The day oil was discovered....

74 year old Chief Sunday Inengite remembers very clearly the day oil was discovered in Nigeria. He says he was 19 when the British, Germans, and Dutch came in search of oil.

“They made us be happy and clap like fools, dance as if we were trained monkeys.”

Inengite talks about how the oil companies have caused almost nothing but problems for the rich environment they used to have. He says now the environment “has been damaged, affecting fish catches, and the small plots of land where people had grown crops are polluted by oil spills and gas flares.” Therefore you would suppose that the government, who controls the oil companies and have received insurmountable amounts of revenues from petroleum, would use the benefits from the oil that destroyed their environment to give back to the Nigerian people suffering from it. Not at all actually. Here is an excerpt from a BBC news article that talked about what Inengite had to say about the Nigerian government:

The government gets tax and royalties on the oil the companies produce.

The government is also a majority shareholder in Nigeria's oil industry and has made over $1.6trillion in revenue over the last 50 years, according to analysts at Standard Bank.

"I don't only blame the whites that came here, what about the government?" Mr Ingenite says.

"People in the government get nearly all the money from the economy."

When the BBC visited the first oil well a few kilometres down the road, we were approached by men working as commercial motorcycle taxis.

They all insisted oil companies, especially Royal Dutch Shell, should give them money as compensation for taking the oil.

But as we spoke, a local government official drove up in his brand new luxury four-wheel-drive car, an expensive gold watch dangling on his wrist.

Why don't people ask their leaders where their money is?

"They have hearts as black as coal, they are evil people - what would be the point?" said Julius Esam, 27.

The white people who discovered oil in Nigeria are not fully to blame for the living instabilities the Nigerians endure. It seems government is keeping almost all the revenues for themselves. The citizens do not even know what the officials are doing with the money. All they know is that they have it. Nigeria receives the most petroleum revenues out of every country in Africa. So why are so many more of it citizens in poverty now than there was when Chief Sunday Inengite was a little boy?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7840310.stm