Strategy Page: Nigeria is going from bad to worse;
MEND is not the only armed militia to come out of the 20 million people living in the Niger River Delta. But it is the most militant, determined and effective. After only a year, MEND has cut nearly a third of the countrys oil production. That’s a big deal, and the rest of Nigeria is paying attention.
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The oil industry in the Delta is now half a century old, and the people in the Delta believe they have been screwed. Most of the money from the oil (nearly half a trillion dollars worth) has left the Delta, and what little oil money that remained, has been stolen by local politicians. The standard of living in the Delta has actually fallen since the oil was discovered. This was followed, in 1960, by the departure of the British colonial government. Nigerians in general, and the Delta peoples in particular, now realize that the problem is local. It’s Nigerians that have stolen or misused the oil wealth. Organizations like MEND want to make things better, although MEND is run by the same kind of thieves and crooks that run the government. Given a choice, MEND appears as the lesser of two evils. Not much of a choice, but people are angry, and out of patience. It’s an ugly situation, and not likely to turn out well. This is especially true because there are now splinter groups in MEND, largely the result of arguments over how ransom money should be split up. While attacking oil facilities gets the most attention from the government, MEND gets most of its revenue from ransoms, followed closely by selling stolen oil and various criminal scams.
the sad thing is, Nigeria is far from the only 3rd world country where national treasure is being squandered by armed thugs and tin-pot dictators….my ex-army buddies and I have been discussing what could possibly be done to change some of these scenarios….between us, we have been on many missions in Africa and the ME, and at the end of the day, a big waste of time….what is needed is a new way of thinking…..to ensure that there are no more Somalia’s, Rwanda’s, Congo’s etc., it is time to create a trans-national army, consisting of the most ruthless, violent soldiers on this planet…armed to the teeth, and with a mandate to take no prisoners….one shithole at a time, destroy everything to do with the corrupt regime….by the time this force hit it’s 2nd or 3rd country, the tin-pots would be ready to negotiate….OR DIE!…no more mollycoddling these murderous bastards
The question in the nattering classes the last decade has been; “Why is Africa been such a perrenial basket case after the western colonial government’s were ceded to Africans?
It seems that the more aid money the west squanders on helping depressed Africans the stronger and more violent the war lord class who exploit them get.
I’m sure even Bob Geldof would not risk a summer home in many of the African nations he pan handles for.
The problem as I see it, and as is exposed in the above article, is that for too long the only interest in Africa has come from profiteering cartels who buy off the local corrupt govt./dictator/war lord and exploit the nation’s resources taking all of that wealth from the nation and leaving just enough to pay off the local strong men.
This cycle has created a local political/ruling class culture which have defined state craft as a simple matter of seizing power by force or stealth, holding it with brutal repression and then pimping out this control to foreign resource exploiters….unscrupulous London and Paris banking cartels play a big part in this problem.
Of course public education and religious/moral counseling are not allowed by these governments because a dumb, amoral and reliant population is east to control and exploit…this explains why either Fascism or Marxism seem to rule Africa
Normally I would say that the way to deal with this is to enable the people to revolt…but that does not seem to be an answer when the population really don’t know what they are fighting for ( never known real democratic freedom or the affluemce of free market capitalism) and they have been war torn and repressed for so long it is taken as the natural way of things by most people.
Mass education is the key weapon to delever a death blow to African tyranny…but how to deliver it?
Mass education is an interesting problem in Africa, the West has been at it since the British Empire and we’ve gotten nowhere.
Places like Nigeria have an amazing resistance to Western culture. They just aren’t interested enough to make it work, and fall back into the lowest common denominator rule-by-thug every time.
I’m not going to blather about the equal validity of the local culture. Ours is clearly better, just ask all the former Africans who live in Canada.
But we are having trouble selling it to the locals back home. So we end up with unrest. Businesses like oil wells, which proceed quite civilly elsewhere and enrich everyone (stocks you Lefties, STOCKS!), end up as armed camps which enrich only a few thugocrats.
Short of Kingstonlad’s fire and the sword solution, with an everlasting garrison thereafter I hasten to add, its difficult to see a way out.