Africa: Next US Oil War Venue

The Pentagon does not admit that a ring of permanent US military bases is operating or under construction throughout Africa. But nobody doubts the American military buildup on the African continent is well underway.

From oil rich northern Angola up to Nigeria, from the Gulf of Guinea to Morocco and Algeria, from the Horn of Africa down to Kenya and Uganda, and over the pipeline routes from Chad to Cameroon in the west, and from Sudan to the Red Sea in the east, US admirals and generals have been landing and taking off, meeting with local officials.
They’ve conducted feasibility studies, concluded secret agreements, and spent billions from their secret budgets. Their new bases are not bases at all, according to US military officials. They are instead “forward staging depots”, and “seaborne truck stops” for the equipment which American land forces need to operate on the African continent. They are “protected anchorages” and offshore “lily pads” from which they intend to fight the next round of oil and resource wars, and lock down Africa’s oil and mineral wealth for decades to come. BAR caught up with Chicago’s Prexy Nesbitt, one of the architects of the US anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and ‘80s. We asked Dr. Nesbitt about the importance to Africans and African Americans of George Bush’s Feb. 7 announcement of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent.

“It means a tremendous amount to Africans, because African people, from working people to university elites all follow very closely everything that the US government does wherever it does it in the world. …More and more African Americans in the US are following carefully what’s the US is doing in Africa, but not enough… What we’re seeing (is) …a US military penetration of the African continent and that this penetration is…motivated by the US quest…for new sources of oil and other minerals.”

In other words, it’s about the oil. And the diamonds, and the uranium, and the coltan. But mostly about the oil. West Africa alone sits atop 15% of the world’s oil, and by 2015 is projected to supply a up to a quarter of US domestic consumption. Most oil from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East winds up in Europe, Japan, China or India. Increasingly it’s African oil that keeps the US running.

“West Africa alone sits atop 15% of the world’s oil, and by 2015 is projected to supply a up to a quarter of US domestic consumption.” A foretaste of American plans for African people and resources in the new century can be seen in Eastern Nigeria. US and multinational oil companies like Shell, BP, and Chevron, which once named a tanker after its board member Condoleezza Rice, have ruthlessly plundered the Niger delta for a generation. Where once there were poor but self-sufficient people with rich farmland and fisheries, there is now an unfolding ecological collapse of horrifying dimensions in which the land, air and water are increasingly unable to sustain human life, but the region’s people have no place else to go.

Twenty percent of Nigerian children die before the age of 5, according to the World Bank. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil have been extracted from the Niger Delta, according to Amnesty International in 2005.
But its inhabitants “…remain among the most deprived oil communities in the world – 70 per cent live on less than US$1 a day. In spite of its windfall gains, as global oil prices have more than doubled in the last two years, the Nigerian government has failed to provide services, infrastructure or jobs in the region.”

Black Star News