A Swamp Full of Dollars, Crude World, The Squeeze

At the beginning of his book about “pipelines and paramilitaries at Nigeria’s oil frontier”, Michael Peel travels to a place believed to be the source of oil in the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, off the coast. He manages to get to the spot where some day an oil company will begin drilling. Once that happens, Sao Tome’s bucolic charms will vanish

Peel, a Financial Times correspondent, takes us to the country that has become synonymous with continuous gas flaring, where massacres occur routinely, where the oil legacy includes the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists, where the economy is drained by overwhelming, pervasive corruption, where stoned militia steal oil in ramshackle boats racing through creeks, and where armed men claim control over resources. Each time they abduct an employee of an oil company, production declines, and oil prices spike higher. Peel delivers a gory account of the sepulchral landscape with enormous sympathy for the people who live there, and has nothing but contempt for the authorities who have brought the Niger Delta to this pass.

Oil and democracy, it would seem, don’t mix. When Dick Cheney ran Halliburton, the controversial company with interests in oil industry services, he famously remarked that it was unfortunate that the good lord did not place all the world’s oil beneath the soil of democratic countries.

The Independent