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Malabu then sued the government. After much legal wrangling, they reached a deal in 2006 that reinstated the firm as the block’s owner. This caught Shell unawares, even though it had conducted extensive due diligence and had a keen understanding of the Nigerian operating climate thanks to its long and often bumpy history in the country. It responded by launching various legal actions, including taking the government to the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Tom Mayne of Global Witness, an NGO, has followed the case closely; he believes things were structured this way so that Shell and ENI could obscure their deal with Malabu by inserting a layer between them. Mr Agaev, Malabu’s former fixer, lends weight to this interpretation. It was, he says, structured to be a “safe-sex transaction”, with the government acting as a “condom” between the buyers and seller.

Shell and ENI reject the suggestion that their joint purchase was a thinly disguised transaction with a dodgy brass-plate company. Shell says it made payments to the Nigerian government only and that it has acted at all times in accordance with Nigerian law. It previously said it had “not acted in any way that is outside normal global industry practice”. ENI says its payments to the government “were made in a transparent manner through an escrow arrangement with a major international bank”. That bank was JPMorgan Chase. A Lebanese bank had earlier declined to handle the payments, it emerged in court.

The World Bank Board today approved a credit of US$38 million to the Government of Ghana for implementation of an Oil and Gas Capacity Building Project.

Ghana and its partners in the Jubilee field have worked hard to bring it into production in barely three years a record time by industry standards but institutional development for sector management by the state and education and skills development face significant challenges.

Given the strategic role civil society is expected to play in promoting accountability and community participation, an additional grant of US$2 million is being provided under the Banks Governance Partnership Facility (GPF) to support a wide range of activities to be championed and implemented by civil society and community based organizations.

The law, passed on March 2, allows oil revenue to be used as collateral for loans in a “credit enhancement” program, said Wayne Mitchell, resident representative for the fund, based in Accra, the capital. The risk of default is reduced, which will lower interest rates, he said.

A provision to keep 21 percent of the revenue in a stabilization fund for the country to fall on in times of price volatility and a heritage fund with 9 percent of earnings saved for the future is “best practice,” Mitchell said in an earlier interview on March 2.

the most encouraging sign was not the grades on the report card, but the presence of several officials at the event including a member of parliament, the communications director from Tullow Oil, the World Bank country director for Ghana and a Deputy Minister of Energy. Although some of the officials’ comments were perfunctory and fairly predictable, their attendance at least signaled the recognition of civil society as an important stakeholder in Ghana’s oil development. 

On transparency and citizen participation, for example, the government received “B” grades. Regarding transparency, the report states, “On the positive side, Ghana’s parliament passed the long-delayed and debated petroleum revenue management bill at the beginning of March 2011. The bill is now awaiting presidential approval. While some issues were hotly debated, there was consensus from both the majority and the minority members of parliament on all the transparency provisions. Should the bill approved by parliament become law, there will be a number of important transparency provisions.”

Of particular concern is the lack of a legal framework for dealing with oil spills: “The institutional weakness in the environmental protection institutions was demonstrated during the investigation into mud spillage by Kosmos Energy.

Remember that in their 2010 budget, they had a chicken-change sum of N90m for staff marriages and bereavements! The commission defended the outrageous budgetary allocation on the grounds that it was dictated by emotional intelligence. Peculiar intelligence, one would say.

the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation still relies largely on paper-based accounting systems.

Why would the oil companies refuse to give figures of extracted oil measured at the well heads?

The initiative for not extracting the oil was originally proposed 20 years ago by Fundación Natura, the largest environmental organisation in Ecuador, and has since been supported by a number of environmental and indigenous groups defending the Yasuní National Park and its buffer zone, where the oilfields are located.

But there are strong supporters for drilling, like the deputy minister of non-renewable natural resources and former manager of the state oil firm Petroecuador, Carlos Pareja, and President Correa himself has talked extensively about "Plan B".

Meanwhile, the German government said it will not support the Yasuní-ITT initiative, because the precedent might be imitated by other countries. The announcement came as very bad news for the initiative.

Balkanising the country into North-South entities would undermine the central government in Abuja and bolster exploitation by these corporations.

Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode says: “The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”

Campbell reiterated the significant observation: “The Mubi atrocity will feed a popular perception that the government can no longer ensure security in large parts of the country.”

It, however, warned: “We will continue to participate in the illicit trade until the Federal Government offers us amnesty and reparation or indemnification for our property, such as the refineries, boats, and houses being destroyed by the government.”

According to the group, ‘’We expect government to encourage and complement us for coming up with this lucrative inventory skills to help government create millions of jobs for Nigerians”.

“It has been recorded that the business also grow large in the region, as many of the powerful businessmen acquire  weapons to fight security operatives to continue their sabotage, which has led to the death of many security operatives in the region,” it asserted. Tamana explained, “Local refinery operators are the main agitators in N-Delta region, the struggle is divided into two perspectives, the militants and the oil refinery operators.” ‘’The government has only succeeded in identifying with militants, but not knowing that we are more stronger  than  militants, the government mistake us to be militants, we are different from militants,  that is why amnesty offer to militant does not put stop to activities oil bunkering and local refinery operations.

the statutory body established to provide an independent assessment of how petroleum revenues are managed and used as stipulated by the Petroleum Revenue Management Act, 2011 (Act 815), says the Ministry of Energy has made payments from oil revenues into an account different from the one established by the law.

The Ministry, as the PIAC points out is indicating that oil revenues from the Saltpond oilfield in 2011 were paid into the Government Non-Tax Revenue Account. But according to the PIAC, “This account is quite different from the Petroleum Holding Fund into which they were required to make the payments further to the passage of Act 815 in April 2011.”

welcome to the world of Nigeria, Angola, and Gabon. Now that you are no longer just a backyard producer of cocoa and gold, you will begin to notice significant shifts in how you are treated by the international community - defined as the countries of Western Europe and America. You see, in international relations, all men were not created equal. The rule here is Orwellian: the owner of black gold is infinitely more equal than the owner of gold and cocoa. Don’t even mention groundnut sellers like Senegal. They are not on the radar and will not be until the Americans discover in the future that groundnut contains ingredients that could cure obesity. That’s the way it is. That’s just the way it is.

Here are the early indications of your new status that you must watch out for: you will be promoted from occasional spectator status to enhanced spectator status during G8 and G20 summits; President Atta Mills will be invited to Washington in the first quarter of 2011 on a grand state visit and White House chefs will be taught to prepare gourmet kenkey; your Ambassador in Washington will suddenly become a very important man and will begin to receive lots of invitations to White House diners much to the displeasure of Nigeria and South Africa; your Ambassador will soon become the Dean of the African diplomatic corps in Washington. That’s the way it is. That’s just the way it is.

Hillary Clinton will now regularly mention a special relationship that has always existed between Ghana and the USA in her speeches

From $30 billion, the fund had trickled down to about $450 million by mid-2010, according to Veronica Kalema of Fitch Ratings, which late last year downgraded Nigeria’s outlook from “stable” to “negative” partly because of the vast and largely unaccounted outflow from the Excess Crude Account.

Some of the vast pile of cash, perhaps $5 billion to $8 billion, has been spent on so-far unfruitful efforts to upgrade Nigeria’s feeble power output, which remains no better than that of a mid-size American city for a nation of over 150 million people, Africa’s most populous. But the rest, some $22 billion or more, remains largely unaccounted for.

Both Tullow Oil and Kosmos Energy have posted scam alerts on their websites. Here’s the warning from Kosmos: NOTE: POTENTIAL RECRUITMENT FRAUD Kosmos Energy has learned that job applicants in the international oil and gas business, as well as other industry sectors, may be contacted by individuals or organizations that offer false employment opportunities. These communications are often via email and may request personal information or money. Kosmos only makes job offers after candidates have completed a formal interview process and does not ask applicants to pay fees during recruitment. Specifically, please note that any communications from or about the “Kosmos Group” are not associated with Kosmos Energy. This is good, but I don’t know how useful these alerts are. There are a lot of people in Takoradi who don’t have internet access. And even when you get to the Tullow or Kosmos websites, it’s not easy to get information.

It was a moment of remarkable contradictions.  Obama managed, for example, to warn against “mission creep” even as he was laying out what could only be described as mission creep.  Earlier that week, he had notified Congress that 275 troops would be sent to Iraq, largely to defend the vast U.S. embassy in Baghdad, once an almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar symbol of imperial hubris, now a white elephant of the first order.  A hundred more military personnel were to be moved into the region for backup.

In tandem with the military moves, the president and his national security team, perhaps reflecting through a glass darkly the “democracy agenda” of the Bush era, also seemed to have dipped their fingers in purple ink.  They were reportedly pressuring Iraqi politicians to dump Prime Minister Maliki and appoint a “unity” government to fight the war they want.  (Adding to the farcical nature of the moment, one name raised for Maliki’s position was Ahmed Chalabi, once the darling of Bush-era officials and their choice for that same post.)

There is, however, no way that an American intervention won’t be viewed as a move to back the Shia side in an incipient set of civil wars, as even retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus warned last week.

With a population of 160 million, Nigeria is the known as the “giant of Africa”. In addition to crude oil, Nigeria has also the biggest reserves of natural gas among Sub-Saharan nations. Western energy companies are gearing up to tap this wealth even further in the coming years. Balkanising the country into North-South entities would undermine the central government in Abuja and bolster exploitation by these corporations.

However, some Nigerian analysts believe that the organization is being used by powerful external forces as a conduit for destabilizing Nigeria. Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode says: “The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”

Campbell reiterated the significant observation: “The Mubi atrocity will feed a popular perception that the government can no longer ensure security in large parts of the country.”

He was quickly handed responsibility beyond his years. For instance, he  was directly involved in an attempted hostile takeover of an American oil company, Kerr-McGee. Hours before it was due to go ahead, the takeover was halted after the intervention of the French prime minister who feared it would damage French-US relations.Before it was stopped, Mr Skjevesland recalled Mr Welby was instructed by Elf’s group treasurer to transfer $2 billion. ‘One morning Justin came in to the office and told me, “I got a phone call from New York last night. We’re going to go ahead with the acquisition.”

Mr Welby had been a committed Christian since university yet rarely discussed his faith with colleagues. But some recall him wearing a cross pinned to the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. Isobel Gil-Noble, the warden of St Michael’s, the English-speaking Paris church Mr Welby attended, said: ‘Justin was a bit of a yuppie – and a real slick professional.’Mr Skjevesland, who was the company’s assistant treasurer for most of Mr Welby’s time with Elf, also attended the monthly talks in Lagos on the Bonny LNG project.It was at this time, unbeknown to Mr Welby who only learnt of the allegations last year, that abuses were being carried out in Elf’s name in the Delta.

Archbishop Welby said in a statement last night: ‘During my time at that company [Elf] I worked in a junior finance capacity on a project in Nigeria, travelling to Lagos from Paris. ‘To suggest that I was in some way responsible for making strategic decisions, or that I was even aware of any alleged dubious confidential strategy by Elf, is absurd given my youth and lack of seniority. ‘In the case of the Bonny LNG project, Elf only had a five per cent stake, so even the company itself had minimal influence in decision making.’

"Because of oil production, rising expectations in Ghana will have to be met. But at the same time, past policy choices constrain the room for manoeuvre and Ghana is toeing a very delicate line," said Razia Khan, Africa analyst at Standard Chartered Bank in London.

Across the capital Accra, evidence of new resource wealth abounds - brightly-lit multi-storey buildings, cranes looming over construction sites, well-paved roads and billboards advertising banks, cars and mobile phones.But many Ghanaians remain excluded. An influx of rural workers hoping for jobs in Accra, has spawned a sprawl of outlying shanty towns and spilled vendors across the streets.Standing in a trash-strewn courtyard, 49-year-old school teacher Monica Quansah wonders where the oil money is going."Our children are still attending school under trees," she said. "Those of us in the city don't have reliable power and water, let alone those in the regions."

However as at today three years after it came into existence as a law, the stipulations on allocation of the number of new expatriates or extension of stay of those already in the country to work in a company or particular project is only on the paper used in writing the Content Act.

The foreign operators have abused their allowed expatriate quota with impunity simply because they have found ways of circumventing the system that was supposed to monitor compliance. Some companies even bring in all kinds of funny “expatriates” under the guise of expertise without recourse to approval from any government monitoring agency.

These agencies either for outright lack of will power to be honest and do the right thing approve applications for expatriate quotas allocations and variations without recourse to existing Regulations and so you see even cooks and washer-men, security men, mechanics amongst many others  work in Nigeria as expatriates with unthinkable pay.

An Energy Analyst, Muhammed Amin Adam has told Citi Business News, the current delays in the completion of the gas infrastructure project could allow the Jubilee Oil field partners minimum flaring opportunity.This is as a result of the current operational challenges government is having with the lead contractor on the SINOPEC project.China’s SINOPEC has threatened to abandon the project following serious financial challenges government is confronted with in paying SINOPEC for pre-financing the project.

“in this case the law also allows that you can flare for operational reasons and you can flare when you are compelled to. So in this circumstance when we are not ready with our gas infrastructure they are compelled to flare, in that case we will have no course to make any case against them”.

The Angolan government, led by reformed socialist strongman President Jose Eduardo dos Santos since 1979, has recently touted its oil wealth, economic growth and social stability to attract foreign investment, but avoids the topic of political repression and glaring economic disparities. Rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized the government's use of violence to silence critics, exemplified by the recent attack on the 10 activists in Luanda. "This brutal beating highlights the ongoing threat of violence that anyone speaking up for free speech in Angola faces," Muluka-Anne Miti, Amnesty International's Angola researcher, said in a statement.