The Times: Delta blues: The stability and prosperity of Nigeria are at stake in its oilfields: “Shell is not a government, but it must accept that it will be a lightning rod for local despair until Nigeria’s oil wealth visibly reaches those among whom it operates.”: Tuesday 17 January 2006
The oil producers of the Niger delta measure output in many ways, but the most telling is their figure for “good day” production. This is the number of barrels they are able to pump to tankers when no flow stations are shut down, no new pipeline leaks have been sprung, and no employees are being taken off drilling rigs by helicopter for their own safety. Sunday was a bad day. Shell, Nigeria’s biggest foreign investor, had to evacuate 330 workers after a rebel gunboat attack on a pumping station near the port of Warri. Last Wednesday, too, was a bad day. Two separate attacks forced Shell to cut production by 10 per cent and to start searching for four foreign engineers, including one Briton, who had been kidnapped and have yet to be released.
Shell’s Nigerian production, which represents 10 per cent of its global output, will bounce back. It has done so many times before, and “bad” days are factored into the arithmetic that has kept the company busy in the vast delta region for nearly half a century. The more pressing question posed by the latest attacks is political, not economic. Can the Government of Olusegun Obasanjo, the President, ever restore peace to the region on which Nigeria’s development and stability depend, or is it spinning out of control? The omens are bleak, and so are the implications for Africa and the world.
A year ago, unarmed villagers mounted a different sort of demonstration against Nigeria’s oil installations. Its purpose, according to one of those involved, was to force the Government to renegotiate its system of distributing oil revenues to oil-producing areas, and to contemplate, for the first time, the idea of a presidential candidate from the delta. Since then, civilian demonstrations have been eclipsed by radical militias calling for the destruction of Nigeria’s oil industry and of Nigeria itself. Their rhetoric and violence, funded by kidnapping and rampant oil theft, offer echoes of Chechnya ten years ago.
The extremism that Nigeria faces in the south is not Islamist, but religion is a factor. President Obasanjo is electorally beholden to the largely Muslim north, where sectarian killings marred his first term and where any perception of federal bias in favour of the Christian-dominated delta region could trigger more blood-letting. But Mr Obasanjo has dithered long enough. He must now find a way to force through infrastructural investment in the oilfields in which his Government remains the majority owner. Above all, he must institute root-and-branch reform of the mechanism for distributing royalties to oil-producing regions, so that they reach the millions living in poverty beneath the delta’s infamous gas flares rather than being siphoned off by the elite of the world’s leading kleptocracy.
Shell is not a government, but it must accept that it will be a lightning rod for local despair until Nigeria’s oil wealth visibly reaches those among whom it operates. A stable Nigeria is vital for a world seeking to dilute its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. It is also vital for 130 million Nigerians.
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