WARRI (Nigeria): Soldiers with mounted machineguns sit behind sandbags on the streets of this gritty oil town in southern Nigeria, enforcing a curfew by night and keeping an uneasy peace by day.
The soldiers are here to keep two local ethnic groups, the Ijaw and the Itsekiri people, from killing each other — one of many examples of sectarian and ethnic violence that threaten to engulf Africa’s most populous nation.
The government in Nigeria does not always go to such pains to quell ethnic disturbances.
But Warri is different because fighting in and around here in March led to an evacuation of oil workers and a 40 per cent cut in Nigeria’s 2.2 million barrels per day output, highly sought after by United States refiners.
As delegates meet this week in the upmarket Johannesburg suburb of Sandton to review the global effort to stem the flow of “blood diamonds” blamed for many African wars, they may pause to think of places like Warri.
Across the world’s poorest continent, commodities — and not just diamonds — prized elsewhere have stoked conflicts, arming both rag-tag rebel groups and state-backed military machines.
Where the flow is threatened as in Warri, the state will often enforce order with an iron hand.
Rival warlords fight for control of resources and the revenue derived from them has often filled the deep pockets of corrupt officials, embittering impoverished local communities who see little or none of the cash or other spin-offs like jobs.
BLESSED AND CURSED: The abject poverty of people in and around Warri, an oil-producing hub in the world’s eighth largest exporter of the product, is one of many examples of resource wealth not trickling down to Africa’s poor masses.
“The wealth created from the oil or minerals creates a security zone for the elites so they can carry on as they want,” said Hannelie de Beer, an analyst with Pretoria-based political consultancy Executive Research Associates.
“To a certain extent, Africa’s commodity wealth has been a curse,” she said.
From the thick gold veins of South Africa to West Africa’s vast offshore oil reserves, Africa has abundant natural wealth.
Africa’s allure to 19th century Europe was gold, rubber and ivory, and the exploitation of these riches led to some of the darkest chapters in white colonial rule.
In the Congo, set up as Belgian King Leopold’s personal fiefdom, company agents cut the hands off villagers as they terrorized locals into meeting their rubber quotas.
Congo is still suffering from the avarice its natural wealth has stirred among outsiders.
In 1998, a rebellion in the Congo’s east dragged in the armies of several other countries, including Zimbabwe and Uganda, which have been accused of grabbing minerals and timber behind the smokescreen of war.
In South Africa, the mining industry that erected the continent’s largest economy was built by the sweat of migrant labourers forced to live in the squalor of reservations set aside for “natives”.
Angola’s almost three decade civil war, which ended last year after killing an estimated one million people and uprooting millions more, was fuelled by oil and diamonds.
The government armed itself with the cash from the roughly 900,000 barrels of oil per day produced by its offshore wells.
Angola stands as a monumental example of the corruption associated with the misuse of resources in Africa.
While most of its roughly 13 million people live in utter poverty, an internal IMF report last year estimated that around $1 billion “vanished” from government coffers in 2001.
On the other side of Angola’s battle line, the UNITA rebel movement funded itself with diamonds smuggled from the remote areas it controlled, in contravention of a UN embargo.
In Sierra Leone, diamonds helped to finance a horrific conflict in which rebels committed atrocities that included hacking off the limbs of civilians.
It was this use of the precious stones that led to the outcry against so-called blood diamonds — just as the brutality of King Leopold’s Congo sparked what one author has called the first modern human rights crusade.
A country relatively poor in resources such as Mozambique can help to point the way. Unburdened by the oil and diamond wealth of fellow former Portuguese colony Angola, its economy has been registering double-digit growth figures since the end of its own civil war more than a decade ago.—Reuters
