Nigeria’s Black Gold Curse

Attacks on oil industry facilities and kidnappings for ransom of foreign oil workers are frequent in the festering creeks of the Niger Delta, which is home to Africa's biggest oil and gas industry, and 419 e-mail scams.

The Washington Shitraker’s Polly Fellatrix states the bloody obvious when opining that Nigeria's ‘black gold’ has brought wealth to a few but fuels greed and corruption on a grand scale, in keeping with anywhere else in the Third World where oil, or any precious resource, has been found in abundant commercial quantities.

Oil has provided hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for the government since it was discovered in the Delta region 50 years ago and yet the country boasts some of the poorest communities in West Africa.

Any of the native leaders possessed of a half-arsed schooling from Western missionaries soon observed, studied and copied the treacherous commercial strategies of their Colonial masters.
Following independence and a period of further education in the national military they were then ready to stage their own rebellion and establish themselves as heads of state: until the next plotting officer rank wannabee pulled his military coup.

So, elections are rigged by money and guns, and corruption pervades society from the top down. The President of the day is normally a top-ranking military officer (or their compliant political puppet) whose tribal group got fed up with the sparse left-over crumbs on the bird table and then initiated their own timely revolt.

"The idea that there is a huge pot of black gold out there for the taking has distorted everyone's values," is how N’Dinga McBonga of the International Basket Case Group reckons the situation.
“The poor of the Delta region see fabulous sums of wealth and cannot quite make out how it is accumulated and so no one works in a systematic way towards making money, apart from pulling their 419 e-mail / internet scams.”

Juxtaposed against a backdrop of white marble mansions belonging to oil barons which line the avenues of the capital of Abuja, people have lost track of the connection between effort and reward. Or have they?

The disproportionate mirrored images of the Delta region’s ‘Have’s’ and ‘Have Not’s’ can produce the most unlikely of reflections.
Possessed of Black Africa’s largest, best-equipped and most well-trained military, Nigeria has a long-established and profitable sideline of hiring mercenary troops to the highest bidder to participate in the continent’s myriad enduring conflicts.

This has further evolved into regional military commanders simply ‘doing their own thing’ and turning covert rogue in an endeavour of self-enterprise. Kidnapping Western / foreign oil workers for their insurance-guaranteed ransoms is but a small part of their remunerative commercial ventures.

Pipelines running round the Delta’s coast are expertly tapped to siphon off the oil and their flows of ‘black gold’ diverted to coastal jungle sanctuaries where the stinking lubricious liquid is pumped aboard small tankers or loaded onto cargo vessels anchored outside Lagos in 200 litre drums, which then ends up getting refined in Rotterdam or elsewhere.
The proceeds from the illicit sales move magically into numbered accounts for offshore / foreign investment and to purchase more arms to perpetuate the situation.

It’s quite a sophisticated operation, where up to 200,000 barrels a day are stolen and is the direct cause of oil revenues in the Delta slumping by 30% over the past twelve months.
Western oil companies speak optimistically of the Nigerian army and navy overcoming the problem, ignoring, in grand ostrich fashion, the glaring fact that ‘they’ are the problem.

Contact : If you have information regarding the illegal sale of Nigerian oil, please call Lagos Crime Watch on our 0800-234-9-419-419 toll-free number and leave your e-mail address and bank account details.

Smile, and have a nice day.