The Republic of Congo is one of Africa’s largest oil producers and is no stranger to corruption allegations. President Denis Sassou-Nguesso and his son Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso have been the subject of corruption probes in Europe.
This episode of People & Power looks at the role of vulture funds in the corruption probe against President Denis Sassou-Nguesso.
Gabon is one of Africa’s largest oil producers. Its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita – an indication of the countrys wealth – stands at a healthy $14,000.
But, as the recent elections have shown, some residents feel that the benefits have failed to trickle down. Three-fifths of the population still live on less than $2 a day.
More on The Dutch Disease in Gabon from the New York Sun:
John Ghazvinian visits a supermarket in the oil-producing West African country of Gabon. French cheeses and foie gras are for sale, but he can’t find bananas. He asked a store clerk for bananas, “Pas des bananas,” the clerk replied. No bananas. Not in the supermarket, nor in the local markets. In his week and a half in Gabon, the author feasted on beef bourguignonne and potato au gratin, but he never found a bunch of bananas. And yet, Gabon is largely virgin rainforest, filled with banana trees.
Economists have named this paradox the “Dutch disease,” which refers to the impact on a country’s exchange rate once it starts selling a valuable commodity, like oil, on the international market. As large amounts of foreign exchange flood in, the value of the country’s own currency rises. Imported products become cheaper, and everyone rushes to buy foreign goods rather than local bananas and cassava. This isn’t a problem until the oil runs out, and a developing country finds itself without a traditional agricultural or manufacturing sector to fall back on.
The rapture of “Untapped” is that Mr. Ghazvinian explores this and other impacts of oil production on Africa — and strips away the turgid jargon to unveil the human stories underneath. He accomplishes this by traveling to 12 different African countries in order to learn first-hand how the rapidly increasing extraction of “black gold” is affecting people’s lives.
Before departing, he establishes the geopolitical context in which international oil companies are descending on Africa. Since 1990, the petroleum industry has invested more than $20 billion in exploration and production activity in Africa, in part motivated by America’s keen interest in Africa as an oil-producing region. An intelligence report produced in 2000 predicted that the region would provide 25% of North American oil imports by 2015, up from 15% at the time.
Mr. Ghazvinian explains how oil has undermined meaningful development in four of Africa’s long-term oil producers — Nigeria, Gabon, and Angola — as well as in the region’s newer producers, such as Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome, Mauritania, and Chad. He adumbrates the impact of multiple actors in these gloomy stories: the corrupt African dictators who mismanage and sometimes steal oil revenue, the western governments that tacitly support such regimes, the oil companies that survive by cozying up to these governments, and the banks that shelter the assets looted from state treasuries.
The narrative begins in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer. By now, many Americans are familiar with reports about the pipeline explosions and militia kidnappings of foreign oil workers in the Niger Delta. Since independence in 1960, a string of corrupt military dictatorships squandered the nation’s oil wealth. The “democratic transition” in 1999 has done little to raise the standard of living. Today 57% of the people live on less than $1 a day. Unemployment is high. Access to electricity, education, and health care is limited. Mr. Ghazvinian travels to the Niger Delta’s mangroves, which seeth with poverty, anger, and weapons. Militias, which he calls the “Nigerian Cosa Nostra,” steal crude oil from pipelines and sell it on the black market, often with official complicity.
Mr. Ghazvinian’s most astonishing reporting relates the situation in Equatorial Guinea — an oil-rich country, called “Africa’s Kuwait,” that is ruled by Brigadier General Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. A western diplomat calls General Obiang “a known murderer.” Mr. Ghazvinian describes the final destination of Equatorial Guinea’s oil riches: General Obiang’s lavish $2.6 million mansion in Potomac, Md., and his son’s $35 million mansion in Malibu, Calif., where he runs his hip-hop label, TNO Records. A 2005 Senate report disclosed that as much as $700 million of the government’s treasury deposits were held at the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., with the president, his son, and nephew as the three persons required to sign for the account.
Given these sepulchral stories, is there any reason for hope? Although Mr. Ghazvinian closes on a more optimistic note, he does not delve into the story of an incipient global movement calling for greater transparency and accountability in the use of oil revenues. This movement — Publish What You Pay — has called for government revenues and spending to be opened to public scrutiny, so that civil society groups can help ensure that oil income serves the public good. One result of this activism has been the creation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which is a set of operating principles designed to open oil and mining revenues up to public scrutiny. Western leaders could assist this initiative by passing laws that require oil companies listed in their countries to fully disclose their payments to developing governments.
Mr. Ghazvinian has a keen eye for the irony, dark humor, and complexity of people and events. I laughed with pleasure at his description of a bus trip from Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, to the Niger Delta city of Port Harcourt, in which a young woman leads the bus in a rendition of a gospel song and then returns to reading her hard-core erotic fiction. His gift for transforming statistics into informative and entertaining sketches ought to make his book a must-read for anyone interested in Africa — especially for the policymakers who even today fail to understand the complicated and tragic consequences of Africa’s oil.
The Revenue Watch Institute promotes the responsible management of oil, gas and mineral resources for the public good. With effective revenue management, citizen engagement and increased transparency, natural resource wealth can drive development and national growth.
Yemeni government forces have been fighting Houthi loyalists in the country’s north for weeks, vowing to crush them with an “iron fist”.
Ali Abdallah Saleh, the president, now speaks exclusively to Al Jazeera, saying the recent lull in fighting was not a truce and blaming Iran for supporting the rebels. He says the military operations were halted only to allow aid agencies into the area where civilians are caught between the two sides.
Tarek Bazley reports on the conflict which some fear could develop into a regional war.
It should be note that the Houthi are Shia Muslims and live in northern Yemen near the border with Saudi Arabia.
The efforts of the Feminine Solidarity Association are especially noteworthy in assisting single mothers in conservative Morocco. The organization was founded by Aicha Ech Chana.
The Moroccan NGO Feminine Solidarity Association offers legal support, housing and employment training to unwed mothers. Recent figures show that marriage to minor girls is on the rise – according to the Justice Ministry, family-court judges received 30,312 requests for marriages to minors in 2006.
In 2007 the number of applications went up to 39,000, of which 68 percent were approved. One in 10 marriages in 2007 involved underage girls. The numbers for 2008 have not yet been published.
At Feminine Solidarity in Casablanca, 65 percent of the incoming women are pregnant girls who were abandoned when they told their partner about their pregnancy. Other than that, the NGO receives victims of rape, group rape and incest. The women are lodged at the NGO from their seventh month of pregnancy. They are later given professional training to earn a living.
“Despite the reform of the family code, being a single mother remains a very big taboo in Morocco,” Soumia Idman notes. “In the Moroccan mind, all relationships outside of marriage are considered acts of prostitution, so the girls we receive are automatically considered to be prostitutes. They are still not protected enough by the law, cannot go back to their families, and are condemned by society.”
In 2005, Aicha Ech-Channa, the founder, was awarded the “Elisabeth Norgall 2005″ prize from the International Women’s Club of Frankfurt.
Many of the pirates operating off the coast of Somalia were given special forces-style training from Western firms, a special report by Al Jazeera has found.
Some security firms currently protecting shipping from the pirates had been engaged to train them a decade ago.
One company, Hart Security, coached trainees to be the “coastguard” of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region – providing protection from illegal fishing in the region.
In this exclusive report, Al Jazeera’s Dan Nolan found that Western companies, involved at all levels of the business, can now expect to make up to half a million dollars from the average $2m “ransom and release” contracts they are awarded to solve.
Russia is extracting more oil than Saudi Arabia, making it the biggest producer of “black gold” in the world, figures show.
The statistics, from the OPEC, reflect a trend that has seen the Russians periodically surpass the Saudis as the world’s biggest oil producers on and off since 2002.
These latest figures are being hailed in Russia as evidence that such periodic production spikes are not one-offs though and that Moscow really does have a right to lay claim to the No 1 spot.
According to OPEC, Russia extracted 9.236 million barrels of oil a day in June, 46,000 more than Saudi Arabia.
The statistics also showed that Russian production in the first half of this year increased to 235.8 million tons, a year-on-year improvement of 2.3 per cent.
Traditionally, Saudi Arabia has been regarded as the world’s undisputed primary source of oil and Russia has had to settle for second place.
But in recent years Russia has renationalized and modernized much of its industry and that policy now appears to be paying off.
Even Russian analysts concede that Moscow’s cause is helped by the fact that Saudi Arabia is subject to OPEC output restrictions.
The Saudis are famous for their ability to access spare capacity and raise production at short notice and if they really wanted to reassert their leadership role the feeling is they could do so easily.
Unconcerned by such “details”, Russia’s “toppling” of the Saudis was welcomed domestically on Monday.
The populist Komsomolskaya Pravda daily newspaper ran a story headlined “Russia takes first place in oil output rankings”.
With oil prices hovering above $70 a barrel for London Brent crude because of uncertainty over BP’s pipeline crisis in Alaska, Russia is enjoying an unprecedented bonanza.
But analysts say its oil industry is already working close to capacity and that it will be able to manage output increases of up to only 2 per cent a year between now and 2009.
There are also fears that Russia is becoming too addicted to what politicians call “the oil needle” and is doing too little to develop future revenue streams. Money from oil and gas accounts for 52.2 per cent of all revenues to the state treasury and more than 35 per cent of Russia’s exports.
Such riches can make a country complacent, according to Alexei Kudrin, the Russian Finance Minister.
“At present, we are in a dangerously carefree zone,” he said recently.
Almost since it came to office, the Obama administration has been trying to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. So far, much of the emphasis has been on diplomacy — but very soon, that could all change.
On Wednesday, Washingtons chief representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran may now possess enough uranium to make a bomb.
The US and Europe have given Tehran until the end of this month to stop enriching uranium or face harsh sanctions. The United States has expressed serious concerns about Irans nuclear efforts in some of the administrations strongest comments yet.
This week, the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog also posted a translation of a television interview given by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, where he claims he aided Irans efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
Fariborz Ghadar, an expert in global economics with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the prospect of sanctions.