There is so much frenzied activity on the embankment that it resembles a termite hill. Emaciated men and women scramble down the muddy slope in plastic flip-flops to collect some of the fuel littering the beach.
A brewery truck loaded with gasoline cans has hurtled down the embankment. Now it lies upside-down in the water, its wheels spinning in the air. On both sides of the road from Port Harcourt to Warri, swaying figures walk home balancing tin bowls filled with gasoline on their heads.
Stealing oil and gasoline has become routine in the Niger delta. The oil industry estimates that upwards of 15 percent of nationwide production is lost to theft. Most of it is directly tapped from pipelines. But black market traders claim that this is not theft. After all, they say, the oil in the ground belongs to them and not to international oil companies.
It is estimated that about 105 billion barrels of petroleum lie beneath the seas off the West African coast. The United States has dubbed the strip of ocean between the Ivory Coast and Angola its "national interest zone." By 2015, it is estimated that sub-Saharan Africa will cover a quarter of US oil demand.
"Africa is close to our hearts, because we believe it is our moral obligation to bring hope to regions where despair prevails," claimed US President George W. Bush upon departing for a visit to Africa last summer. However, exactly who is bringing hope to whom in this region is already becoming apparent.
In light of ongoing strife in the Middle East and because newly discovered oil reserves in central Asia are not proving to be especially abundant, new wells in the Gulf of Guinea are like a gift from above for the American oil industry. These reserves cannot replace Arab oil. But they do help reduce America's dependency on the Middle Eastern crisis region. To achieve this, the Americans don't mind spending about 60 billion US dollars in the coming years for exploration and drilling.
West African petroleum is almost exclusively beneficial to the United States. Because it has a lower sulfur content, it is less expensive to process. An oil tanker takes only about half as long to sail from the Gulf of Guinea to oil terminals in Galveston as from the Persian Gulf. Another important issue is that the West African oil states, with the exception of Nigeria, are not members of the OPEC cartel. Here, prices are determined by demand and not by global quotas.
Even as the oil fever continues to rise, the next boom is already on the horizon. Nigeria has estimated natural gas reserves of five billion cubic meters. The natural gas, which, until now, has been uselessly burned off, is expected to be fully marketable by 2010.
For this reason, a consortium consisting of Shell, Agip, Total and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has constructed an enormous gas liquefaction plant in the jungle on Bonny Island. At this plant, natural gas is cooled to minus 162 degrees Celsius and then loaded into special tankers. The liquefied gas simply has to be heated to reconvert to its former state.
The standard of living on Bonny Island is thoroughly American. By contrast, two-thirds of Nigerians still live on less than a dollar a day. Poverty is at its worst in the villages of the Ijaw and Itsekiri tribes, where many children have swollen abdomens and orange-colored hair, both signs of severe malnutrition.
The tribes are fighting back, in their own way. In the summer of 2002, several hundred women occupied ChevronTexaco's largest shipping terminal in the town of Ugborodo, on the tribal lands of the Itsekiri. They hijacked a ferry, forced their way into the terminal, and prevented hundreds of workers from leaving the facility. The oldest of the protesters was 90 years old.
ChevronTexaco could have summoned the oil police, known locally as the "kill and go." But CEO David O'Reilly didn't want to attract attention. He promised the protesters schools, a community center, a water line and electricity, as well as a monthly supply of 18 barrels of diesel for their power generator.
Market leader Shell is also doing its part. The Shell model farm, just under an hour's drive from Port Harcourt, is a perfect example of tropical agriculture. But it isn't well-received, because working the fields and raising livestock are considered backward in eastern Nigeria. Most people prefer quicker ways to make money.
"Oil has made us lazy," says Nigeria's finance minister, Nedadi Usman. "We really had to work hard in the past. Young people don't do that anymore. They're corrupt."
"There isn't a single positive example of oil having produced a favorable long-term outcome in the Third World," says Stanford professor Terry Lynn Karl, who studies the effects of the oil industry on politics and society.
In the Niger delta, the explosive situation has been going on for almost 20 years. In a memorandum, the central African conference of bishops called upon the oil industry to abandon its "complicity with the politicians," demanding that it stop dealing with corrupt regimes. But how can that work? If a corporation were to meet these demands, another one would simply take over the claim.
In Chad, the multinationals tried something new. The EssoChad consortium, consisting of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and Malaysia's Petronas, developed a concept intended to ensure that the people will also receive their share of oil wealth. More than 70 percent of revenues from oil wells in the Doba basin in the southwest of the country are to be invested in education, health care, and agricultural development.
"There isn't a single positive example of oil having produced a favorable long-term outcome in the Third World."
In fact, a few schools, social centers and hospitals were built with oil revenues. But no one was monitoring what the government was doing with its allowance. Even before the contract came into effect, President Idriss Déby used the first 4.5 million dollar check from the United States, which was in fact earmarked for power generators, water pumps and road construction, to buy weapons to support the government's conflict with rebels in the north of the country.
Hopes for a rush of new jobs have also failed to materialize in Chad. About 3500 locals were hired for construction work. But now that the oil is flowing, only about 1000 of these workers are needed. Unemployed workers have built a shantytown next to the "Komé 5" pumping station, hoping someone will need them. They call it Athen, after the French, "attend," – to wait.
Foreigners, who can afford anything, have driven up prices. Meat, fish, flour and cocoa butter: all of these things are three times as expensive as they were before the boom. Even the prostitutes in their corrugated metal brothels on the town's outskirts have raised their prices.
The next oil El Dorado on the African continent is likely to be the tiny state of Equatorial Guinea. Geologists estimate that about four billion barrels in oil reserves lie under the ocean floor. Whether the local population will benefit from oil revenues is also questionable here. While President Teodoro Nguema Obiang has already amassed up to 500 million dollars in his Washington account, his people would be happy to have running water and electricity.
It would be so easy to make every citizen of this tiny state incredibly wealthy. Leonidas Drollas, chief economist at the London Center for Global Energy Studies, has a very simple explanation as to why the equitable route will probably not be chosen: "Oil is the devil's gold."
ERICH WIEDEMANN
Translated by Christopher Sultan
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© DER SPIEGEL 22/2004
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