Crude World Page 6

  Scary stuff, it might seem, but the fact remains that American and European companies continue to have a far larger presence in Africa and the Middle East. There were far more Texans in Malabo than Chinese. In some ways the Chinese threat was useful to American interests. American oilmen and diplomats contend that if they pull out of unsavory countries like Equatorial Guinea, the Chinese will fill their still-warm seats and apply less pressure for political change. But in Equatorial Guinea, there has been no substantive political change since American companies began investing their billions there. Much of their operations—and all of their negotiations—are conducted in conditions of near secrecy. Marathon allowed me to visit its natural gas plant outside Malabo, but Exxon, the largest foreign company in the country, refused to let me talk to any of its local executives or visit its headquarters; its gated compound was as much of a forbidden city as the real one in Beijing. If any of the American executives had been allowed to talk to me, they probably would have put forward the argument I heard from an American oilman in Quito, Ecuador, when I asked about the environmental movement’s opposition to his company’s plans for further extraction in that country. “The fear I have,” the oilman said, “is that all the [American] companies are going to leave. Who’s going to come in? The Chinese will behave as they do in China. Saying no to us is going to turn into saying yes to the wrong people.”

  The argument made sense in theory—America is a democracy and China is not—but in the real world of deeds and misdeeds, it can be hard to see a great difference. The American government was paying rent for its embassy to a minister accused of torture. Obiang’s family was reaping huge profits from sweetheart deals with American companies. There seemed to be more in the way of reward for bad behavior than pressure to change it.

  My expulsion was inevitable. I had let the authorities know I was working on a book about oil, and after I’d been in the country for ten days the minister of information, Alfonso Nsue Mokuy, began calling and texting me, demanding that we meet immediately. I sensed what was coming, because several journalists who had visited Equatorial Guinea in recent years had been expelled in a matter of days; Equatorial Guinea was, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the most censored countries in the world. (Only North Korea, Burma and Turkmenistan were worse.) I suggested that we meet at the patio café of the Hotel Bahia, a very public place where no harm could occur.

  The minister was waiting for me when I arrived, along with a man who wouldn’t disclose his name but said he was an adviser to President Obiang. They did not bother to shake my hand. They were not happy.

  “Peter, you have caused us enormous problems,” the minister said. “The president has called me three times, and him”—he nodded to the presidential aide—“four times.”

  The hotel pool, just a few yards away from us, had no water, the sky was overcast and the waiters, normally attentive, kept their distance. Nothing boded well. The minister was sweating profusely, because his job and perhaps his life were on the line. In dictatorships, information ministers are expected to control the activities of journalists, and Minister Mokuy had failed to do so in my case. He told me Obiang was upset because I’d met Spain’s ambassador—Spain was then refusing Obiang’s request to extradite a political rival—and because he believed I was involved with a wire-service story criticizing his rule. (I had no knowledge of the story.)

  My explanations failed to persuade. The minister gave me fifteen minutes to pack my bags. Then the adviser drove me to the airport, where I waited for the next flight out. A final bout of unpleasantness occurred when the minister arrived at the airport and accused me of being a spy. He searched my bags, confiscated several disks (fortunately I had backups) and threatened to take me downtown for a real interrogation. He backed off when I said President Obiang would never visit Washington again if his regime imprisoned an American journalist. I had no idea whether this was true, but the minister reacted as though I had said a magic word.

  Obiang could jail and torture his subjects as much as he wished, and appropriate the country’s resources without challenge, but Americans would be spared his rough treatment. This is the practice of bullies; they assault the weak and cower from the strong. America’s relationship to Obiang had saved me from further discomfort—oil had saved me, to be precise—but America’s influence and oil itself were of little benefit to the people of Equatorial Guinea. As the turboprop taking me to Cameroon rose into an evening storm above the airport, the only light I could see through the clouds was Marathon’s flare. My last glimpse of Equatorial Guinea was fitting. Darkness and flames. A landscape of plunder.

  Who owns it?

  The discovery of oil usually unearths this question, and the answer is not simple. Is the oil owned by the farmer who works the land that sits atop the oil? The surrounding community? The state in which the community is located? The federal government in a capital hundreds or thousands of miles away? The foreign company that invested millions of dollars to find it?

  Even in Norway and Canada, countries with cohesive political institutions, these questions required considerable time and effort to settle. The task is harder for countries without national identities. Not just harder but sometimes lethal, because power rather than justice can prevail in such disputes. As the oilman J. Paul Getty noted, “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” Communities in the Niger Delta, where most of Nigeria’s oil was found, received little more than token payments after significant extraction got under way in the 1960s, and this accelerated a process of national breakdown. At first, there were peaceful protests, which were met with state repression. Militias were then formed to do battle with soldiers who attacked disgruntled villages. The militias and their supporters took matters into their own hands; oil workers were held for ransom, pipelines were tapped into. The militias also fought one another, because struggles for justice can develop into grabs for cash, and some militias were little more than gangs that Nigerians called “cults.” Foreign companies fed the conflict by providing funds to both sides: the military was paid to protect wells; the militias were paid not to attack them. The combatants were incentivized for combat. I visited Nigeria to learn how oil had turned a once healthy country, and the people who lived there, into a specimen of rot.

  Nigerian worker at an oil spill in the Niger Delta

  Midmorning wrapped a humid embrace around Port Harcourt, which is the heart of Nigeria’s oil industry and has a population of about 1.5 million. Located at the mouth of the oil-rich Niger Delta, Port Harcourt is a typical Nigerian city—it is sprawling, chaotic and violent. (Guns reportedly outnumber computers by four to one.) On this morning, Dokubou Asari, a warlord, stayed in bed at the small hotel that was his temporary headquarters in the city. When awake, he was the vigorous leader of an uprising against Nigeria’s armed forces and the oil companies they protected. His uprising depended, for its rallying cry and financial sustenance, on attacking some oil facilities while siphoning crude from pipelines operated by Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and other firms. Depending on your view, Asari was a thief, stealing from the companies a resource that was not his, or Asari was a Robin Hood, restoring to his people what was being stolen by foreign companies and a corrupt government. We would talk once he awoke.

  When oil was discovered in Nigeria by geologists working for Shell, the country had a growing industrial sector and a healthy farm economy. With its British-educated elite, Nigeria’s prospects were bright in 1960, when it became independent; its people were led to believe that the just-discovered treasure in the delta guaranteed a brilliant future. One of them was Annkio Briggs, a senior aide to Asari, who told me of Shell managers visiting her village with a movie projector. The villagers, most of whom had never seen a movie, gathered to watch a company film about the prosperity oil would bring. “They showed pictures of how white people lived in suburbs,” Briggs recalled. “Water came out of the taps. Children were getting into cars. Like
them, we would live the good life.” Shell was welcomed into the Niger Delta.

  Now the world’s eighth-largest exporter of oil, Nigeria earned more than $400 billion from oil in recent decades, yet nine out of ten citizens live on less than $2 a day and one out of five children dies before his fifth birthday. Its per capita GDP is one-fifth of South Africa’s. Even Senegal, which exports fish and nuts, has a larger per capita income. Nigeria’s wealth did not vanish, as in a magic trick. It has been stolen by presidents, generals, executives, middlemen, accountants, bureaucrats, policemen and anyone else with access to it. This is what can happen in a country with weakly enforced laws and a weak sense of national identity: it becomes every region for itself, every tribe for itself, every family for itself. But the fruits of thievery are lopsided. The World Bank estimates that 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil wealth has gone to 1 percent of the population. A few years ago the national police chief was convicted of stealing $98 million, and the punch line was his sentence: six months in jail—one month for every $16 million. As for the money that wasn’t stolen, much was squandered on projects like the multibillion-dollar Ajaokuta steel complex, which has not made a single slab of steel.

  The cruelest joke is that even if oil money is not stolen or wasted, it can nonetheless have negative economic consequences. The problem begins with the influx of foreign currency from oil sales, which seems like a stroke of great luck. When large amounts of foreign currency flood into an exporter’s economy, the local currency tends to appreciate. When this happens, foreign products become cheaper to buy with the strengthened local currency while domestic products become more expensive for foreigners to buy. As a result, the exporter’s industrial and agricultural sectors can lose local and foreign customers. The loss may not hurt until the boom subsides and the flood of oil revenue turns into a trickle; the exporter’s economy is left with industrial and agricultural sectors that have atrophied. This is known, in economics, as the Dutch disease, named after the decline of Dutch industry in the 1960s in the wake of an influx of revenue from the sale of North Sea natural gas. One remedy, economists have realized, is to “sterilize” oil revenues by keeping them offshore—investing a chunk of them in foreign stocks and bonds, for example. But a government that is mismanaged, greedy or just in desperate need of funds will let the money rush in. The Dutch economy recovered, but others have not been so fortunate.

  Nigeria is like a specimen exposed to multiple diseases. Legions of young men, turning away from hard and low-paying farmwork, migrated to the cities for the easier jobs they thought would be available there. The jobs weren’t there—the oil industry is not labor-intensive, and the Nigerian government, even if it hadn’t lost funds to corruption and waste, did not have enough oil revenues to pay for the infrastructure projects that would put such a large labor force to work. Instead, the migrants coalesced into an urban underclass, Dickens gone to Africa. Some used their financial and language skills to perpetrate Internet scams—Nigeria is the origin of many of the too-good-to-be-true e-mail offers that fill in-boxes across the world. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer, noticed a similar abandonment of reason in Iran during the times of the shah. “Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation,” he wrote. “It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. … Oil creates an illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts.”

  Ironically, oil’s impact can be harshest on the communities where it is located. Instead of becoming rich and moving to mansions in fancy towns, as the fictional Clampett family did in the 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, the people of the Niger Delta became poorer, watching as their land and water become polluted by an industry they did not own, had no control over and derived almost no income from. In the delta, once a vibrant marine habitat, fish died off and crops wilted. There was little compensation. Oil revenues that weren’t stolen went directly into the national treasury, because the government in the capital controlled the revenues. The ethnic groups in the delta were not powerful enough to get their way in national politics. The modest funds earmarked for local development were, for the most part, stolen by officials and chiefs before reaching the people who were supposed to be the beneficiaries.

  Rebellion, in such conditions, is inevitable. Early on, in 1966, Isaac Boro, an army officer born in the delta, cofounded the Niger Delta Volunteer Service and declared a breakaway republic. His revolt was crushed in twelve days by troops who rushed into the delta on boats supplied by Shell. Soon after, an accumulation of discord—partly over oil, but also over religion, culture and ethnicity—led to a massive and unsuccessful war of secession, the Biafran war, which killed as many as two million people. A new generation of activism emerged in the 1990s, led by the charismatic Ken Saro-Wiwa of the Ogoni tribe, which lived where oil was first found and whose people were its first victims. Saro-Wiwa formed a popular nonviolent campaign against Shell and the repressive military regime that was its partner at the time. In 1994, as martial law was about to be imposed on his restive home region, Saro-Wiwa predicted, “This is it, they are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.” Soon after, on the orders of General Sani Abacha, the military dictator, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and later hanged after a show trial. Investigations after Abacha’s death several years later revealed that he’d stolen $4 billion in state revenues.

  Asari’s rebellion was a violent continuation of this history. It was low-intensity warfare that killed thousands of combatants and civilians every year, and it had a postmodern touch, because helicopter gunships were pitted against militiamen who wore bullet-stopping amulets (or so they believed). For the 30 million unfortunate souls in the delta—the country’s total population is nearly 150 million—life had become a hellish vision that was part Mad Max, part Waterworld, and, with the prevalence of adolescent fighters, a bit of Lord of the Flies.

  Port Harcourt, in the fall of 2004, was its usual insane self. The power grid was down, roads had holes the size of craters and foreign oilmen were driven across town with armed bodyguards. Swindles and violence beckoned at every corner, and the police only made things worse. With casually violent ways, paramilitary police teams were known as “Kill and Go,” because that’s what they did. There was only one event to be thankful for, and that was a truce between the government and Asari’s militia, the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force. It was rumored that Olusegun Obasanjo, the president at the time, had made an offer that was too lucrative for Asari to turn down—a significant sum of money for some sort of disarmament. In Nigeria, disputes tended to be settled with guns or cash, and in this instance, cash had done the job. Asari moved freely in Port Harcourt, residing in a small hotel that was a thirty-minute bumper-to-bumper drive from mine (or, as the crow flies, a mile or two).

  When I arrived to talk with him, several dozen young men were gathered in the hotel driveway and bar, wearing the uniform of toughs at rest—loose T-shirts and sweatpants. They drank Star beer, even though lunch was hours away. At this moment, they were interested in nothing more challenging than watching soccer on the bar’s television, but they were not incurious, at least if their nicknames were windows into their minds. Nigerians love nicknames, and the young men I encountered at the hotel told me to call them Justice or History or some such moniker. It is strange to meet a teenager who introduces himself by saying, in literal truth, “I am Handsome!”

  I was led to a small suite where a klatch of these youths were watching a DVD of Asari speaking to villagers in the Niger Delta. They watched avidly, because Asari was a spellbinding orator, and they failed to notice that their leader had woken and shuffled into the back of the suite from the adjoining bedroom. Asari was wearing gym shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops. He watched the TV with the look of a groggy sculptor sippin
g his first cup of morning coffee and assessing the previous day’s work. He seemed pleased.

  On the screen, a village elder lamented the abundance of oil in the ground and the lack of food in people’s stomachs. Behind him, a boy peeked through the crowd, wearing an Oakland A’s cap.

  “Brothers and sisters, your salvation is in your hands,” Asari, on TV, told the villagers. “Today you must choose whether to be free or in jail. If you want to be free, say yes.”

  The crowd roared its assent.

  A cell phone rang in the suite. It was Asari’s, and he told the caller to phone back later. He returned to watching the best entertainment going.

  “Now is the time for us to fight together,” Asari told the crowd. “On this road there is weeping and the cracking of teeth, but the only way we can win is by fighting. We will fight until the enemy abandons control of our resources.”

  There was more cheering, and at the speech’s conclusion Asari was driven away in a white Hummer, standing up and waving through its sunroof like the grand marshal at a New Year’s Day parade.

  It was easy to understand his allure. Asari possessed the cadences of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the dramatics of Fidel Castro, and he borrowed lines from Bob Marley. His words inspired not only the crowd in the delta and not only the young men watching the DVD—their keen interest was not fabricated—but even Asari himself. Sleepy when he’d padded into the suite, he was now energized. As one of his followers cued up another clip, Asari tapped my shoulder and led me down a corridor to a room that was under renovation or had been relieved of its contents by his followers.

  His eyes jumped to the digital audio recorder I placed at his side.