Aohell

Blood of Darkness

The anti-oil resistance in Nigeria recently struck at a Shell platform, taking nine oil workers hostage. This is the latest reported act of violence in a region described in a Shell report as an area like Colombia... or Chechnya.

Just what Africa needed, its own Chechnya. But this one goes one better. While Chechnya sits astride a pipeline route, the Niger Delta has the real deal - massive oil deposits. In the Niger Delta, corruption and violence are everywhere. Government officials steal crude oil to line their pockets, anti-government forces steal crude oil and oil workers to raise money to buy weapons, oil companies hire private militias to protect the oil the resistance alleges they're stealing from Nigeria - it's a mess.

Are the oil companies stealing the oil? Probably. The theft is under cloak of legality, but the laws have been bent to favor the powerful at the expense of the weak. I am for free trade - very strongly, but this sort of thing is not free trade. It is a criminal enterprise with full backing from a corrupted government. If it was free trade, it would be benefiting the people of the Niger Delta and the rest of Nigeria, not just the corrupt officials and the multinational oil companies.

And it's not like the resistance is a band of gallant fellows: they're a bunch of thugs, as well, corrupting their own parts of the government to run their operations. If they were to win, the Niger Delta's wealth would merely flow into different officials' pockets and, quite likely, into renegotiated contracts with multinationals.

With the money at stake in providing oil, every gallon has at least one drop of blood in it. I recently came up with a jingle that would have done Frank Capra proud: "Every gallon in the tank means some poor third-world guy gets shanked."

Watch out.