Nigeria, being one of the biggest oil suppliers in the world, is the fourth biggest supplier of oil to America. It is estimated that in the past 50 years, over 10 millions barrels of oil have polluted the area. The people are blaming the oil companies for these oil spills and the oil companies are blaming the people for the oil spills because of their piracy. These oil spills have been killing livestock, harvests, poisoning water sources, and creating other health concerns. There have only been a few people that were successful in suing these oil companies for reparations of the damages lost. Shell gasoline estimates that it loses between 50-60 million barrels of oil a year due to piracy, which translates to a 7 billion dollars a year loss. Even though there are task forces that try to prevent and stop oil piracy, but it has largely been unsuccessful due to the terrain and areas they have to patrol. The water alone, is so unhealthy because of the pollution, that it is said to have 900x the limit amount of benzene that the World Health Organization deems "safe to drink". Even though these oil companies spend big bucks to invest in these communities, there are many complaints that the money does not get to the right people. At one point, the people got fed up and took militant action, where the nigerians kidnapped the oil workers and sabotaged the oil pipeline.
Scroll 14 minutes in to see the clip on Nigeria... http://www.vice.com/vice-on-hbo/vice-on-hbo-episode-9
I can see stop noticing that you did not write anything for this post. This country is really unstable, but I think that Mexico will be like this in a couple of years and Brazil. The reason that I have come to this conclusion is that people are eventually going to rebel against the government and start to fight them. In Mexico the Zapatista Movement is strong and the book does not talk about it, which shows how Bias the author of this book is. I hope that Nigeria becomes stable and I believe that Education has a lot to do with it if the government educated people then they can start to create a middle class which will create a stable democracy.
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