Free Crude World by Peter Maass

Spain’s ambassador—Spain was then refusing Obiang’s request to extradite a political rival—and because he believed I was involved with a wire-service story criticizing his rule. (I had no knowledge of the story.)
    My explanations failed to persuade. The minister gave me fifteen minutes to pack my bags. Then the adviser drove me to the airport, where I waited for the next flight out. A final bout of unpleasantness occurred when the minister arrived at the airport and accused me of being a spy. He searched my bags, confiscated several disks (fortunately I had backups) and threatened to take me downtown for a real interrogation. He backed off when I said President Obiang would never visit Washington again if his regime imprisoned an American journalist. I had no idea whether this was true, but the minister reacted as though I had said a magic word.
    Obiang could jail and torture his subjects as much as he wished, and appropriate the country’s resources without challenge, but Americans would be spared his rough treatment. This is the practice of bullies; they assault the weak and cower from the strong. America’s relationship to Obiang had saved me from further discomfort—oil had saved me, to be precise—but America’s influence and oil itself were oflittle benefit to the people of Equatorial Guinea. As the turboprop taking me to Cameroon rose into an evening storm above the airport, the only light I could see through the clouds was Marathon’s flare. My last glimpse of Equatorial Guinea was fitting. Darkness and flames. A landscape of plunder.

Who owns it?
    The discovery of oil usually unearths this question, and the answer is not simple. Is the oil owned by the farmer who works the land that sits atop the oil? The surrounding community? The state in which the community is located? The federal government in a capital hundreds or thousands of miles away? The foreign company that invested millions of dollars to find it?
    Even in Norway and Canada, countries with cohesive political institutions, these questions required considerable time and effort to settle. The task is harder for countries without national identities. Not just harder but sometimes lethal, because power rather than justice can prevail in such disputes. As the oilman J. Paul Getty noted, “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” Communities in the Niger Delta, where most of Nigeria’s oil was found, received little more than token payments after significant extraction got under way in the 1960s, and this accelerated a process of national breakdown. At first, there were peaceful protests, which were met with state repression. Militias were then formed to do battle with soldiers who attacked disgruntled villages. The militias and their supporters took matters into their own hands; oil workers were held for ransom, pipelines were tapped into. The militias also fought one another, because struggles for justice can develop into grabs for cash, and some militias were little more than gangs that Nigerians called “cults.” Foreign companies fedthe conflict by providing funds to both sides: the military was paid to protect wells; the militias were paid not to attack them. The combatants were incentivized for combat. I visited Nigeria to learn how oil had turned a once healthy country, and the people who lived there, into a specimen of rot.

Nigerian worker at an oil spill in the Niger Delta
    Midmorning wrapped a humid embrace around Port Harcourt, which is the heart of Nigeria’s oil industry and has a population of about 1.5 million. Located at the mouth of the oil-rich Niger Delta, Port Harcourt is a typical Nigerian city—it is sprawling, chaotic and violent. (Guns reportedly outnumber computers by four to one.) On this morning, Dokubou Asari, a warlord, stayed in bed at the small hotel that was his temporary headquarters in the city. When awake, he was the vigorous leader of an uprising against Nigeria’s armed forces and