The Niger Delta serves as a cautionary model for new oil economies

Evidence

Twenty years ago, Saro-Wiwa foresaw this dire turn in an essay called “The Coming War in the Delta.” “The Delta people,” he warned, “must be allowed to join in the lucrative sale of crude oil … only in this way can the cataclysm that is building up in the Delta be avoided. Is anyone listening?” 93 In the aftermath of his “judicial murder” the wider world listened for a time, but one wonders who exactly is listening anymore. Apart, that is, from the Mongolian leader who, when oil was recently discovered in his territory, declared, “[W]e do not want to become another Nigeria.” Fresh oil strikes in Ghana and Uganda have prompted similar responses: exhilaration tempered by fears of letting loose unanswerable, unspeakable forces that rip through the socioenvironmental fabric, leaving behind a Niger Delta redux. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 354

Categorization

• XREF: Nigeria’s fall below Haiti on human development (ch21) is now a global benchmark other petro-states fear replicating — fear of the resource curse from ch14.
• QUESTION: Which state actually avoids the Nigerian pattern? Ghana and Uganda are named as at-risk — worth pursuing comparative cases of hydrocarbon discovery that avoided the curse.