A Swamp Full of Dollars [Kindle Edition]

Michael Peel, the former West Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, has written a fascinating book. Part travelogue, part insight into big oil and the multinationals that produce and market it, the book is also a story of admiration for Nigeria with all its chaos, corruption and injustice. Peel travels the (often dangerous) world of the Niger delta where Shell, AGIP Chevron and other companies are tapping one of the more important reserves of crude oil in the world. The light, sweet crude is readily refined into petrol and there are considerable reserves in nearby Sao Tome, Gabon and Cape Verde. Yet the vast oil revenue that has come to the Federal Government (and the states) of Nigeria has done little to raise the living standard of the poor people who live in the delta. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pollution from the oil and the disinclination of the oil companies to clear up have turned the delta into something of a wasteland. And the story of theft by successive Nigerian government officials is staggering. Yet at the end of his story, Michael Peel is optimistic. Nigeria is a new country; its injustices and problems and abuses of power are more open, more blatant but in a way more honest. Legitimacy is really longevity, as it is in the West. People in newer countries can offer fresh ways of thinking and a hunger for reform. As the need for oil grows, and the need for this reformation, we shall surely hear a lot more about Nigeria.

Some say the history of crude oil extraction has a dark and seedy side; most say nowhere is it more glaringly visible than in Nigeria - a confused ex-colonial outpost with a complex ethnic and tribal mix turned into a unified nation and given its independence by the British some five decades ago.

In this candid book, Michael Peel, a former FT journalist who spent many-a-year in Nigeria, presents a warts n' all account of this most chaotic and often fascinating of African countries shaped by oil, driven by oil and in more ways than one - held to ransom by oil. The author dwells on how the discovery of crude oil has not been quite the bonanza for its peoples who remain among the poorest and most deprived in this world. End result is growing dissent and chaos.

The book has its 220 pages split into three parts, comprising of nine chapters, containing a firsthand and first rate narration of the violence, confusion, partial anarchy and corruption in Nigeria where its people who deserve better have to contend with depravity and pollution. Some have risen up and abide by their own rule - the rule of force, rather than the law.

If the reader seeks insight into this complex country, Peel provides it. If the reader seeks a travel guide - this is one candid book. If the reader seeks info on what went wrong in Nigeria from a socioeconomic standpoint, the author duly obliges. Hence, this multifaceted work, for which Peel deserves top marks, is a much needed book. It addresses an information gap about a young nation, its serious challenges, addiction to its oil endowment and the sense of injustice the crude stuff creates for those who observe the oil bonanza from a distance but cannot get their hands into the cookie jar.

Peel notes that the chaos of Niger delta is as much a story of colonial misadventure, as it is about corporate mismanagement, corruption in the bureaucracy and a peculiar and often misplaced sense of entitlement that creates friction between the country's haves and have nots.

Drop into the mix, an unfolding ecological disaster and you get a swamp full of dollars whose inhabitants range from impromptu militias with creative names to Shell, from terrorists to ExxonMobil, from leaking pipelines to illegal crude sales. It demands to be read and I am happy to recommend it to a very wide readership base not just those interested in African history and that of crude oil.

If you want a feel for Nigeria, this is the book for you. It captures both the wildness and buccaneering spirit of the Nigerian character, extolling the openness and energy of its people and at the same time probing gently and sensitively at its tender underbelly. All the time making comparisons that serve to place the anarchy and corruption in objective context. It's all too easy to make a special case of the Nigerian situation because of its seeming excesses and to miss what is special - that a vibrant, energetic body of people can live in such an aspic-like state seemingly unable to shrug off the parasites that drain it. Mr Peel does neither. In coruscating style, he describes an arc through Nigeria's short history - by the end you see a country that (like other African countries) has only really ever existed as a glint in the eye of the parasites who live on it.

The book reads like a boys own story (even for one who spent the first 22 years of his life in Nigeria) and yet the author has a lot of well-considered insights to make. He makes frequent asides about international capital and talks as if places like Nigeria might be early warning signs of a coming Tsunami. He never quite succeeds (at least for me) in showing how but arguably he doesn't need to - in early 2012 the air is full of portent and the signs are everywhere (a place like Nigeria must feel redolent with them).

Somewhere towards the end of the book, he recounts the expression of hopelessness from a militant lamenting the fact that the white man is not still in charge. In what I consider Mr Peel's most astute observation, he ascribes it to ` ...a sense of inferiority and even self-loathing founded on centuries of exploitation and grotesque power relationships'. This diagnosis is a plausible explanation for this giant's inability to rid itself of its pestilent cargo. It is to Mr Peel's credit that he tries so hard to look at what he is seeing - coming from where he is coming from, it's no small feat. This book places him in the same space as Kapuscinski - I hope, like him, Mr Peel goes on and on. As we used to say back then - `more jelleen to your elbow'