Mass oil revenues left Nigeria ranked below Haiti on human development

Evidence

What could and should have been for the Niger Delta’s oil minorities the beginnings of great promise augured instead a poisonous future. Who could have dreamed in 1958 that four decades and $600 billion of oil revenues later, some 90 million Nigerians would be surviving on less than a dollar a day? And that Nigeria would rank below Haiti and Congo on the United Nations Human Development Index, a composite gauge of life expectancy, education, and income? Even those figures don’t capture the plight of the Ogoni and the delta’s forty other oil micro-minorities: their environment has become so despoiled that supplementing that daily dollar with untainted crops and fish has become untenable. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 297

Categorization

• CANDY: The 1958 synchrony — Achebe publishing, first tanker sailing, independence ahead — with the subsequent reversal to below-Haiti is a spare, striking anecdote.
• SHARE: Good for someone teaching Achebe or Nigerian literary history: the same year Things Fall Apart appeared, Nigeria’s first oil export left Port Harcourt.
• XREF: connects to: Oil wealth fails to translate into human development in most petro-states — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 274