EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Nigeria and the United States: Convergent Interests
In its anxious search for
energy security, the United States has embarked on a risky
strategy to arm and train the militaries of oil-producing West
African countries under the rationale of pursuing the Global
War on Terror. Over the past 15 years,
amidst widening crises in the Middle East and volatile petroleum
markets, the U.S. has quietly institutionalized a West African-based
oil supply strategy, closely focused on an “Oil Triangle” centered
on the Gulf of Guinea. These policies are deeply flawed
because they will serve to undermine America’s energy security
even as they breed growing resentment and violence against U.S.
economic and strategic interests.
In order to manage this
policy, the U.S. Department of Defense just announced the establishment
of an African military command—AFRICOM—to
spearhead an “oil and terrorism” policy, which will
oversee the deployment of U.S. forces in the area and supervise
distribution of money, materiel and military training to regional
militaries and proxies. Pentagon analysts and generals claim
that vast “uncontrolled spaces” in Saharan and Sahelian
Africa, which are said to include large portions of northern
Nigeria, are rife with terrorists seeking to damage the United
States, even though the evidence for such claims is woefully
thin. Nevertheless, a $500 million “Trans-Sahara
Counter Terrorism Initiative” (TSCTI), which will tie African
militaries to American policies, is in the works. Given the internal
security problems often found in resource rich countries, it
is much more likely that the newly-acquired skills and equipment
will be directed against domestic opponents than global terrorists.
The contradictions of this
policy are evident in Nigeria, which currently provides 10-12
percent of U.S. oil imports and serves as the cornerstone of
the strategy even as it demonstrates its deeply-flawed reasoning.
Since the end of 2005, the on- and offshore oilfields of the
Niger Delta––the major source of
the country’s oil and gas––have essentially
become ungovernable as a site of on-going and violent contestation
between local ethnic groups, oil corporations and the Nigerian
government. This violence results in repeated reductions and
shutdowns of oil, sometimes exceeding 500,000 barrels per day. Moreover,
reports the World Bank, some 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil
monies flow to one percent of the population, while 75 percent
of the country’s people live on roughly one dollar per
day. In other words, the United States is relying on increased
oil production from the African Oil Triangle to reduce its dependence
on Middle East petroleum, but could replace one set of insecurities
with another.
In fact, militarization
by the United States will exacerbate an already tense situation
in Nigeria and other parts of the Oil Triangle without having
any effect on terrorists. Only
a concerted effort to support Nigeria’s democratic forces
and legislative oversight of the country’s presidency can
ensure American and the region’s security, and quell wholesale
theft of oil revenues as well as the insurgencies, criminality
and social banditry now rampant in oil-producing areas.
This is an
executive summary of
, Convergent Interests: U.S.
Energy Security and the ‘Securing’ of Nigerian
Democracy, by Paul M.
Lubeck, Michael J. Watts and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, published
in February 2007 by the Center for International Policy in
Washington, DC. The full report can be found at:
http://www.ciponline.org/NIGERIA_FINAL.pdf