A free-for-all over oil money in Nigeria

KEGBARA DERE, Nigeria – The fire burned strong for 45 days and 45 nights, blanketing the village with ash and torching the young cassava plants in Ada Baniba’s field. As she weeded, the flames flared out of the leaking oil pipeline behind her.

It wasn’t that no one could put the fire out. It was that no one would


The tale of Kegbara Dere’s fire shows just how desperate the long-neglected communities of Nigeria’s oil-rich river delta have become.

The average Nigerian still survives on less than $2 a day, despite the country’s $20 billion rise in oil exports to the United States over the past five years. And so Kegbara Dere villagers saw the fire less as an environmental crisis than as a negotiating tool