Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispo... - 0 views
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Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy companies.” IHS Energy—one of the oil industry’s major consulting companies—expects African oil production, especially along the Atlantic littoral, to attract “huge exploration investment” contributing over 30 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010. Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were scarce, one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America was found in Africa. A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of the rich African oilfields
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Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on terror.
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To see the African crisis, however, as a moral or ethical failure on the part of the “international community” (not least in its failure to meet the pledges promised by the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty by half by 2015) is only a partial truth. The real crisis of Africa is that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed catastrophically.
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West Africa Rising: Will a sovereign wealth fund really help reverse Nigeria's 'oil cur... - 0 views
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On Dec. 1 last year, Nigeria’s cabinet approved the creation of a sovereign wealth fund that would invest any excess revenues generated from the sale of the country’s oil, which it exports at a rate of roughly two million barrels per day.
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This isn’t the first time that the country has made such an effort. In 2003, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, Nigeria set up the Excess Crude Oil Account, or ECA, to serve a similar purpose.
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If Nigeria’s new fund succeeds in delivering tangible infrastructure improvements and other development outcomes from its oil profits, the country could become a role model for other poverty-stricken but resource-rich countries in West Africa.Ghana just began pumping oil in December, and significant reserves have recently been found off the coasts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. No doubt those countries will look to their larger neighbor to the east, the region’s economic heavyweight, in deciding how to manage their own oil revenues.
Fuelling Poverty: a Film on the (Mis)Management of Nigeria's Oil Wealth | Zainab's Musings - 0 views
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It was towards the end of our lunch discussion that the journalist mentioned the documentary “Fuelling Poverty”, credited it to Ishaya Bako and urged me to watch it on Youtube. The filmmaker, true to his African values, was quite bashful as he smiled modestly, lowered his voice and acknowledged he made the film. It all sounded really interesting so I promised to watch the short film afterwards.
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Ironically, the move by the government to ban the documentary from TV stations in Nigeria, simply fueled people’s interest in it – those who had never heard of it prior to this incident and others, like myself, who only just got round to watching it. Now the film has gone viral! Nigerians are sharing the link to the Youtube video via Blackberry Messenger, Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools. Soon, counterfeit DVD copies will be sold freely at traffic jams in Nigerian cities
Oil and Illusions » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views
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What a coincidence: the world’s first major oil well, Empire, was established in 1861, in Pennsylvania, the same year the American Civil War began. With black liquid slaves gushing from the ground, there was less of a need to enslave black (or any other) humans, at least not so overtly. The new black slaves are also much more powerful, flexible, storable, transportable and tradable. Cheaper to maintain, they also don’t revolt.
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Concurrent with the increase in oil and the actual wealth that it brought, we’ve also witnessed an explosion of magical or illusory wealth, in the form of images. It began with the invention of photography in the mid-19th century, just before the Empire oil well and American Civil War. With photos, then moving images, now on television, desktop, laptop, cellphone and Ipad, any man can own so much with his eyes.
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Though the US has made so much noise about Tibet, it never mentions Manipur, a sovereign land invaded by an ally. The state will rob and murder, then grant you symbolic victories, such as a Martin Luther King Boulevard slicing through each ghetto, but enough of token bones tossed under the table. It’s time to overturn that table.
Africa: The Next Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet - 0 views
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What have you learned from your experience on the book?MW: I have learned several things. The first is that oil is not always a curse, meaning that oil dependency does not always produce poverty or conflict or corruption. It did not in Norway or the U.K. But vast oil wealth captured by oil-producing governments always places the question of how that wealth is to be allocated and spent at the center. If oil is inserted into a corrupt federal system, then the combination of non-transparent Big Oil and authoritarian Big Government produces a perfect storm of violence, corruption, ecological destruction and poverty. And this storm will have a huge blowback.
Harvard Political Review - Oil and Development in Africa - 0 views
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The Chad-Cameroon pipeline, a World Bank-sponsored project aimed at bringing Chadian oil to Cameroon 's Atlantic ports, represents successful cooperation between governments, oil companies, NGOs, and international monetary bodies. If oil-rich African states continue to forge such partnerships, the chances of cashing in on the development potential of mineral wealth will be greatly increased.
Ghana's New Oil Wealth May Trigger Borrowing Spree - BusinessWeek - 0 views
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Ghanaian President John Atta Mills says the country will learn from the mistakes of other African oil producers and save some of the revenue for future generations after production starts today. Government agreements to borrow more than $14 billion say otherwise.
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“We must give thanks to God for giving us this natural asset,” Mills said after opening a tap to release oil aboard a storage ship today. “It means we are assuming very serious responsibilities. Those of us in leadership positions must ensure oil is a blessing is not a curse.”
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Ghana has been overspending since the oil was discovered in 2007, with the government posting a fiscal deficit in excess of 5 percent of GDP in each of the past three years.
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Photoblog - Extremes of wealth and poverty revealed in photographs of Nigerian oil indu... - 0 views
West Africa Rising: Will a sovereign wealth fund really help reverse Nigeria's 'oil cur... - 0 views
West using terror to plunder oil resources of Nigeria | nsnbc - 0 views
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
REFILE-REUTERS SUMMIT-Newly oil-rich Ghana struggles to please | Reuters - 0 views
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"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.
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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."
Nigeria Bans Occupy Video About Its Oil Curse, Video Obviously Goes Viral | Motherboard - 0 views
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But instead of protesting financial institutions that had left the economy in ruins, Nigerians turned out in droves to protest the removal of a fuel subsidy that kept gasoline affordable for the public—and also threatened to destroy Nigeria's economic stability
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Replete with commentary from a Nobel laureate, it offers a pretty even-handed look at the economics of the subsidy, the protests, and the political situation in Nigeria. But when it was submitted to Nigeria's National Film and Video Censors Board for approval it was promptly banned. The film was obviously nixed because it casts the government in a critical light; but, of course, banning a controversial film without blocking it online is a surefire way to make it go viral.
Angola: The Bloody 'Democracy' Of An Oil Republic - International Business Times - 0 views
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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.
Pambazuka - Banks, blood and chocolate - 0 views
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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).
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How does this special purpose vehicle relate to the sterilization funds? See, e.g., http://oxfordswfproject.com/2010/03/24/ghana-petroleum-funds-take-shape/
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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.
Pambazuka - Review of Duncan Clarke's Crude Continent: the Struggle for Africa's Oil Prize - 0 views
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
Oil: Fueling Another Debt Crisis? - 0 views
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it is clear that soaring oil prices are undermining the benefits of debt cancellation in some countries, especially poor oil-importing nations.
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In Escaping the Resource Curse, Columbia University professors Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz identify a vast array of contributing causes to the resource curse. Corruption is among the most severe, they conclude. “The short run availability of large financial assets increases the opportunity for the theft of such assets by political leaders. Those who control these assets can use that wealth to maintain themselves in power, either through legal means (e.g., spending in political campaigns) or coercive ones (e.g., funding militias).” Local corruption, they note, is often aided and abetted by international companies. “International mining and oil companies that seek to maximize profits find that they can lower the costs of obtaining resources more easily by obtaining the resources at below market value — by bribing government officials — than by figuring out how to extract the resources more efficiently.”
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High oil prices have a clear economic effect. But for highly indebted, impoverished countries, climate change, fueled significantly by CO2 emissions from cars and other gas-guzzling vehicles in the North, will have serious ecological, social and economic impacts as well.
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Hilbroy Advisory: Oil vrs other sectors in Ghana - 0 views
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Forecast estimate that Jubilee oilfields can produce 55,000 barrels of light sweet oil per day. With further development of more oil wells, production could reach 120,000 barrels per day. At that rate, Ghana would soon be awash with petro-dollars, which if properly managed, would provide much-needed funds for the development of infrastructure and enhance the living conditions of the people. Before it struck oil, Ghana depended on cocoa and minerals like gold, diamond and bauxite as foreign exchange earners which it prudently utilized to build a fairly decent economy with a modest but steady four per cent yearly growth rate. With democracy now well into the third decade under a succession of enlightened and committed leadership, the country is now being touted as a model for the continent. With new-found oil wealth, the future promises to be rosier.