Crude World (8 page)
I don’t think a novelist could have invented the next chapter. At his confirmation hearing in 2006, Donald C. Johnson, the newly nominated U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, admitted an unusual fact about the new embassy in Malabo: the building was being leased from the minister of national security, Manuel Nguema Mba. Nguema is the uncle of President Obiang, which meant the U.S. government, like Exxon and Marathon, was putting money into the pocket of the presidential family. Yet the most appalling twist was that the State Department and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights had documented a case in which Nguema Mba had supervised the torture of a political opponent. An alleged torturer was receiving $17,500 in monthly rent from U.S. taxpayers.
In Malabo, it was easy to notice one of the reasons the American government was a good friend to the Obiang regime.
I stayed in the Dynasty Hotel, which had perhaps twenty closetlike rooms and would qualify in most cities as dingy, though in Malabo it
was one of the best. Because Equatorial Guinea had just begun to join the international grid, it was not yet possible to pay my bill with a credit card. The hotel, like the few others in town, accepted only cash or transfers into an overseas bank account. I chose the latter option and was told, at the reception desk, that the account was located in Shanghai. The hotel was called “Dynasty” because it was Chinese-owned. The manager, the receptionists, the waitresses in the small café, the cooks—they were all Chinese. The lamps in my small room, the desk, the bed, the phone, the armoire—all from China.
More than a century ago, it was the British competing against the Russians for mineral resources in central Asia. After that, it was Americans against Soviets in the twentieth century. Now the great race pits China against everyone else. Or so it seems. This is the modern narrative of resource competition, and it has a xenophobic tone, as though China, a newcomer, has less of a right to consume the world’s resources than the rest of us. But consume they do.
When I drove from Bata to Ebebiyin to watch Obiang’s parade, the road was being paved by Chinese workers. Other crews of Chinese were building a road from Bata to Mongomo. The Chinese government now imports more than $
2.5
billion in oil from Equatorial Guinea every year, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation has signed a contract to explore for oil in the waters of Equatorial Guinea. This was an inevitable consequence of China’s effort to acquire the natural resources it needed to fuel its economy. Most famously, China has become a key economic partner in Sudan’s genocidal regime; Chinese companies are extracting oil from fields in the south of Sudan. In Nigeria, China agreed to build an eighteen-hundred-mile railway. A Chinese company bid $2.4 billion to extract oil from Angolan waters. And China is going straight to the mother lode, buying billions of dollars of oil from Saudi Arabia while working with Saudi companies to construct refining facilities in China itself.
Scary stuff, it might seem, but the fact remains that American and European companies continue to have a far larger presence in Africa and the Middle East. There were far more Texans in Malabo than Chinese.
In some ways the Chinese threat was useful to American interests. American oilmen and diplomats contend that if they pull out of unsavory countries like Equatorial Guinea, the Chinese will fill their still-warm seats and apply less pressure for political change. But in Equatorial Guinea, there has been no substantive political change since American companies began investing their billions there. Much of their operations—and all of their negotiations—are conducted in conditions of near secrecy. Marathon allowed me to visit its natural gas plant outside Malabo, but Exxon, the largest foreign company in the country, refused to let me talk to any of its local executives or visit its headquarters; its gated compound was as much of a forbidden city as the real one in Beijing. If any of the American executives had been allowed to talk to me, they probably would have put forward the argument I heard from an American oilman in Quito, Ecuador, when I asked about the environmental movement’s opposition to his company’s plans for further extraction in that country. “The fear I have,” the oilman said, “is that all the [American] companies are going to leave. Who’s going to come in? The Chinese will behave as they do in China. Saying no to us is going to turn into saying yes to the wrong people.”
The argument made sense in theory—America is a democracy and China is not—but in the real world of deeds and misdeeds, it can be hard to see a great difference. The American government was paying rent for its embassy to a minister accused of torture. Obiang’s family was reaping huge profits from sweetheart deals with American companies. There seemed to be more in the way of reward for bad behavior than pressure to change it.
My expulsion was inevitable. I had let the authorities know I was working on a book about oil, and after I’d been in the country for ten days the minister of information, Alfonso Nsue Mokuy, began calling and texting me, demanding that we meet immediately. I sensed what was coming, because several journalists who had visited Equatorial Guinea in recent years had been expelled in a matter of days; Equatorial Guinea was, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the most censored countries in the world. (Only
North Korea, Burma and Turkmenistan were worse.) I suggested that we meet at the patio café of the Hotel Bahia, a very public place where no harm could occur.
The minister was waiting for me when I arrived, along with a man who wouldn’t disclose his name but said he was an adviser to President Obiang. They did not bother to shake my hand. They were not happy.
“Peter, you have caused us enormous problems,” the minister said. “The president has called me three times, and him”—he nodded to the presidential aide—“four times.”
The hotel pool, just a few yards away from us, had no water, the sky was overcast and the waiters, normally attentive, kept their distance. Nothing boded well. The minister was sweating profusely, because his job and perhaps his life were on the line. In dictatorships, information ministers are expected to control the activities of journalists, and Minister Mokuy had failed to do so in my case. He told me Obiang was upset because I’d met Spain’s ambassador—Spain was then refusing Obiang’s request to extradite a political rival—and because he believed I was involved with a wire-service story criticizing his rule. (I had no knowledge of the story.)
My explanations failed to persuade. The minister gave me fifteen minutes to pack my bags. Then the adviser drove me to the airport, where I waited for the next flight out. A final bout of unpleasantness occurred when the minister arrived at the airport and accused me of being a spy. He searched my bags, confiscated several disks (fortunately I had backups) and threatened to take me downtown for a real interrogation. He backed off when I said President Obiang would never visit Washington again if his regime imprisoned an American journalist. I had no idea whether this was true, but the minister reacted as though I had said a magic word.
Obiang could jail and torture his subjects as much as he wished, and appropriate the country’s resources without challenge, but Americans would be spared his rough treatment. This is the practice of bullies; they assault the weak and cower from the strong. America’s relationship to Obiang had saved me from further discomfort—oil had saved me, to be precise—but America’s influence and oil itself were of
little benefit to the people of Equatorial Guinea. As the turboprop taking me to Cameroon rose into an evening storm above the airport, the only light I could see through the clouds was Marathon’s flare. My last glimpse of Equatorial Guinea was fitting. Darkness and flames. A landscape of plunder.
Who owns it?
The discovery of oil usually unearths this question, and the answer is not simple. Is the oil owned by the farmer who works the land that sits atop the oil? The surrounding community? The state in which the community is located? The federal government in a capital hundreds or thousands of miles away? The foreign company that invested millions of dollars to find it?
Even in Norway and Canada, countries with cohesive political institutions, these questions required considerable time and effort to settle. The task is harder for countries without national identities. Not just harder but sometimes lethal, because power rather than justice can prevail in such disputes. As the oilman J. Paul Getty noted, “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” Communities in the Niger Delta, where most of Nigeria’s oil was found, received little more than token payments after significant extraction got under way in the 1960s, and this accelerated a process of national breakdown. At first, there were peaceful protests, which were met with state repression. Militias were then formed to do battle with soldiers who attacked disgruntled villages. The militias and their supporters took matters into their own hands; oil workers were held for ransom, pipelines were tapped into. The militias also fought one another, because struggles for justice can develop into grabs for cash, and some militias were little more than gangs that Nigerians called “cults.” Foreign companies fed
the conflict by providing funds to both sides: the military was paid to protect wells; the militias were paid not to attack them. The combatants were incentivized for combat. I visited Nigeria to learn how oil had turned a once healthy country, and the people who lived there, into a specimen of rot.
Nigerian worker at an oil spill in the Niger Delta
Midmorning wrapped a humid embrace around Port Harcourt, which is the heart of Nigeria’s oil industry and has a population of about 1.5 million. Located at the mouth of the oil-rich Niger Delta, Port Harcourt is a typical Nigerian city—it is sprawling, chaotic and violent. (Guns reportedly outnumber computers by four to one.) On this morning, Dokubou Asari, a warlord, stayed in bed at the small hotel that was his temporary headquarters in the city. When awake, he was the vigorous leader of an uprising against Nigeria’s armed forces and the oil companies they protected. His uprising depended, for its rallying cry and financial sustenance, on attacking some oil facilities while siphoning crude from pipelines operated by Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and other firms. Depending on your view, Asari was a thief, stealing from the companies a resource that was not his, or Asari was a Robin Hood, restoring to his people what was being stolen by foreign companies and a corrupt government. We would talk once he awoke.
When oil was discovered in Nigeria by geologists working for Shell, the country had a growing industrial sector and a healthy farm economy. With its British-educated elite, Nigeria’s prospects were bright in 1960, when it became independent; its people were led to believe that the just-discovered treasure in the delta guaranteed a brilliant future. One of them was Annkio Briggs, a senior aide to Asari, who told me of Shell managers visiting her village with a movie projector. The villagers, most of whom had never seen a movie, gathered to watch a company film about the prosperity oil would bring. “They showed pictures of how white people lived in suburbs,” Briggs recalled. “Water came out of the taps. Children were getting into cars. Like them, we would live the good life.” Shell was welcomed into the Niger Delta.
Now the world’s eighth-largest exporter of oil, Nigeria earned more than $400 billion from oil in recent decades, yet nine out of ten citizens live on less than $2 a day and one out of five children dies before his fifth birthday. Its per capita GDP is one-fifth of South Africa’s. Even Senegal, which exports fish and nuts, has a larger per capita income. Nigeria’s wealth did not vanish, as in a magic trick. It has been stolen by presidents, generals, executives, middlemen, accountants, bureaucrats, policemen and anyone else with access to it. This is what can happen in a country with weakly enforced laws and a weak sense of national identity: it becomes every region for itself, every tribe for itself, every family for itself. But the fruits of thievery are lopsided. The World Bank estimates that 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil wealth has gone to 1 percent of the population. A few years ago the national police chief was convicted of stealing $98 million, and the punch line was his sentence: six months in jail—one month for every $16 million. As for the money that wasn’t stolen, much was squandered on projects like the multibillion-dollar Ajaokuta steel complex, which has not made a single slab of steel.
