"Sweet Crude"

The documentary "Sweet Crude" by Sandy Cioffi informs the viewer about the issues of oil in the Niger Delta. For those who are a more of a visual learner, this might be much more fun for you to watch instead of reading my boring writings. Well, maybe not, but you should check it out nonetheless! Here is a description of it from the website.

In a small corner of the most populous country in Africa, billions of dollars of crude oil flow under the feet of a desperate people. Immense wealth and abject poverty stand in stark contrast. The environment is decimated. The issues are complex, the answers elusive.

The documentary film Sweet Crude tells the story of Nigeria’s Niger Delta. The region is seething and the global stakes are high. But in this moment, there’s an opportunity to find solutions. What if the world paid attention before it was too late?

For more info, check out www.sweetcrudemovie.com

Yar'Adua's meetings with world leaders.

These are two interviews that shows Umaru Yar'Adua's meeting with the Prime Minister of England Gordon a year ago and his meeting with U.S. past U.S. president George Bush when he was first elected the new leader of Nigeria in 2007. THis will give you a view on some of his intentions he spoke of for Nigeria.

President Yar'Adua offers amnesty to militants.

"On the Niger Delta, we are working on the holistic of the development and implementation of the Niger Delta Master Plan," president Umaru Musa Yar'Adua announced on Thursday at a National Executive Committee meeting of the Peoples Democratic Party in Abuja. "Also, we are working on terms for the granting of amnesty for all those who are ready to lay down their arms in the Niger Delta, and this amnesty will include not only laying down their arms but also reintegrating them and rehabilitating them into the Nigerian society."

The National Security Council will meet next week to work out the modalities for the amnesty.
Yar'Adua it seems is in pursuit of finding some common ground with the Niger Delta militants. He said the country must be prepared for "hard times" in order to endure this crisis, in which he say is "very much real." He claims there are no hope this financial meltdown could come to an end by 2009, but if the nation lays down their arms and are reintegrated into Nigerian society Nigeria could very well have one of the best economies in the world by 2020.

This of course is not what The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) want to hear. They want things to change now. I vaguely relate this to Herbert Hoover's comments when he was the U.S. president during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, when he stated it was best to "wait the crisis out." Whether or not his statement was true, people who were currently out of jobs and couldn't make ends meat to provide for their children did not want to believe that. They wanted to believe something was going to be done right away. Whether or not Yar'Adua comments are inevitably true the citizens of Nigeria don't want to hear that they will have to wait until 2010 to have a sustainable economy. They want action now.

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5397620-146/Yar%27Adua_announces_amnesty_for_Niger_Delta.csp

Oil's dirty business.

It is a little slow-paced, but this video will give you an up close informative view of the intentions of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and the results of oil spills to the community.

Nigerian rebels with a deadly cause

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (“MEND”) is a militant indigenous people’s movement dedicated to armed struggle against what they regard as the explotation and oppression of the people of the Niger Delta and the degradation of the natural environment by foreign multinational corporations invovled in the extraction of oil in the Niger Delta and the Federal Governement of Nigeria. MEND has been linked to attacks on foreign-owneed petroleum companies in Nigeria as part of the Conflict in the Niger Delta.

A wave of attacks on oil installations and kidnapping of foreign oil workers has reduced ouptut by 25% and now it has expanded its theatre of operations by placing a car bomb in a miltary barracks in the regional capital, Port Harcourt. Shell has withdrawn 330 employees from the region, and shut down four pumping stations. Four Shell employees are currently being held hostage.
These rebels are responsible for causing most of the problems for the oil companies in Nigeria. They feel like they are serving a good cause that will benifit their country in the end. They are not just crazy guys who pick up guns and shoot away, they are trained militants. Kids are being trained to fire guns and rebel against their government before they even break puburty. Upon further research I read that it started off with friendly meetings, but as time passed and no beneficial changes were made the rebels resorted down to malicious forms of violence.

Methods to MEND attacks include:

• Swarm-based maneuver. The guerrillas are using speed boats in the Niger Delta's swamps to quickly attack targets in succession. Multiple, highly maneuverable units have kept the government and Shell's defensive systems off-balance defending the sprawling network.
  
• Radically improved firepower and combat training. This new capability has allowed the guerrillas to overpower a combination of Shell's western-trained private military guards and elite Nigerian units in several engagements. Note: one of Shell's private military operators was captured as a hostage.
  
• Effective use of system disruption. Targets have been accurately selected to completely shut down production and delay/halt repairs. This is a systematic operation. Additionally, the guerrillas are making effective use of Shell's hostages to coerce both the government and the company

More than half of the citizens living in the oil rich Niger Delta are still living below the poverty line, and the government continues to use oil revenues for annynomous causes. I do not know how guerrilla warfare will spark any sort of change in the government officials' hearts. Their rebellious actions are only decreasing oil production, resulting in less petroleum exports and revenue incomes for the country. What do you think? Do you feel there are alternatives ways the citizens of the Niger Delta could speak out against their governement?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_the_Emancipation_of_the_Niger_Delta

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/01/nigerian_evolut.html

Little Bee

Yesterday I bought the book "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah at Borders book store. In the novel the author describes his true past as a child soldier in Sierra Leone and his rehabilitation process. I heard him speak two weeks ago at the Community College in Jacksonville and I have been wanting to read his book ever since. A Borders employee showed me where the book was, and upon telling him my obsession with Africa history referred me to the book "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave. Suprisingly, he told me the book is about two Nigerian women who lived ordinary lives until oil was discovered, and how they coped with problems to come. I plan to read after I finish "A Long Way Gone" (which has kept me reading so far). I tried to look up a synopsis of "Little Bee" on the internet but there are no in-depth description because the author does not want too much of the story to be revealed without reading it. Here is the description on the back of the book:

WE DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS BOOK.

It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

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