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The Bowoto case is the legal reaction to Chevron’s role in a 1998 protest by Nigerian community activists in the Niger Delta. The unarmed demonstrators boarded an oil platform and adjacent barge, property of subsidiary Chevron Nigeria Ltd, in protest over the environmental and economic damage caused by oil production in the region. The activists were attacked on 28 May by Nigerian authorities ferried to the floating protest by the oil corporation. Two men were killed and several more protestors injured. Three others claim detention and torture.

After nearly 10 years of pre-trial motions wherein many claims were dropped by a pre-trial judge, the case finally debuted in trial in October 2008 and a decision was handed down on 1 December the same year. The nine-bench jury decided in favour of Chevron, clearing the corporation of any liability under the various claims. It was a defendant’s victory, but civil society groups and legal experts still label the case a milestone in advancing corporate accountability.

The Bowoto case is the first time the multinational magnate Chevron USA Inc. has been successfully taken to a US court for the actions of an overseas subsidiary. ‘Chevron has a very intricate structure, used in part to try and shield itself from liability,’ Simons said. The case has effectively scrapped this corporate strategy.

the Jubilee Ghana MV 21 BV – a special purpose company[5] comprised of energy corporations – is incorporated in the Netherlands, one of the world’s leading tax havens that provides specific loopholes for corporate activities. The consortium owns the Kwame Nkrumah MV 21 – the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility that will be used to exploit Ghana’s offshore oil during the first phase of development. Commenting on the Jubilee Ghana special purpose vehicle (SPV), Elmer explains that the intent is manifold: Protecting secrecy and providing legal, tax and regulatory relaxation. ‘In this case,’ he says, ‘there is a strong suspicion that the SPV [will] charge certain services to the company, therefore reducing the profit and the taxable profit. Another option is that certain currency or derivative deals with the company [will be] made with the same effect that the taxable profit is reduced in Ghana.’ The use of the Netherland’s opaque legal and financial vehicles are likely to facilitate revenue leakage, diminishing Ghana’s projected oil revenue, estimated to inject US$800 million into the economy from 2011 and 2029 (beginning with US$20 per person in 2011 before increasing to US$75 per person by 2017, if revenues are directly remitted to citizens).

Ironically, though corporate mispricing accounts for 60 per cent of illicit flight from resource-rich developing nations, specifically those in oil and-mineral rich West Africa, Ghana vies to become the Netherlands of Africa. ‘Under the IFSC, Barclays Bank has been given the license to operate the first Offshore Bank in the sub region.’[10] Cumulatively, US$13 trillion in private wealth is stashed by tax evaders and avoiders in secrecy jurisdictions. If taxed at a moderate 7.5 per cent rate of return, these funds would yield US$865 billion dollars annually.

The desire to capture more oil reserves is driving exploration and development of oil and gas fields in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Puntland, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, the Comoros, Seychelles and the coast of Durban in South Africa.

The National oil spill detection and response agency (NOSDRA), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have identified over 2,000 spill sites that need to be remediated. Some of these spills happened over 40 years ago. The Ebubu spill that occurred in 1970, has not been cleaned up and Shell, the company implicated in the disaster, is vigorously appealing a judgement of a federal high court which ordered it to pay US$40 million compensation as at 2001.[3]

Even though Ikiogha is the government bureaucrat in charge of penalising Shell for the spill and signing off on the cleanup, he is also the contractor hired by Shell to do the cleanup… His cleanup operation consists of four shirtless men scooping oil from the surface of the polluted river with Frisbees… he claims that most of the oil had earlier been removed with absorbent foam and blankets.’[5]

The thrust of Crude Continent is precisely (and often, not so precisely) this: oil, far from being a curse, could actually save Africa. It is oil that will modernise Africa and oil that will lead it out of what Clarke dubs – without ever defining – ‘African medievalism’. Clarke argues that those countries without oil are the ones that are truly cursed, for they will be left ‘largely backward’.

This intriguing notion is preached throughout Crude Continent, with Clarke seeking to expose as fools those who argue that Africa's oil-rich countries are being poisoned to the core by the so-called ‘resource curse’. Our candid author is particularly incensed by two experts' ‘scribblings on oil’, both released last year: Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an Oxford lecturer; and Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson, an associate fellow at Chatham House, London.

Clarke asks us to consider what he calls the long-term ‘multiplier effects’, the direct and indirect benefits of the oil and gas industry, including employment creation, foreign exchange inputs and capital inflow, technology transfers, fiscal funding and ‘indirect supply chain effects’. These are much more significant than the ‘palliative band-aid…of corporate social investment’ that Clarke clearly detests. He berates the fact that no one has ever ‘properly identified and measured’ the social and economic benefits of oil and gas projects in Africa.

Without diminishing the severity of the Gulf spill, several observers have pointed out the asymmetrical political reactions to oil disasters in the US and in other parts of the world.[6] Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International, explains the sense of frustration: ‘We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US, but in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments…This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper.’[7]

Presumably, companies are not only put off by the prospect of increased red tape in the US, but also attracted – as they have been for decades – by the limited capacity of African States to regulate extractive activities. To attract foreign investment, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa also enter into generous production-sharing agreements that allow foreign oil companies to turn a relatively small upfront investment in exploration into billions in downstream profits.[11]

Even after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the company has moved full-steam ahead with plans to sell off US$30 billion in onshore and shallow-water production assets in order to aggressively pursue deepwater drilling in West Africa, Angola, Egypt and, yes, Louisiana.[17]

Although the area contains the world's largest tiger reserve, according to reporter Thomas Maung Shwe of Mizzima news service, ‘the Burmese regime has encouraged logging, gold mining, large scale farms and the building of factories inside’. As the scandal grew, Silver Wave denied what its own press release had announced, but conceded it would drill near the reserve.

A company this dastardly is a high risk, and to prove the point, Silver Wave's environmental impact document includes a description of the notorious Agulhas Current, which begins at the Mozambique border: ‘Compared to other western boundary currents the Agulhas Current adjacent to southern Africa's East Coast exhibits a remarkable stability.’ Huh? In reality, the Natal Pulse races down the Agulhas a half-dozen times each year, pushing 20km per day. It is one reason Durban's coastline hosts more than 50 major ship carcasses. Creating havoc further south on the Wild Coast, the Pulse contributes to the rouge waves that have sunk 1,000 more vessels in what is considered one of the world's most dangerous shipping corridors.

Daily, poisons are flared onto thousands of neighbouring residents. The Indian, coloured and African communities suffer the world's highest-ever recorded asthma rate in a school (52 per cent of kids), as Settlers Primary sits next to the country's largest paper mill (Mondi) and between two refineries: one run by Engen, Chevron and Total; and the other, called Sapref, by BP, Shell and Thebe Investments. Sapref's worst leak so far was 1.5 million litres into the Bluff Nature Reserve and adjoining residences in 2001.