Troubles Brewing in Africa's Largest Oil Producer

If you ask people what's the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the words "oil, "violence," and "unrest," most would probably say "the Middle East."

Based on recent developments, however, some might soon be mentioning a few other places -- including the west coast of Africa.

In "Nigeria Is One Step Away From Religious Civil War," War News Updates highlights a YouTube video --

-- and a Time magazine report, "The Violence in Nigeria: What's Behind the Conflict?" (excerpted below), detailing the troubles brewing in Africa's largest oil producer.

The hundreds of villagers killed with machetes near the central Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday have thrown the sectarian problems of Africa's most populous nation into the spotlight again. Nigerian officials claim the latest bloodshed — most victims were Christians, many of them women and children — was retaliation for clashes in the same city in Jan. In that massacre, Christian attackers killed 300 Muslims.

Nigeria has been wracked by periodic episodes of violence for decades. The country's 150 million people are divided about equally between Christians and Muslims, and further splintered into about 250 tribes. Jos, some 300 miles north of Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, sits smack-dab in the center of Nigeria's tumultuous "middle belt," a so-called cultural fault line that divides the country's Muslim north from the Christian south. The "middle belt" is a melting pot where the major ethnic groups of Nigeria — Hausa-Fulani Muslims and Yoruba and Igbo Christians — usually coexist peacefully but sometimes collide.

Many Nigerians argue that the real reason for the violence isn't ethnic or religious differences but the scramble for land, scarce resources and political clout. Poverty, joblessness and corrupt politics drive extremists from both sides to commit horrendous atrocities. Although the nation rakes in billions of dollars in oil revenue annually, the majority of Nigerians scrape by on less than a dollar a day. In the Plateau state, where Jos is located, Muslim cattle herders from the north and Christian farmers from the south vie for control of the fertile plains.

That poor distribution of wealth has also sparked conflict in Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta region, where militants lobbying for a greater share of oil revenue regularly blow up pipelines and kidnap foreign oil workers. Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of International Management Development at the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management, says oil companies have at various times pitted ethnic factions against one another for economic gain.
(See pictures of Lagos.)

Kakabadse blames a lethal combination of outside oil interests, longstanding local conflicts and poverty for the sectarian strife. "In Nigeria the Christian-Muslim thing is the tip of the iceberg," he says. "What's underneath the water is a much more complex socio-political situation, which cannot be explained just in terms of the religious divide. You have a recipe ripe for conflict and it just so happens to be Christian-Muslim."

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Comments

[austincompany]

Having lived in Texas all my life, I have friends who have worked in the oil industry in Nigeria. Needless to say, it is difficult for many oil companies to get employees to transfer to Nigeria - especially those with families. Most consider it to be a place akin to hell on Earth. ALL foreign oil company employees must live in armed and fully gated encampments. These "mini-cities" resemble the green-zone in Iraq as they have fast food, shops and schools. I rarely knew any person who ventured out of these camps - other than for work related reasons, and this was usually under heavy guard.

What most Americans do not realize is that Nigeria is an extremely violent and impoverished country - despite its oil wealth. As is the case in many oil producing countries, almost all of the oil wealth goes to a very few corrupt and wealthy families at the top. Though I rarely condone violence, in this case, the people of Nigeria should become more active in the proper distribution of its oil wealth. And quite frankly, President Obama and the liberals-who-care-so-much, should be much more vocal and active in helping the 95% of Nigerians who never see a penny of the oil wealth.