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"Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil"
Thursday, May 17th, 2007

Watch Video / Audio here ...
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/17/1350254


Historian and Journalist John Ghazvinian discusses his recent trip to Nigeria and the African oil boom. The U.S. now imports more oil from African nations than from Saudi Arabia. [includes rush transcript]
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We begin today's broadcast with a look at Africa and oil. It's a little known fact: the United States today imports more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. More than $50 billion in foreign investment in African oil is expected over the next three years.
What has this oil boom meant for Africa's ordinary citizens? Our first guest spent a year reporting across the continent to find out. John Ghazvinian is a journalist who has written for publications including Newsweek, The Nation and Time Out New York. His new book is called “Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil." The book compares the global competition for the continent's oil resources to the nineteenth century scramble for colonization.

John Ghazvinian has just returned from Nigeria, where oil has been the driving force behind a longstanding bloodshed. Protesters in Ogoniland have just ended their week-long occupation of a major oil pipeline hub that forced Royal Dutch Shell to cut their daily production by nearly 40%. In recent weeks, villagers demanding compensation and regional control over Nigerian oil have kidnapped at least 13 foreign workers, occupied a Chevron oilfield, and bombed other international oil pipelines. Two major US companies, Chevron and Hercules Offshore, are evacuating all their non-essential workers from the oil-rich country.

John Ghazvinian, Journalist who has written for publications including Newsweek and the Nation. His new book is "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil." He is a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today's broadcast with a look at Africa and oil. It’s a little known fact: the United States today imports more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. More than $50 billion in foreign investment in African oil is expected over the next three years by the United States.

What has this oil boom meant for Africa’s ordinary citizens? Our first guest spent a year reporting across the continent to find out. John Ghazvinian is a journalist, who has written for publications including Newsweek, The Nation, and Time Out New York. His new book is called Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. The book compares the global competition for the continent’s oil resources to the nineteenth century scramble for colonization.

AMY GOODMAN: John Ghazvinian has just returned from Nigeria, where oil has been the driving force behind a longstanding bloodshed. Protesters in Ogoniland have just ended their week-long occupation of a major oil pipeline hub that forced Royal Dutch Shell to cut their daily production by nearly 40%. In recent weeks, villagers demanding compensation and regional control over Nigerian oil have kidnapped at least thirteen foreign workers, occupied a Chevron oilfield and bombed other international oil pipelines. Two major US companies, Chevron and Hercules Offshore, are evacuating all their nonessential workers from the oil-rich country.

John Ghazvinian joins us now from Philadelphia, where he’s a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN GHAZVINIAN: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we talk about Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan -- and what’s not often talked about is oil there -- let’s talk about the latest news out of Nigeria, out of the Niger Delta. What is happening there, John?

JOHN GHAZVINIAN: Yeah, as you say quite rightly, it’s actually more of the same, to be honest. The situation in Nigeria is now as bad as I think anyone can remember it. Many of your listeners and viewers will be aware of the struggles of the Ogoni in the 1990s against Shell, and so on. That was really child's play compared to what’s been going on in the last couple years in Nigeria, and ironically we hear less about it.

But, you know, I was just there a couple weeks ago. Just in the sort of four or five days I spent in the Delta, there were twenty-nine foreigners taken hostage, kidnapped by militants. You know, it’s the same story, basically. It’s a battle over access to oil money and for resource control, and it hasn’t gone away, and it’s not about to go away.

AMY GOODMAN: The fact that the United States gets more oil from Africa -- now, that’s a continent versus Saudi Arabia, which is a country. That’s not often recognized by our leaders, the continent versus country issue, but that’s still extremely significant. Give us the picture of Africa, where the oil is and where many are hoping it will be.

JOHN GHAZVINIAN: Yeah, actually, you know, the US, as you say, gets as much oil now from -- as we do from Saudi Arabia, but actually we’re going to be getting about -- you know, much more in the next few years. This is what’s significant is that by 2015, we’re going to be getting 25% of our imported oil from Africa. And, you know, this is why I wrote the book, really, because I feel like this is something we don't pay a lot of attention to. When we think of oil, we tend to think of the Middle East or other parts or Venezuela or other parts of the world. But Africa is becoming increasingly important for our way of life and our energy needs, and I think it’s important for people to have some idea what some of the issues are in some of these countries.

To answer your question, the big kind of African oil boom at the moment, or at least in recent years, has been along the west coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, what some people like to call the armpit of Africa -- if you sort of picture a map of Africa, that sort of ninety-degree bend along the ocean there. You know, it’s a lot of deep water offshore discoveries that have really been coming on stream recently at places like Angola that are really up and coming. Angola has just joined OPEC a couple months ago. It’s the first new member of OPEC in more than thirty years, and it’s an African country, and it’s rapidly catching up with Nigeria. People are now talking about East Africa, that was possibly the next big margin, you know, the next kind of big oil boom for Africa. That’s much closer to China, so it has some obvious benefits there.

But the bottom line is that Africa, as a whole, is really deeply under-explored and kind of under -- it’s not really looked at as much as it could be. I mean, there’s exploration blocks the size of France that still haven’t been given away, and it’s a very hot and very exciting destination for the oil industry right now.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, in particular, about Nigeria. Clearly it’s become an increasingly big supplier to the United States, yet we have all of these enormous problems there, the attacks on oil facilities, the rampant apparent violations during the recent elections, and very little attention in the American press to what is happening in Nigeria, compared, for example, to all the attention that the press gives to Venezuela, where there is not this kind of, like, dislocation of the oil industry or questions about the legality of their voting process.

JOHN GHAZVINIAN: Yeah, I know, exactly. Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States, which I think is something a lot of people are not aware of. We get a lot of our oil from Nigeria. You know, I don’t know why we don’t pay more attention to it. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of international media organizations don’t have someone in West Africa. They often have someone in Johannesburg and Nairobi, and that’s it, really, especially in the English-speaking world.

But Nigeria is extremely important. You know, this is a country of 130 million people. One out of every six Africans is Nigerian. You know, as I say, it’s one of the biggest oil producers in the world. It has a large and very experienced army, and it’s a real anchor for American and British foreign policy in Africa, actually.

AMY GOODMAN: But in Nigeria, the way -- when it is covered in this country, the discussion is of the vandals, the criminals that are tapping into the oil pipelines, stealing the oil. Can you describe who it is who is organizing in the Niger Delta, John?

JOHN GHAZVINIAN: That’s a very good question, and if I knew the answer to that, I’d have a lot more insight than I do. I mean, the truth is that it changes often, and these groups splinter, and often, to be honest, a lot of criminal elements also kind of jump on the bandwagon. It really varies day-to-day, and it’s a very difficult and very complex situation to follow.

But in recent -- in the last year and a half, the big kind of group, the umbrella group that’s been getting most of the attention is a group called MEND, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. They’re kind of an Ijaw group. They have kind of inherited the mantle of the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, which was also an Ijaw group from a couple years ago. You know, like I say, things have moved on a lot since the days of the Ogoni and MOSOP, but to try to say who exactly is responsible for some of the vandalism or kidnapping, or so on --

AMY GOODMAN: John, their concerns? Talk about who is profiting from the drilling in the Niger Delta?

JOHN GHAZVINIAN: Yeah, this is at the bottom of the issue, basically, is that for more than forty years, international oil companies have, you know, pumped billions of dollars worth of oil out of Nigeria. $400 billion has gone into the pockets of the Nigerian government, and most of that money, frankly -- a lot of that money -- has been salted away into foreign bank accounts by corrupt politicians and then, of course, has gone away, disappeared in the form of profits to multinational oil corporations.

Who has not seen the profits from oil exploration is probably the real question, which is the people of the Niger Delta. You have people living in stone age squalor, in mud huts, you know, in swamps with no roads, no electricity, no running water. I spend a lot of time in the Delta, and I’ve seen the way people live there. And, you know, through their backyards you have thousands of miles of pipelines, ultra-modern, multi-million-dollar, air-conditioned, state-of-the-art facilities going up, and people just haven’t seen any benefits from the oil exploration. And over time, that has turned into a fairly nasty sort of militant insurgency, as I think shouldn’t surprise anyone, really.

AMY GOODMAN: Talking to John Ghazvinian, journalist, who has written for many publications. His new book is called Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. He has just returned from Nigeria. When we come back, we’ll talk about US multinational corporations versus China, and areas, countries like Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is John Ghazvinian. His book is called Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. Juan?