The Curse of Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta [3]

[... continued from last post]

From the air, it must look as if a patch of skin has been removed from the face of the forest.

Activists with human rights groups are pressuring Shell to learn from past mistakes and treat this high-profile project, which affects 90 villages, as a chance to work better with communities. Michael Watts is advising NGOs on how to educate the local people about their rights. "For Shell to conduct business as usual would be a public relations disaster," Watts says. "Folks say, 'Look, these oil companies are making billions by taking out this black stuff from our territory—they should have some ethical and social responsibilities.'"

A cautionary tale unfolds at Oloibiri, where a wellhead, or "Christmas tree," stands in an overgrown plot. Nothing has flowed from it for years. A weathered sign states the facts: "Oloibiri Well No. 1. Drilled June, 1956. Depth: 12,000 feet (3,700 meters)." Nearby, a plaque dating from 2001 commemorates a presidential visit and the laying of a foundation stone for the Oloibiri Oil and Gas Research Institute, a projected government-funded museum and library. The stone is still there, but nothing else. A few local youths guard the site, not so much to protect it as to demand money from anyone who wants to snap a picture.

In the town of Oloibiri, whose population has dropped from 10,000 to fewer than 1,000 in the past 30 years, a dirt road passes between rough-hewn houses, some roofed with thatch, others with sheets of corroding metal. A small shop offers a few bananas and yams. Inside the only freshly painted structure, a lemon yellow, two-story house, Chief Osobere Inengite of the Ijaw tribe apologizes for the appearance of his town: "Oloibiri is supposed to be compared to Texas," he said. "I ask you, in Texas have the people in 50 years seen one second of darkness? But look here, we have no light, no water, no food, no jobs."

The chief looked prosperous. He was wearing an ornate black-and-purple robe, a chunky coral necklace, and a black derby, his outfit for a neighboring chief's coronation downriver in Nembe later that day. Like most chiefs, Inengite has a business—dredging sand from the river for roadbuilding. He always keeps an eye out for visitors to Nigeria's historic Well No. 1. He wants them to leave Oloibiri with a message for Shell, which owns the local oil fields. "Tell them to help us. Tell them to train 50 boys and girls from here for jobs," the chief pleaded. Then he sighed, "If we had never seen oil, we would have been better off."

Where does all the oil money go? That question is asked in every village, town, and city in the Niger Delta. The blame spreads, moving from the oil companies to a bigger, more elusive, target: the Nigerian government. Ever since it nationalized the oil industry in 1971, the government has controlled the energy purse. In a joint venture arrangement, the state, in the name of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, owns 55 to 60 percent of multinational oil operations onshore. The windfall in revenues from this arrangement has grown in real dollars from 250 million a year to more than 60 billion in 2005. During that time, even though the government has evolved from a military dictatorship to a democracy (the latest attempt at civil governance began in 1999), what has not changed is what an International Crisis Group report calls a "cancer of corruption." A Western diplomat quoted in the report was even more direct, referring to "the institutionalized looting of national wealth." The money involved is staggering. The head of Nigeria's anticorruption agency estimated that in 2003, 70 percent of oil revenues, more than 14 billion dollars, was stolen or wasted.

On paper, a mechanism does exist for distributing oil revenues somewhat fairly. The federal government retains roughly half and gives out the rest each month, on a sliding scale, to the 36 state governments. The core oil producers—Rivers, Delta, Bayelsa, and Akwa Ibom—receive the most. During the month I was in the delta, those four states divided up more than 650 million dollars.

But there is no discernible trickle down.

Newspaper articles and court cases document spectacular misuses of the money by military men and public office holders—such as the now imprisoned former Bayelsa governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha—who stash hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts to buy mansions in the U.S. and send their children to private schools in London. For the delta's 30 million people—most of whom struggle on less than a dollar a day—seeing this kind of money coming into their states with essentially none of it reaching them has created conditions for insurrection.

Nigeria's oil money won't keep coming, of course—perhaps another 40 years, the experts say. Natural gas is a fallback. Nigeria's reserves are estimated at 184 trillion cubic feet (five trillion cubic meters), good for an estimated 240 years of production at current levels. In the meantime, Antony Goldman says, "The government is following a simple plan for oil extraction: We've got to get what we can now, now."

Isaac Osuoka remembers the first time he saw frozen fish. It was the late 1970s, and he was five. A peddler caused a stir as he entered Osuoka's delta town of Oeliabi (now Akinima) with a carton of what he called ice fish. "We never had fish brought in from outside," said Osuoka, who now lives in Port Harcourt. "We had no idea what frozen fish meant. There were rumors that this fish was kept in a mortuary."

Frozen fish was a harbinger of the changes that would traumatize Osuoka's community. "As a boy, I could stroll to the rivers or back swamps with a rod and a net and come back with enough fish to feed my family," he recalled. "There was usually enough left over to sell, providing income for us to go to school." This bounty would not survive the coming of oil. Leaks from pipelines and wells, and the building of roads and canals, have disrupted the wetlands. "The degree and rate of degradation," the UN report warns, "are pushing the delta towards ecological disaster."

In 1996, Osuoka joined Environmental Rights Action, an advocacy group that helps communities defend their resources and learn their legal rights so they can avoid Oeliabi's fate. "We're seeing that environmental damages often happen silently, with their effects not coming out until years later," Osuoka said. "Today, there is not a single person in my community you could describe as a fisherman. We depend almost totally on frozen fish." At market stalls, a piece of frozen croaker or mackerel, most of it imported, goes for almost a dollar, unaffordable for most villagers.

The best environmental studies of the delta were done at least 30 years ago, according to Jimmy Adegoke, a Nigerian-born research scientist at the University of Missouri. To help fill the void, he and a team of researchers conducted fieldwork and a satellite-based study of the delta. They found that between 1986 and 2003, more than 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) of mangroves disappeared from the coast, largely because of land clearing and canal dredging for oil and gas exploration. "That is a significant amount given how valuable the mangrove ecosystem is," Adegoke said, referring to the coastal forest's high productivity for fish populations. "I think the loss of one acre is too much. You're wiping out the means for people to sustain themselves."

[to be continued...]

The Curse of Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta [2]

[... continued from last post]

"I can say this," Osuoka said firmly. "Nigeria was a much better place without oil."

Such a stark indictment would surely draw reaction from the government and oil companies. But repeated efforts to arrange on-the-record interviews with officialdom—oil company executives, the governor of Rivers state, the commander of the Joint Task Force, which is the military arm responsible for security in the delta—were foiled. Shell and Total, a French company, had offered tours of their facilities, but soon after I arrived in the delta, a spate of kidnappings of foreign oil workers, especially around Port Harcourt, prompted the multinationals to restrict the movements of personnel. Amid the violence, the oil companies have hunkered down in silence.

At the Finima meetinghouse, the men grew restless and, one by one, drifted into the dusk. Before he left, Felix Harry declared that faith in God would reward the community. That belief must be deep on Bonny Island, judging from the barrage of signs for revival meetings and church services along island roads. One church promoted PUSH: Pray Until Something Happens. Christianity has found fertile ground in the delta after Protestant missionaries arrived in force in the mid-1800s, and it is now the dominant faith.

Harry recited Psalm 91, praising God with a flourish: "He is my refuge and my fortress." We walked outside. There, stranded on the shore, were the village fishing boats, several dozen of them. Only a miracle would get them into the water.

Across the delta, people are hoping that someone will pay attention to the region's problems and intervene. The U.S. and western Europe, the major consumers of Nigerian oil, are watching closely. With the U.S. consulate in Lagos warning of a possible rebel attack on Bonny Island, diplomats are urging greater military security. Stockholders of the oil companies are asking why the situation has turned so perilous. Who is to blame? The answers are as complicated and murky as the water trails in the delta.

When the oil curse began with that first great gusher in the creekside village of Oloibiri, 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Port Harcourt, Nigeria was still a British colony. At independence in 1960, few observers expected that Nigeria would mature into an oil giant. But in subsequent decades, the oil companies, led by five multinational firms—Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Italy's Agip, and ExxonMobil and Chevron from the U.S.—transformed a remote, nearly inaccessible wetland into industrial wilderness. The imprint: 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) of pipelines, 159 oil fields, and 275 flow stations, their gas flares visible day and night from miles away.

No one can deny the sheer technological achievement of building an infrastructure to extract oil from a waterlogged equatorial forest. Intense swampy heat, nearly impenetrable mangrove thickets, swarming insects, and torrential downpours bedevil operations to this day. But mastering the physical environment has proved almost simple compared with dealing with the social and cultural landscape. The oil firms entered a region splintered by ethnic rivalries. More than two dozen ethnic groups inhabit the delta, among them the Ijaw, the largest group, and the Igbo, Itsekiri, Ogoni, Isoko, and Urhobo. These groups have a history of fighting over the spoils of the delta, from slaves to palm oil—and now, crude oil. The companies disturbed a fragile landscape that supported fishing and farming. Engineers and project managers constructing pipelines through a mangrove swamp, or laying roads through marshland, could disrupt spawning grounds or change the course of a stream, threatening a village's livelihood.

Recent reports by the United Nations Development Program and the International Crisis Group identify some of the questionable strategies employed by oil companies: paying off village chiefs for drilling rights; building a road or dredging a canal without an adequate environmental impact study; tying up compensation cases—for resource damages or land purchases—for years in court; dispatching security forces to violently break up protests; patching up oil leaks without cleaning up sites. "

After 50 years, the oil companies are still searching for a way to operate successfully with communities," says Antony Goldman, a London-based risk consultant. The delta is littered with failed projects started by oil companies and government agencies—water tanks without operating pumps, clinics with no medicine, schools with no teachers or books, fishponds with no fish.

"The companies didn't consult with villagers," says Michael Watts, director of the African Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. "They basically handed out cash to chiefs. It wasn't effective at all."

Last summer, skittish oil prices hit $78 a barrel, partly because of an attack on a Shell flow station. The high prices more than offset production losses caused by the growing instability, helping earn Shell and the other multinationals record profits in 2006. Meanwhile, more oil fields continue to open, many of them offshore where the infrastructure, though far more expensive than on land, is much safer from sabotage and theft. The deepwater fields are attracting aggressive new investors as well. China, India, and South Korea, all energy-hungry, have begun buying stakes in Nigeria's offshore blocks. "Most Western companies in Nigeria will find it difficult to compete, especially with China," Goldman says. That's because oil purchases by the Chinese come with their commitment to finance large infrastructure projects, such as rehabilitating a railroad line.

The largest new petroleum endeavor on the delta is taking shape along the Nun River, a tributary of the Niger. Operated by Shell, the Gbaran Integrated Oil and Gas Project, scheduled to begin producing in 2008, will encompass 15 new oil and gas fields, more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) of pipeline, and a sizable gas-gathering plant. New roads are already gashing the forest. Mounds of long black pipes await burial. Near a bank of the Nun, Nigerian soldiers crouch behind a ring of sandbags, a .60-caliber machine gun facing the road as they guard the entrance to the construction site of the gas plant. Cranes and bulldozers crawl over a cleared space large enough to fit two shopping malls. From the air, it must look as if a patch of skin has been removed from the face of the forest.

[To be continued...]

The Curse of Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta [1]

I read the following narrative with tears in my eyes. It's an article written by an outsider (Tom O'Neill) in the February 2006 issue of National Geographic. I stumbled on it quite by accident, while gathering data for my research. It's a long, long piece, one that I initially thought to truncate for readers' convenience. I told myself I'd leave in only the most important bits and probably throw in the URL for anyone who was interested in reading the whole piece. As I read on however, I found every word of the article to be at once gripping and heart-wrenching. So I've decided to break it into as many parts as necessary till it's exhausted.

Read on:

The Niger Delta holds some of the world's richest oil deposits, yet Nigerians living there are poorer than ever, violence is rampant, and the land and water are fouled. What went wrong?

Oil fouls everything in southern Nigeria. It spills from the pipelines, poisoning soil and water. It stains the hands of politicians and generals, who siphon off its profits. It taints the ambitions of the young, who will try anything to scoop up a share of the liquid riches—fire a gun, sabotage a pipeline, kidnap a foreigner.

Nigeria had all the makings of an uplifting tale: poor African nation blessed with enormous sudden wealth. Visions of prosperity rose with the same force as the oil that first gushed from the Niger Delta's marshy ground in 1956. The world market craved delta crude, a "sweet," low-sulfur liquid called Bonny Light, easily refined into gasoline and diesel. By the mid-1970s, Nigeria had joined OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), and the government's budget bulged with petrodollars.

Everything looked possible—but everything went wrong.

Dense, garbage-heaped slums stretch for miles. Choking black smoke from an open-air slaughterhouse rolls over housetops. Streets are cratered with potholes and ruts. Vicious gangs roam school grounds. Peddlers and beggars rush up to vehicles stalled in gas lines. This is Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil hub, capital of Rivers state, smack-dab in the middle of oil reserves bigger than the United States' and Mexico's combined. Port Harcourt should gleam; instead, it rots.

Beyond the city, within the labyrinth of creeks, rivers, and pipeline channels that vein the delta—one of the world's largest wetlands—exists a netherworld. Villages and towns cling to the banks, little more than heaps of mud-walled huts and rusty shacks. Groups of hungry, half-naked children and sullen, idle adults wander dirt paths. There is no electricity, no clean water, no medicine, no schools. Fishing nets hang dry; dugout canoes sit unused on muddy banks. Decades of oil spills, acid rain from gas flares, and the stripping away of mangroves for pipelines have killed off fish.

Nigeria has been subverted by the very thing that gave it promise—oil, which accounts for 95 percent of the country's export earnings and 80 percent of its revenue. In 1960, agricultural products such as palm oil and cacao beans made up nearly all Nigeria's exports; today, they barely register as trade items, and Africa's most populous country, with 130 million people, has gone from being self-sufficient in food to importing more than it produces. Because its refineries are constantly breaking down, oil-rich Nigeria must also import the bulk of its fuel. But even then, gas stations are often closed for want of supply. A recent United Nations report shows that in quality of life, Nigeria rates below all other major oil nations, from Libya to Indonesia. Its annual per capita income of $1,400 is less than that of Senegal, which exports mainly fish and nuts. The World Bank categorizes Nigeria as a "fragile state," beset by risk of armed conflict, epidemic disease, and failed governance.

The sense of relentless crisis has deepened since last year, when a secretive group of armed, hooded rebels operating under the name of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, intensified attacks on oil platforms and pumping stations, most operated by Shell Nigeria. Militants from MEND and other groups have killed soldiers and security guards, kidnapped foreign oil workers, set off car bombs in the delta city of Warri to protest the visit of Chinese oil executives, and, to show off their reach, overrun an oil rig 40 miles (64 kilometers) offshore in the Gulf of Guinea. The attacks have shut down the daily flow of more than 500,000 barrels of oil, leading the country to tap offshore reserves to make up for lost revenue. With each disruption, the daily price of oil on the world market climbed. According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, escalating violence in a region teeming with angry, frustrated people is creating a "militant time bomb."

From a potential model nation, Nigeria has become a dangerous country, addicted to oil money, with people increasingly willing to turn to corruption, sabotage, and murder to get a fix of the wealth. The cruelest twist is that half a century of oil extraction in the delta has failed to make the lives of the people better. Instead, they are poorer still, and hopeless.

Every day at Bonny Island, oceangoing tankers line up in Cawthorne Channel like massive parade floats. They're each waiting to fill up with close to a million barrels of the coveted Bonny Light, drawing the oil from a nearby export terminal. Ships have been gathering at this 15-mile-long (24 kilometers) barrier island since the mid-1500s, when slave trading between West Africa and the New World began. Beneath the contemporary cacophony—the yammer of motorcycle taxis, the call of Christian preachers from the market stalls, the throb of drums and guitars from boomboxes inside shacks—strains of anger and sorrow echo the tragedy of exploitation.

"It's not fair," Felix James Harry muttered in a meetinghouse in the village of Finima on the western end of the island, close to the oil and gas complex. "We can hardly catch fish anymore. Surviving is very hard." Harry, a 30-year-old father of two children, should have been in his canoe this afternoon, throwing out nets to snare crayfish and sardines. But he was sitting in an airless concrete-block shelter with half a dozen other fishermen, none of whom had much to do.

Their fishing community once stood on the other side of a small inlet, where fuel storage tanks the size of cathedral domes now loom, and where the superstructure of a liquefied natural gas plant juts higher than any tree in the forest. The relocation of Finima in the early 1990s jarred loose the community's economic moorings. "We can't support our families anymore," Harry said.

Houses in the new village are tightly packed, leaving little room for gardens. Windows look out on walls. In this claustrophobic setting, the men talked about nature. "The forest where the gas plant is protected us from the east wind," Solomon David, the community chairman, said. "Now, the rain and wind ruin our thatched roofs every three months. They lasted more than twice as long before." Another fisherman mentioned how construction and increased ship traffic changed local wave patterns, causing shore erosion and forcing fish into deeper water. "We would need a 55-horsepower engine to get to those places." No one in the room could afford such an engine.

The meetinghouse had no electricity, but a battery-powered wall clock, the only decoration, showed that another day was ebbing away. Forced to give up fishing, the young men of the village put their hope in landing a job with the oil industry. But offers are scarce. "People from the outside get all the jobs," Harry said, alluding to members of Nigeria's majority ethnic groups—the Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, and Fulani—who are the country's political and economic elite. "We have diploma holders, but they have nothing to do."

Grievances crowded the dim room. Bernard Cosmos, a strapping young man in a striped polo shirt, spoke out: "I have a degree in petrochemical engineering from Rivers State University in Port Harcourt. I've applied many times with the oil companies for a good job. It's always no. They tell me that I can work in an oil field as an unskilled laborer but not as an engineer. I have no money to get other training."

Isaac Asume Osuoka, director of Social Action, Nigeria, believes that callousness toward the people of the delta stems from their economic irrelevance. "With all the oil money coming in, the state doesn't need taxes from people. Rather than being a resource for the state, the people are impediments. There is no incentive anymore for the government to build schools or hospitals.

"I can say this," Osuoka said firmly. "Nigeria was a much better place without oil."

[To be continued...]

Quote of the day

"It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well."
- Rene Descartes

I agree.

Deluded about God?

It was this year's Annual Chaplaincy Lecture at the University of Nottingham. The lecture consisted of a single presentation by a Professor of Theology from Oxford University, titled "Deluded about God?: Richard Dawkins and the meaning of life". The presentation was essentially a response to Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion', published in 2006. Richard Dawkins is a British biologist who has obviously acquired too much knowledge for his own good. In his book he argues that the whole idea of God is nonsense. Hear him: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who read it will become atheists when they put it down". Needless to say, he is an atheist himself.

Dawkins' book stresses four major points:

• Belief in God is irrational
  
• Science shows us there is no God
  
• Faith in God can be explained away on scientific grounds
  
• Faith in God leads to violence
  

Dawkins tries to prove by his own intrinsically faulted theories that faith in God is infantile, or childish (I personally don't see how that is a problem, as Jesus himself said that whosoever will enter the Kingdom of God must become like a child). The logic of Dawkins' argument goes something like this: There is no God. But lots of people believe in God. This is a delusion. So how can we account for so many people being deluded? Conclusion: Belief in God is a virus of the mind.

There are just a couple of things wrong with this reasoning: One, it is a prime example of what philosophers might call a 'cyclical argument', i.e. it really has no end and no beginning. On what premise did he come to his first conclusive statement that there is no God? Two, even if we were all to accept this warped reasoning pattern, then it would necessarily follow that atheism – which in itself is a form of belief; belief in no God – is also a virus of the mind.

The theologian giving the presentation at the lecture was clearly taking a stance against all of Dawkins' claims, trying to explain to a mixed crowd of over five hundred people that the claims have no substance. His task was not one which I envied; in fact, at some point I started to pity him, because of the sheer magnitude of the opposition – spoken and unspoken – in the room. How exactly do you explain God, especially to people who believe that even if He exists, he is not on their side? Being an intellectual discourse, the professor had to try as much as possible to present the facts without coming across as a preacher. I could see he was struggling. The thrust of his argument was this: Dawkins is wrong in stating categorically that there is no God. While it may not be possible to prove without a shadow of doubt that there is a God, it is also impossible to prove 100% (like Dawkins attempts to do) that there is no God.

It is interesting to note that not all of Dawkins' colleagues are quite as deluded as he is. Many renowned scientists all over the world accept the limitations of science and recognise the place of God in this cosmos. For all of Dawkins' ignorance, at least he did succeed with something. Without meaning to, he's actually done God a favour. "The God Delusion" since its publication has generated so much controversy and elicited countless responses, including this one. The controversy has stirred up a hunger within people to search for the truth. The truth is that everyone – including Richard Dawkins – has a deep-seated need to find God. God is the missing piece in the puzzle of human lives. To further complicate the human quandary, that piece is at the very centre of the puzzle, so that the puzzle is abstract and meaningless without it.

In this part of the world, people have so many questions about God: "What kind of God allows so much pain and suffering?" "If there is a God, why does He allow children to go hungry in Africa?" (Even the hungry children themselves in Africa don't ask God such questions!) "How did everything begin?" "What are we all here for?" "What is the point of living?" The controversy generated in the wake of Dawkins' book has brought these questions again to the fore, and people with answers have a greater opportunity than before to share what they know about God. Hopefully everyone with questions will find the right answer.

After about forty five minutes of talking and answering questions from the mostly antagonistic audience, the Oxford professor finally took his seat. A soft-spoken gentleman was then called upon to give the closing remark. Slowly and calmly he read out the words of Acts 17: 22-23: So Paul took his stand in the open space at the Areopagus and laid it out for them. "It is plain to see that you Athenians take your religion seriously. When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, to the god nobody knows. I'm here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you're dealing with." Considering that this was supposed to be a strictly academic meeting, he could not have made his point in a more subtle way.

Of course, by now, you know my stance. In the course of his argument, the professor expounded a lot of theories to arrive at his conclusion, but of all that he said, one statement remains indelible in my mind: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen – not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else".

"Working in Africa"

A friend commented on the piece I wrote about freewriting (see the post "Getting into the habit of writing" of January 2008), asking for all the pieces I implicitly promised to deliver via this blog from that time onwards. Well, my friends, life has been on fast forward for me in the last few weeks; so fast that I've gone for days on end without even remembering that such a thing as blogging exists. Honestly. My circumstances have changed drastically within the last month – admittedly for the better, but the change process has been harrowing. I know everyone of us can come up with excuses for why we renege on our promises and resolutions, so I don't mean for that to constitute an excuse, really. I am guilty.

Now that I'm more settled, I'll give you the gist of something that's been on my mind for the past few days. About two weeks ago, a colleague who's doing postgraduate research in another university informed me about a seminar that was planned to hold in his school, titled 'Working in Africa'. One to be excited at the mere mention of any development-related activity in Africa, I quickly inquired about how to register. Although the seminar was ideally aimed at the university staff and students, I managed to worm my way in on the grounds of the interest I expressed to the organisers. So it was that I sat in on this meeting to listen to presentations of what would hopefully be stimulating ideas on how to make Africa work.

I guess in my mind I must have read the seminar title backwards, because the seminar turned out to be all about what's in Africa for the university. Four out of five presentations discussed ways to make the university more attractive to prospective students from Africa. So it was not that they were discussing how to make a contribution; they were rather interested in strategising to gain more income and global recognition through increased enrolment of African students. The first speaker went over statistics of African students enrolled currently enrolled on various programmes at the university. Of course several African countries were represented, but I didn't get past the first three before the alarms went off in my brain.

Nigeria was top of the list with 64 students registered in that UK university. The next country to Nigeria was Kenya with 19 students, followed by Ghana with 15 students! The presentations that followed the first one carried on in similar business fashion, the overriding aim being to measure the university's success so far in recruiting bright young talents from Africa, and devise means of perfecting the recruitment strategy so that the university's pockets can get even fatter with international fees. I'll let you on to a little secret, in case you didn't know: international students in the UK pay over 4 times – yes, 4 times – what 'home' students pay. The only reason a UK university will chase a Nigerian student desperately is to collect all that cash. Why, a single Nigerian student is financially worth at least four UK students. See?

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with leaving Nigeria to study abroad. The question I've started to ask myself is, why do people really leave? In my opinion, the fact that Nigerians hardly ever return home after studying abroad gives an insight into people's real reasons for leaving in the first place. I've always been aware of this fact, but the huge disparity between Nigerian students and students from other African countries in the example given above has set me thinking again. South Africa, for instance, has only 1 student enrolled at the same university this session. That's a difference of 63 from Nigeria! I know this is only one case, but from what I see and hear around me, it is not likely to be the only case.

I will answer the argument that Nigeria has a higher population than those other countries by saying that migration, especially for educational purposes, is absolute, not relative. There are 140 million people in Nigeria, but I don't know that up to 10 million of those can even dream of showing up at a foreign embassy to apply for student visas. How many of those millions even have proper primary school education? My point: There's nothing to say that the total number of educated 'elites' in Nigeria is 4 times higher (64/15, ratio 4:1) than those in Ghana. Probable, yes; certain, no.

In any case, this is not the time to be making excuses. The point is that we need to wake up. People, Nigeria is NOT the worst country in Africa! So why is it that Nigerians seem to be more desperate to 'check out' of their country than other, poorer, nations? It would be fantastic if all those 64 Nigerian students would return home at the end of their education to contribute to rebuilding the ruins of our nation. That is the only way we as a people can realise net profit from this desperate student–for–money transaction initiated by foreign universities. Otherwise, we will continue to be taken advantage of by people who prey on our weaknesses to make themselves stronger. Talk about 21^st century slave trade.

I'm very familiar with the argument often put forth that Nigeria does not have anything worthwhile to offer her returning professionals and intellectuals, so it would be a shameful waste for anyone to go back after studying. What do I have to say to that? Well, that's a story for another day.

The height of civilisation

I was on the bus to school a couple of days ago. As the bus approached a stop, I spotted two old ladies waiting, looking expectantly toward the bus as it chugged toward them. That, apparently, was the bus they were waiting to catch. As is the norm here, they patiently waited for those alighting from the bus to do so before attempting to get on. (Anybody familiar with the scene of crowds rushing to enter a still-moving yellow-and-black striped minibus, while half of the passengers inside struggle to get off amidst the mayhem?) Anyway, the ladies must not have been familiar with the route, because they paused to clarify their direction with the driver. It turned out they had the wrong bus, and in a brief exchange that lasted less than sixty seconds, a hundred and one things came into focus for me.

I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the long bus, so I couldn't quite catch every word of the conversation up front. However, I didn't need to hear it to know that it was a pleasant one indeed. A very polite one. The driver patiently, in a normal tone of voice, explained to the ladies that this was not their bus, and gave them detailed directions to where they would catch the correct bus. The ladies obviously appreciated the time and effort he took to help them out, and they were literally smiling their thanks to him. As they got off the bus and went on their way, they turned back to wave more thanks to the driver. Overall, the whole episode made a very positive impression on me.

Instantly I recollected my experiences with danfoe drivers (those with the yellow-and-black striped minibuses) in Lagos, Nigeria. Being an experienced danfoe passenger, I have witnessed all sorts. Shouting matches between driver and passenger; insult-hurling between driver and conductor; fits of argument between conductor and passenger; heated brawling between passenger and passenger; the works. Sitting there on the bus 17 to Nottingham City, my mind reconstructed the incident I had just witnessed between a danfoe driver and any two people looking for the bus to Shangisha under the sweltering Lagos sun. Sweating profusely beneath the merciless heat and tired from wandering aimlessly round the bus park, they would eventually sum up the courage to ask the nearest danfoe driver/conductor for directions - not very politely, I might add. Of course, the reaction from the driver/conductor will vary from person to person, depending on a range of factors. For the purpose of illustration I'm just going to paint pictures of the possible best case and worst case scenarios.

Best case: The driver sizes up the two wanderers, his face void of all expression. Then, deciding that he can spare them some of his precious time and breath, he lazily points the way to them. The two manage a 'thank you' between them; at least they got off relatively easy. Worst case: The conductor reluctantly breaks off the noisy conversation he's been having with the conductor of the next bus to listen to the wanderers' tale. It's not quite clear if he's really paying attention to what they're asking, or if he just wants to dismiss them as quickly as possible so he can carry on his idle conversation. He flippantly, somewhat rudely, tells the wanderers he has no idea where the bus going to Shangisha might be 'loading', and promptly turns away to continue with his very important conversation. The wanderers take the hint and walk off, wondering if asking the groundnut seller hawking her wares between buses might yield better results. Of course, saying thank you to the conductor is not even an option in this case.

My heart has often bled at the way we treat ourselves in Nigeria, our motherlan'. The general unspoken rule seems to be that you don't have to treat with respect people you don't know. I see this rule played out almost everywhere I go: on the danfoe bus; in the cornershop across the road from my house; in the banking hall of 'customer-friendly' banks; everywhere. In my opinion, most of us have little or no regard for the 'human-ness' of others. Respect doesn't start and stop at calling your next-door neighbour 'Aunty Caro' or 'Uncle Joe', just because they're a couple of years older than you are. After all, what's the point in making a statement like, 'Aunty Caro, your head no correct'? You get my point.

Respect transcends age barriers, class, status, job description, family ties, relationships. Respect at its highest level reckons with everybody it comes across, just because people are who they are. When you can treat an absolute stranger with the same level of dignity you accord your best friend, then you have respect. When citizens of a country can break past all barriers to reckon with one another and treat each other politely and respectfully, that country is on the road to deliverance. Naturally, the country I have in mind as I speak is none other than Nigeria.

My submission is this: the sign of a country's civilisation is not in her wealth, her fame, her military might or even the degree of technological advancement she can boast of. In my observation, the true sign of a country's civilisation is the politeness, or mutual respect, shown by one citizen to another. That is what gives meaning and dignity to our fragile human existence. It is the antidote to the apathy that preys on our national consciousness and strips us of our collective identity. It is the ultimate sign of any country's coming of age, the very height of any people's civilisation. It is spelt R-E-S-P-E-C-T.