Shell Game

As Big Oil made its play for the White House this week, 35 desperate Nigerians took 165 employess of the Shell Oil company hostage in the Niger Delta. They demanded employment with the company and compensation for extracting oil from their land. Another hostage taking event will barely register as a blip on the radar screen for most Americans, but for the Ogoni life is little more than a struggle to survive. The oil rich delta of the Niger River has yielded them nothing more, it would seem, than misery. Several hundred people were killed in the delata in mid-July in an explosion at an oil pipeline whilke panning for oil from pipelines as the price is too prohibitive for them to buy on the 'open market'.

The Ogoni people of the Niger Delta have suffered extensive damage to their homeland and to themselves in the years since the Royal Dutch Shell oil company discovered oil there in 1958. Shell has extracted some 900 million barrels of oil from the land of the Ogoni. Out of that 30 billion US dollars worth of oil, the Ogoni have seen virtually nothing for themselves.

Although Africa's history is much more entangled with that of Europe due to European colonization, the U.S. has increasingly developed an interest in the continent. The U.S. has been deeply involved in the internal politics of the country for the last twenty years, manipulating elections as well as trying to manipulate the local culture to suit its economic agenda. The "Kissinger population paper" of the mid-seventies recommended that the population of Nigeria be curbed so that it would not become the predominant power of the region and challenge U.S. interests there.

Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Texaco are invested in west African oil exploration and development as well as Royal Dutch Shell. As a matter of fact, the U.S. buys half of Nigeria's oil output.

One of the dangers for undeveloped countries that ocme to rely on oil export for their survival is that any collapse of the oil price severely damages their economy. This is doubly disastrous for the least advantaged of these countries who are reaping no benefit from the exploitation of the natural resources of their countries and so have no economic insulation against economic downturns. The Ogoni of the NIger Delta have suffered from both an economic and military genocide in the past twenty years as the outisde world converges on its land in search of oil.