As Gas Fires Burn, Devastated Nigeria Pays Horrific Price to Ensure Profits of Big Oil | Black Agenda Report

As Gas Fires Burn, Devastated Nigeria Pays Horrific Price to Ensure Profits of Big Oil

08 Feb 2012

🖨️ Print Article

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Big Oil ranks among the most profitable enterprises on earth. But capitalist corporations don't pay their own costs – these are borne by the people and their environments. Few have paid a higher price than the oil-producing regions of Nigeria, now among the most devastated and toxic wastelands on the planet.

As Gas Fires Burn, Devastated Nigeria Pays Horrific Price to Ensure Profits of Big Oil

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Since its nominal independence from Britain in the 1960s, the West African nation of Nigeria has been the scene of a vast, murderous and ecocidal wave of corporate crime. The leading culprits are the continuing corporate criminal conspiracies of Big Oil, including Shell, Texaco, Mobil, Conoco, BP, Total, and others, aided by a succession of compliant military and civilian governments, armies and police forces. The job of capitalist corporations is to maximize profits by externalizing, or shedding their costs onto other entities, and Big Oil has been massively successful in Nigeria.

With most of Nigeria's oil concentrated in the Niger Delta and offshore, Big Oil has extracted conservatively at least $600 billion, more likely trillions in profits. Big Oil's costs are borne by the people, the lands and the waters of Nigeria's oil producing regions, which they have transformed into an impoverished and toxic wasteland where fishermen can't fish, where farmers can't farm, where the very rain and air are poisonous and the water undrinkable, where hospitals, electricity and schools are mostly unavailable. The oil producing regions are crisscrossed by a network of high-temperature, high-pressure, ill-maintained and chronically leaking pipes which annually spill an amount comparable to what BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster did in the Gulf of Mexico. Nigerians have paid this price every year for more than a generation.

But unlike the Deepwater Horizon disaster, homicide and ecocide committed by Big Oil in West Africa gets little notice in the world's media. A December Shell/BP oil spill that the criminals claim was only 40,000 barrels was virtually ignored outside West Africa. A separate offshore gas fire, which initially killed two workers when a rig exploded, has turned a region of open water into a lake of fire up to 1400 degrees Farenheit that is burning well into its second month. While Chevron oil officials claim it will be another month before efforts to put out the fire are successful, even more nearby communities are finding their water undrinkable, their air unbreathable, and local clinics thronged with environmentally induced diseases and disorders.

The profits of Big Oil in West Africa, which now supplies nearly a fifth of US oil imports, has and continue to poison millions of Africans. It has turned their crops, their waters, their environment and even their children into sacrifices on the altar of corporate profit. And this horrendous price is only to bring the oil out of the ground and onto the world market, not the cost of burning it and adding its carbon to the atmosphere, but costs which are also paid by someone other than Big Oil.

The long term survival of West Africa, and of humanity will only be ensured when we stop paying the homicidal and ecocidal cost of Big Oil. We believe that day is coming. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com .

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120208_bd_big_oil_ravages_nigeria.mp3

More Stories

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Radio December 19, 2025
19 Dec 2025
In this week’s segment, we present a conversation about birthright citizenship, its benefits to Black people, and why it is under attack. But first, we hear from a U.S. activist who recently traveled…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
John Parker on Solidarity with Venezuela
19 Dec 2025
John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice In Los Angeles and a leading member of the Struggle for Socialism Party. He is joining us from Los Angeles to discuss…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley , Renee Johnston , Jared Ball
Birthright Citizenship and the African World
19 Dec 2025
Margaret Kimberley was recently a guest on the Black Liberation Media program, Saturdays with Renee, with Renee Johnston and Jared Ball. They discussed the issue of birthright citizenship in light of…
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor , Ahmed Kaballo
Struggling for Sovereignty: Sudan After Two Years of Civil War
17 Dec 2025
After two years of civil war, Sudan is now the site of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. However, as in most conflicts in the Global South, colonial and neocolonial history are a large part…
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Turtle Island Liberation Front Warning for Activists
17 Dec 2025
Arrests of members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front are the latest in a decades-long effort to criminalize the left and to make examples of anyone who might fit the profile of being a "…