to South Africa, the Nigerian president fired back: "If you have your facts in chapters and verses give them to me" . (The Guardian April 30, 2004). Who says this man who continues to shade his corrupt officials is not involved in the looting game?

Treasury looting by successive Nigeria government officials is a sport. There, it is a bizarre system where no one is held accountable for "missing" or "misappropriated" funds . No regime probes its predecessor . Government is business as usual. General Ibrahim Babangida, the former maximum ruler, was revealed by the Dr. Pius Okigbo investigation panel to have misappropriated over $12 billion of the 1991 Gulf war oil wind fall, in one fell swoop. However, no one has been able to tell us how much Babangida stole for the eight long years he presided over the plundering of the Niger Delta oil money. No one has asked him to return a dime. No one has asked Obasanjo to return his own loots as military dictator whose regime witnessed so much unaccounted oil money. No one has asked General Abdulsalami Abubakar to return his loot. They are only making noise about General Abacha's loots because that tyrant is no more here. Were Abacha to be alive today no one would have said he stole any money, let alone asking him to return anything.

Babangida now reputed to be a billionaire, has kept his entire loots with which he is able to retain the services of a swarm of mercenaries and hangers-on who he is paying to tell the Nigerians he has robbed and murdered for eight years that he is the only country man alive capable of ruling the country again.

Obasanjo is posed to hand over to Ibrahim Babangida comes 2007. Babangida himself is so sure of the deal that he reportedly boasted that only God can stop him from capturing Nigeria again. Blame that "shameless rogue" (apologies to Gani Fawehnmi) . He knows too well that in Nigeria you don't have to be voted for to win an election. When Babangida takes over in 2007 he will surely not bother Obasanjo about any missing or misappropriated money even as we are dead sure some billions of dollars will go missing in yet another era of Gulf war oil wind fall.

Since no elections where the people can freely exercise their democratic mandates by voting in leaders of their choice take place in Nigeria, the cartel of past treasury looters and murderers- the army generals and their civilian associates continue to recycle themselves in power and continue the vicious circle of looting. This way, the chain of treasury looting and organized banditry is never broken. And Nigeria continue to be ruled by certified criminals who would not walk free on the street in any decent society.

The west can afford to look the other way or make do with a token of verbal condemnation as tyrannical dictators in the Third world trample upon the rights of their people and loot their national treasuries dry, so long as their own (western interests) are not affected. However, it is a different ball game whenever western interests are at stake. The west has now stepped forward to defend its interest (oil) in the Niger Delta. Goaded on by the west, ruling cabal in Nigeria is set to commit another round of mass murder in the Niger Delta, as it masses up the largest deployment of troops in the region. This same west has continued to behave as if there is something less human about the lives of the oppressed and over exploited minorities of the Niger Delta as Nigerian troops daily mow down defenseless locals whose only crime is protesting the devastation of their environment and the reckless plundering of their God-given oil resource. To the west oil is thicker than blood.

Those of us who have experienced military occupation in Nigeria fully understand what the people would be going through with the deployment of an occupation force in the Niger Delta. The poorly trained, poorly remunerated and ill- mannered Nigerian security forces would have a field day looting, killing, maiming and rapping the female population. Yet, the ethnic minorities who inhabit the oil bearing Niger Delta will continue to suffer double jeopardy. It is their own oil money that acquires the bullets which is used in killing them. It is still their oil money that pays the troops which mow them down.

Like the late Minority and Environmental rights campaigner, Ken Saro Wiwa noted: "What is happening in Nigeria is that the resource of a small group has been appropriated by the bigger groups". The majority groups who produce the army generals and big time politicians that plunder the oil money do not have oil on their land. Now, they want to maintain the status quo at all cost.

Governors of 22 non-oil producing states ( majority groups) have gone to court to challenge the pittance of concession-onshore/off-shore abrogation, granted the oil producing states by the Obasanjo government. This is provocative in the extreme. In a society where there is justice it is those who own the resource that should give hand-outs to those who do not own. But in Nigeria where injustice and oppression stalk the land, it is the other way round.

What we need in the Niger Delta today is western interest mixed with western sympathy. There should be a symbiotic relationship between the west and the people of the Niger Delta. The NGOs have made quite some commendable efforts over the years by way of carrying out research studies to determine the level of environmental devastation in the region, touring the region, sometimes at personal risks, to assess the depth of human rights violations and publishing reports exposing the atrocities committed by the Nigerian regimes and the transnational oil corporations. However, western governments which have real powers (economic and political) to compel the ruling cabal in Nigeria and the transnational oil corporations to toe the line of civilized norms have been found wanting most of the time.