My Beauty Best Teacher

Paul Collier writes in ANSA:

...as the radically different trajectories of Botswana and Sierra Leone illustrate, growth based on resource exports is critically dependent upon the quality of public choices. A long chain of decisions has to be got right, not just once but repeatedly for a generation. The upstream part of the decision chain involves reconciling strong incentives for prospecting with capturing as much as possible of the resource rents for society. This requires overcoming acute problems of agency, of time-inconsistency, and of asymmetric information. As the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico demonstrate, it also requires the effective restraint of environmental damage.
The downstream part of the decision chain is about harnessing revenues for sustainable growth. Resource revenues need to be treated distinctively: they come from the depletion of a natural asset and should be substantially offset by the accumulation of other assets. The only European model of prudent use of resource revenues is Norway, but the Norwegian model is inapplicable for Africa. Norway has more invested capital per member of the labour force than anywhere else on earth, whereas Africa has less. Hence, whereas it is appropriate for Norway to accumulate foreign financial assets, Africa needs to invest domestically

Tim Grey writing in the NYTimes:

Almost everyone, including MSCI, puts Nigeria in the frontier category. “I get people asking, ‘Who’s the next Brazil?’ ” said Adam J. Kutas, manager of the Fidelity Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa fund. “I answer without hesitation that it’s Nigeria,” because it also has a large population and a huge base of natural resources.

Nigeria holds hefty oil reserves — the world’s 10th largest, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. For years, its riches produced unrest, as residents of the oil-producing Niger Delta rebelled against what they saw as too small a share of the profits. Lately, the delta has stabilized, and the country, formerly a military dictatorship, has had several democratic transitions.

An excerpt from Robert Neuwirth's Lecture 'The Extroverted City of System D' a contribution to the book Open City:

In Lagos, everything is informal. The bus system is informal—the government got out of mass transit business decades ago (though it has recently stepped back into public transport with a bus rapid transit line) and the system that includes more than 75,000 danfos was held together informally by the National Union of Road Transport Workers as one-part mass transit and one-part Ponzi scheme. One of the largest formal supermarkets in Lagos buys most of its product from informal wholesalers. Some major multinationals here distribute their products through informal networks. And informal merchants invest in the formal world.

Authorities in the city acknowledge that as much as 80 percent of the work force—and Lagos has between nine and 17 million inhabitants, depending on where you draw the boundaries and who’s doing the counting—is involved in the informal sector. The federal government also suggests that somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of the country’s economic activity derives in some way from the informal sector—and this means that, in aggregate, merchants like Prince Chidi Onyeyirim and Fatai Agbalaya are more important to Nigeria’s future than Shell, Mobil, and Chevron, the multinational oil giants that pump sweet crude from the Niger River Delta.

'Publishing in Africa' via NaijaBlog
Author of children's books Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo via IP
Niger Delta is a 'Human Rights Tragedy'-VOA
DAAD prizewinner and aerospace student, Erick Mule Kitili
Kufunda Learning Village asks the question "...what it means to be a self-reliant and sustainable..."

As our speedboat casts off from Yenagoa, in the heart of the Niger Delta, I feel as if I am being propelled into a more welcoming world. A bracing wind replaces the humid closeness of the town, a monument to disorder clustered around a single, thunderous main road. The foliage on either side of the water is thick and lush, with oil palms peeping over the top of the tree line. The river traffic – mainly canoes loaded with goods such as fish, wood and plantains – clings to the banks to avoid being capsized by our wake.
I am traveling with a few guides and a fellow journalist, Glenn ­McKenzie, in search of the Niger Delta’s main militant movement: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or Mend. The organisation had attacked oil installations and kidnapped dozens of oil workers, prompting the big companies to send non-essential staff home and shut down hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of production.

As our speedboat casts off from Yenagoa, in the heart of the Niger Delta, I feel as if I am being propelled into a more welcoming world. A bracing wind replaces the humid closeness of the town, a monument to disorder clustered around a single, thunderous main road. The foliage on either side of the water is thick and lush, with oil palms peeping over the top of the tree line. The river traffic – mainly canoes loaded with goods such as fish, wood and plantains – clings to the banks to avoid being capsized by our wake.
I am traveling with a few guides and a fellow journalist, Glenn ­McKenzie, in search of the Niger Delta’s main militant movement: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or Mend. The organisation had attacked oil installations and kidnapped dozens of oil workers, prompting the big companies to send non-essential staff home and shut down hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of production.

The Times reports:

The uprising (by Boko Haram), however, is just a symptom of the social breakdown that has made Nigeria so prone to violence. Rampant corruption has undermined even the feeble central government efforts to tackle social inequality, failing health and education systems, the stinking detritus burying most big cities and widespread unemployment. The oil boom has only exacerbated corruption and inequality, and the dreadful conditions in the Niger Delta have spawned an endemic rebellion, regular kidnappings and crime syndicates that siphon off so much oil that total production is running at millions of barrels below capacity...[continue reading]

The Times reports:

The uprising (by Boko Haram), however, is just a symptom of the social breakdown that has made Nigeria so prone to violence. Rampant corruption has undermined even the feeble central government efforts to tackle social inequality, failing health and education systems, the stinking detritus burying most big cities and widespread unemployment. The oil boom has only exacerbated corruption and inequality, and the dreadful conditions in the Niger Delta have spawned an endemic rebellion, regular kidnappings and crime syndicates that siphon off so much oil that total production is running at millions of barrels below capacity...[continue reading]

While the clueless 'leadership' in Nigeria fiddles, MEND lays the foundation for an independent state with its own revenue.The FT reports:

Now, inhabitants of the delta have started processing crude. In small, modular refineries they are producing kerosene and other fuel and selling to the local market from so-called mushroom enterprises in the creeks and swamps.

While the clueless 'leadership' in Nigeria fiddles, MEND lays the foundation for an independent state with its own revenue.The FT reports:

Now, inhabitants of the delta have started processing crude. In small, modular refineries they are producing kerosene and other fuel and selling to the local market from so-called mushroom enterprises in the creeks and swamps.

Will Connor at the NYTimes reports:

Just another Saturday night in Lagos, one of Africa’s money- and contrast-rich boomtowns. Already a city of superlatives on the continent (it has variously been deemed Africa’s most traffic-plagued, most populous and fastest-growing megacity), Lagos has a new title to add to its mantel: most expensive.
Lagos has always been one of the most powerful commercial hubs in West Africa, ever since slaves were first shipped from here to Europe and the Americas. But because of the rising price of oil, the declining United States dollar, the relocation of foreign workers from the oil-rich but kidnapping-prone Niger Delta, large privatization efforts and a mad dash for the city’s remaining plots of land, Lagos is more flush with cash and full of glitter than ever...[continue reading]

Directed by Yorgos Avgeropoulos, "DELTA - Oil's Dirty Business" "...portrays the image of "development", the way giant multinational petroleum companies would define it. Petroleum leaks in the River destroy flora and fauna, poison the food chain and consequently wipe out the 27 million indigenous people of the area - the Ijaws, the Ogoni and the Itsekiris. The inhabitants dare to ask the self-evident, they demand an end to it. As a response they are massively and brutally attacked by special forces of the army and the police, which are armed by the oil companies. The camera meets at the river militia of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta-MEND- and presents to the world for the first time shattering images of their speed boat patrols and of their heavy weaponry..."

Life Cycle Analysis reported that:

...gas flaring from Nigerian wells and refineries emits more greenhouse gases than any other single source in Africa south of the Sahara. Even more important for the Nigerian people are the chronic health effects and contamination of the air, water, and soil in the delta which result from the practice of flaring rather than capturing the natural gas. Approximately 24 billion m3 of natural gas are wasted by flaring in the Niger delta and offshore, and the flares are bright enough to be clearly detected in satellite images as shown above.
According to Nigerian economist Anthony Adegbulugbe, quoted on the TVE program Earth Report, Nigerian natural gas wasted by flaring would be enough to provide electricity to half of Africa for a year...

John Ghazvinian focuses on the Nigerian version of the resource curse:

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. Seeing a doctor can mean traveling for hours by boat through the creeks.