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Yet Idku remains defiant, even in the face of the Egyptian Liquefied Natural Gas  Project, a massive natural gas liquefaction facility on the nearby beach. The oil operations are run by two joint ventures Rashpetco and Burullus, whose shareholders include the British BG, Malaysian PETRONAS, French Gaz de France,  and the Egyptian state companies EGAS and EGPC .

Unfortunately, BP has not given up completely. Instead of recognising that it's not wanted, the company has moved to a new location futher east along the coast. Now the struggle moves to Mtubas  in Kafr elSheikh, the new proposed site for BP’s gas plant.

To day, these demands remain unmet. So when British Petroleum eyed Idku for an onshore natural gas processing plant, the community took matters into its own hand: it mobilized to stand up against the proposed project. Roads were blocked, a sit-in occupied the construction site, BP's office was raided and popular assemblies took place in the street. The organised local campaigning and resistance by the Idku community managed to halt BP’s plans.

Jeffery Tesler, a Briton, who distributed the infamous $180 million Halliburton bribes to senior government officials, also told a French court that Mr. Etete tricked him into believing that Mr. Amafegha was a real person and how he had paid millions of dollars into Mr. Amafegha’s account.

Insiders in Shell said before partnering with Malabu, the Dutch firm did an extensive due diligence on the Nigerian company and was aware that a fictional character was on the board of the company.

Apart from the illegality in partnering with Malabu, the outright purchase of OPL 245 license from Malabu (through the Nigerian government) was also an illegal act by Shell and ENI as it contravened condition 4b of the approval letter for the oil block given to Malabu.

Sources say the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the Nigerian agency overseeing the licensing of and regulation of companies operating in the upstream and downstream sectors of the country’s oil and gas industry, would not have approved the sale of OPL 245 had President Goodluck Jonathan not suddenly “restructured” the agency to plant favourite officials with specific instruction to subvert the law and due process in the Malabu-Shell deal.

“There was pressure on Obaje to approve the sale, but he did not. That is why they brought the new Director, who is a Shell man all through,” an industry source said. “Do you think it is a coincidence that a Shell VP was brought in as head of DPR at a time when Shell and the FG wanted the DPR to approve the sale of one of Nigeria’s richest oil blocks,” the source queried.

“Shell cannot say it was not aware that Etete gave the oil block to himself, they cannot say that they were not aware that the guideline on the block prevented them from partnering or buying it from Malabu,” an oil industry source with links to the multinational company stated

Critics also point to Ghana’s long history of extractive activities and primary commodity exports: Ghana produces gold, bauxite, manganese, diamonds, timber and cocoa, none of which have generated appreciable benefits for the majority of Ghanaians.

Ghana has chosen to accept so-called ‘stabilisation clauses’ in its contracts with companies that lock in current laws and regulations. If the country should decide to strengthen its regulatory framework, companies with existing contracts could claim that the new laws do not apply to them, or require the government to provide financial compensation for the cost of compliance.[13] As foreign companies reap handsome rewards, and Ghana gains uncertain benefits (much of the content of these contracts remains secret), coastal communities are sure to pay the highest cost. At a recent Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) workshop held in the coastal town of Takoradi, representatives of six districts located closest to the oil find responded angrily to refusals to commit part of the petroleum royalties to an environmental mitigation or compensation fund, as is legally required in the mining sector.[24] No such provision has thus far been established for the oil and gas industry.

corporate interests are often recast as national security concerns. It was President Jimmy Carter who cemented the connection in his 1980 State of the Union address by stating that any foreign attempt to gain control of Middle Eastern oil would be regarded as ‘an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.’ The policy, now known as the Carter Doctrine, set a dangerous precedent of using military might to secure ‘strategically important’ resources throughout the world.

In another case, the European Commission on Oil in Sudan (ECOS) has accused oil companies of complicity in crimes against humanity in a Southern oil field known as Block 5A. ECOS charges companies with pressuring armed groups to ‘clear the ground’, leading to a wave of repression in which 12,000 people were killed and another 20,000 displaced.

Farming accounts for as much as 32 per cent of total emissions, a significant portion of which are created by industrial agriculture through the use of petroleum-based fertilisers, pesticides and forest clearing.[38] The issue of ‘food miles’ – the distance our food travels from farm to table[39] – has been well documented, while new data shows that the production phase accounts for as much as 83 per cent of the average US household’s carbon footprint for food.[40] Changing the way we produce food, therefore, constitutes a necessary step towards reducing oil dependence, its enormous carbon footprint and its human toll.

Food sovereignty, the political project put forward by the international peasant movement Via Campesina, offers a promising road map.

Industrial agriculture may be more ‘efficient’ in terms of labour (output per worker), but its productivity is achieved through massive applications of fossil fuel-based inputs such as tractor fuel and agrochemicals. Small organic farms, however, are generally more efficient in terms of land (output per acre), since they grow a variety of plants and animals, taking full advantage of each ecological niche.

Yeah, I know a lot of jobs in the oil industry require technical skills and education. I grew up around the oil industry. My father was a petroleum engineer. But he started work as a roustabout.

Something is preventing Ghanaians from getting work and it’s hard for me to understand.  After all, the oil men who are hanging out at the hotel bar in Takoradi are mainly working class guys from Texas and Louisiana who are in Ghana via the Gulf of Mexico or E.G. (that’s Equatorial Guinea). What degrees do they have?

The American Petroleum Institute filed a lawsuit agains the S.E.C. in October 2012, which would suggest that a number of oil companies are happy with the secrecy status-quo.

Regularly tumbling into appalling metaphor and analogy, Clarke nevertheless concludes: ‘North and south Sudan may be bound by the umbilical cords of a chequered politics and oil history, but as with Siamese twins these links can also be severed.’

Parts three and four provide the reader with 140 pages of comprehensive information on corporate oil operations in Africa and the global scramble for the big prize. Leaving aside his irritating penchant for metamorphosis – lions becoming countries, rhinos turning into multinationals – Clarke offers readers the chance to delve into his vast wealth of knowledge. Together with a comprehensive index, these two sections make it easy to find out which company is drilling what wells, where and with whom. Our expert guide also leads us around the world explaining how different nations are capturing Africa's oil and gas potential. All fascinating stuff.

The perpetuation of the petroleum age might make the current crop of oil executives and certain political leaders happy, but it is dangerously optimistic to suggest that the future well-being of African people depends primarily on drilling oil.