On February 22, 1895, a naval force laid siege to Brass, the chief city of the Ijo people of Nembe in Nigeria's Niger Delta. After severe fighting, the city was razed. More than two thousand people perished in the attack. A hundred years later, the world was shocked by the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa-writer, political activist, and leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Again the people of Nembe were locked in a grim life-and-death struggle to safeguard their livelihood from two forces: a series of corrupt and repressive Nigerian governments and the giant multinational Royal Dutch Shell. Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas present a devastating case against the world's largest oil company, demonstrating how (in contrast to Shell's public profile) irresponsible practices have degraded agricultural land and left a people destitute. The plunder of the Niger Delta has turned full circle as crude oil has taken the place of palm oil, but the dramatis personae remain the same: a powerful multinational company bent on extracting the last drop of blood from the richly endowed Niger Delta, and a courageous people determined to resist.
This book argues that the poverty and underdevelopment of Africa are the result of poor leadership, which is demonstrated in the historical indifference of a long succession of Africa's ruling classes to scientific and technological progress.
The people of the Niger delta in southern Nigeria are locked in a life-and-death struggle with Royal Dutch Shell to safeguard the source of their livelihood -- their environment. This extraordinary book reveals the rape and plunder of this unique, environmentally-sensitive region once rich in natural resources. Written by close collaborators of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa -- and providing the background to his execution by the Nigerian government in 1996 -- this volume demonstrates how the ecosystem of the Niger delta, and the lives of its people, have been systematically destroyed by Shell. The result of many years' investigative work by Saro-Wiwa, and the authors, on the covert collaboration between oil multinationals and the Nigerian government, this book examines the catastrophic effects of gas flaring, indiscriminate oil spillage and waste dumping. The authors provide evidence of how Shell, with the backing of successive Nigerian governments, has extracted billions of dollars worth of oil and gas from the inhabitants of the Niger delta since 1956, and yet have given nothing of substance in return.
The Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), an ethnic militia, emerged in the Igbo-speaking region of Nigeria in 1999, shortly after military rule ended and Olusegun Obasanjo took office as elected President. MASSOB's stated goal is the struggle for Igbo self-determination and the re-emergence of a new sovereign state in the eastern part of the country to be known as the 'United States of Biafra', thereby raising the spectre of a possible break up of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This Discussion Paper examines the circumstances of MASSOB's emergence in a period of political transition and considerable uncertainty as the Nigerian armed forces began to prepare to relinquish their grip on power, and the specific ways the promoters of this ethnic militia movement have shaped Nigeria's still unfolding democratization process since 1999.
On February 22, 1895, a naval force laid siege to Brass, the chief city of the Ijo people of Nembe in Nigeria's Niger Delta. After severe fighting, the city was razed. More than two thousand people perished in the attack. A hundred years later, the world was shocked by the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa-writer, political activist, and leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Again the people of Nembe were locked in a grim life-and-death struggle to safeguard their livelihood from two forces: a series of corrupt and repressive Nigerian governments and the giant multinational Royal Dutch Shell. Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas present a devastating case against the world's largest oil company, demonstrating how (in contrast to Shell's public profile) irresponsible practices have degraded agricultural land and left a people destitute. The plunder of the Niger Delta has turned full circle as crude oil has taken the place of palm oil, but the dramatis personae remain the same: a powerful multinational company bent on extracting the last drop of blood from the richly endowed Niger Delta, and a courageous people determined to resist.
The Failure of Leadership in Africa’s Development examines the dominant scholarly theories about the cause of Africa’s underdevelopment and argues that none of the traditionally invoked causes—an alleged black racial inferiority, the colonial and neo-colonial expropriation of Africa, purported natural defects in Africa’s geography—is plausible as the explanation of the main cause of the continent’s underdevelopment. Rather, the book argues that the chief cause of the continent’s lag is the failure of leadership of Africa’s ruling classes. This failure of leadership, the book shows, is most evident in the historically traceable indifference of a long succession of Africa’s ruling classes to the scientific and technological advances that were emerging from Europe and Asia during the most critical periods of Africa’s history. It was this indifference, the book argues, that set the stage for the subsequent conquest, expropriation, and technological stagnation of Africa. The book recommends a blueprint for the continent’s future development.
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