The vast backdrop of peterbilt trucks and speedboat auctions, the envelope of fresh november snow. The family restaurants feeding the great american stomach a steady diet of hometown pride and manky coleslaw. I couldn’t remember the last time i bought airline tickets over the phone, and the whole thing felt a little odd, and profoundly inefficient like something my parents might do. But i was flying to nigeria, and if you want to fly to nigeria, you have to buy your ticket the old fashioned way. Even if you found the fare online, you have to book your seat over the phone and then go down to the airport to pay for it.

So what is it that’s taking you over there, anyway? the operator asked while we were waiting for one of her screens to come up. Oh, yes, there’s quite a lot of it, and we’re starting to get more and more of our oil from over there. Well, sure, but of course it’s not always that simple, i said, trying, in what felt like a bizarre reversal of roles, to keep things friendly and relaxed.

The niger delta is made up of nine states, 185 local government areas, and a population of 27 million. It has 40 ethnic groups speaking 250 dialects spread across 5,0 to 6,0 communities and covers an area of 27,0 square miles. This makes for one the highest population densities in the world, with annual population growth estimated at 3 percent. About 1,500 of those communities play host to oil company operations of one kind or another. Thousands of miles of pipelines crisscross the mangrove creeks of the delta, broken up by occasional gas flares that send roaring orange flames into the already hot, humid air. Modern, air conditioned facilities sit cheek by jowl with primitive fishing villages made of mud and straw, surrounded with razor wire and armed guards trained to be on the lookout for local troublemakers. The problem, in a nutshell, is that for fifty years, foreign oil companies have conducted some of the world’s most sophisticated exploration and production operations, using millions of dollars’ worth of imported ultramodern equipment, against a backdrop of stone age squalor.

They have extracted hundreds of millions of barrels of oil, which have sold on the international market for hundreds of billions of dollars, but the people of the niger delta have seen virtually none of the benefits. While successive military regimes have used oil proceeds to buy mansions in mayfair or build castles in the sand in the faraway capital of abuja, many in the delta live as their ancestors would have done hundreds, even thousands of years ago in hand built huts of mud and straw. And though the delta produces 100 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, its people survive with no electricity or clean running water. Occasionally, oil has been spilled into those creeks, and fishing communities disrupted, dislocated, or plunged into violent conflict with one another over compensation payments. When the people of the delta have tried to protest, they have been bought off, set against one another, or shot at.

The rampant criminality, lawlessness, and youth unrest that have plagued the delta as a result are perhaps technically troubles rather than active warfare. On a good day, they will push off into the morning mist in their hollowed out wooden pirogues and return in the evening with a few sickly looking croaker and catfish that they will dry in the sun for another day. The tragedy of the niger delta story is that it could be told through the eyes of any one of the many delta minorities affected by oil production. Urhobo, ijaw, etche, itsekiri, ogoni, edo, efik all have some version of the sorry tale to tell. When i visited nigeria in january 2005, however, the ijaw community of kula was in the news. A few weeks earlier, angry that shell’s and chevron’s promises of development projects had not been fulfilled, thousands of kula villagers had occupied the companies’ flowstations in the area, shutting off 120,0 barrels of oil a day. The protestors had refused to leave until a new memorandum of understanding mou was signed, with clear guarantees of compensation and infrastructure projects for the community.

Over the years, mous have become standard operating procedure for international oil companies and local communities, they know that dealing with each other directly is infinitely preferable to leaving things to the nigerian government. Unfortunately, mous are by their nature informal documents, outlining generally agreed upon principles, and rarely amount to much more than a handful of promises such as financing the construction of boreholes or clinics made by an oil company in exchange for a peaceful operating environment. Routinely, when communities feel promises are not being met, they take over flowstations or otherwise sabotage operations in an attempt to draw attention to the problem. After several weeks of shut down production in kula in december 2004, the dispute had been resolved thanks to some heavy handed intervention by the rivers state governor and probably some money thrown at the village chief , but tensions were still running high.

Com 150 Final Project Expository Essay

Kula elders were threatening to make life hell for shell and chevron, and no one doubted the potential for violence. And so it only made sense to pay a visit to kula, but kula, like much of ijaw country, is not reachable by road. A people whose destiny has been tied to tidal fishing for centuries, the ijaw live on top of steamy, spongelike mangrove swamps that rarely climb to more than three or four feet above sea level. They live precariously at the best of times, in huts that seem to hover over the water. And, like much of ijaw country, kula is considered unsafe territory for a white man traveling alone, thanks to increased militant activity and widespread anger at foreign oil companies. Even if you managed to negotiate a reasonable rate for boat hire, the warning goes, you would have a hard time convincing village youth that you were not an oil company worker and should not be taken hostage. Only a few weeks before my visit, a foreign journalist using an inexperienced guide had been kidnapped and held in the creeks for several hours.

Someone with some real star power, who knew the creeks like the back of his hand. Someone who spoke the local tongue, who knew how to sweet talk an armed militia, and who wouldn’t lose his cool in a sticky situation. It took a few phone calls to pin him down to a meeting, but with a little persistence, i was soon face to face with just such a man the one and only felix tuodolo.

In the late 1990s, tuodolo had founded the ijaw youth council, a vanguard of radicalized youth that he had tried to channel into a constructive, coordinated advocacy network. It had made him one of the most respected and credible voices for change among the ijaw. Now in his midtwenties and studying for a phd in conflict studies at liverpool university, tuodolo was back in port harcourt on winter break. The road from port harcourt leads south, inevitably, toward the sprawling mouth of the niger delta. And as it insinuates its way through thick forests of coconut palms, it passes the usual heaps of acrid garbage smoldering in all their tear jerking glory. But here, going south from port harcourt, the road also takes on several forms of punctuation unique to the delta. First, there are the fences and barriers of the international oil companies, each painted in the companies’ signature colors and accompanied by rusted but still menacing signs that warn against unauthorized entry.