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The Ogoni
12/08/2025
The flag of the Ogoni people as designed by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Via Wikipedia.
Andrew McGrath
Britain's abandonment of the slave trade in 1807 was moved less by moral objections than by the fact that increasing competition by other countries had undermined its monopoly. Indeed, Britain used the need to end the slave trade as a pretext for direct intervention in Africa: as a result of British military action there to secure trade against French and native influence, Britain laid claim to Southern Nigeria at the Conference of Berlin in 1884-5. But as the Royal Niger Company, given a royal charter to control the Niger and N. Nigeria, was unable to do so, necessitating further military intervention, until in 1906 Britain gained control and divided Nigeria into the Colony (Lagos) and Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, and the Southern. Via the tried and trusted method of indirect rule, the British ran the country for the production of cash crops such as palm nuts and kernels, peanuts, cotton, and cocoa.
Corporations like Shell are today as much
state agents as was the royally-mandated Niger Company. The
corporations' political clout enables Britain and other former colonial
powers continue to wield influence through the veil of private sector
involvement. This has been the case with Nigeria since it gained
independence in 1960. Ever since its arrival in Nigeria, Shell has been
despoiling the Niger Delta with impunity, under the protection of a
corrupt government, and with the Nigerian army and police at their
disposal. The conviction in 1995 by a kangaroo court of Ken Saro-Wiwa
and eight other members of MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni
People), was the outcome of a collaboration between a corporation which
had no scruples about importing weapons and engaging in surveillance,
and a brutal dictatorship which attacked its own people, and instead of
using its profits from native oil and gas resources to benefit the
population, engaged in the expropriation of vast sums of money to
overseas accounts. This situation has not changed much for the better
with a change of government, indicating that the real problem lies less
with the nature of that government than the purposes it is set up (and
kept in power) to achieve. In 2004, Nigeria's Finance Minister Nedadi
Usman was quoted by the New Internationalist as saying, "If we hadn't
discovered oil, we would have been better off today." One might go
further and say: if oil had never been discovered in Nigeria, the
political evolution of that country would have been entirely different.
It is not so much that such corporations take advantage of political weakness for their own benefit, as that, in their role as state corporations, they help to encourage and prop up politically weak administrations for the benefit of publicly-funded "private enterprise". This system, in its turn, is the bedrock for global political power. The terms of energy exploration in Ireland are a reliable index of the health of Irish democracy: elected representatives have shown total willingness to tie their own hands in matters of national sovereignty It is no accident that Shell and other corporations have taken advantage of the political weakness of the Irish state, so far as to dictate the terms of their involvement in exploration and production in Ireland. The terms allow oil and gas multinationals to declare the size of their own discoveries, without State monitoring of any kind, and to have their expenses reimbursed by the taxpayer for up to 25 years. These terms are a declaration by the Irish government that it heads a client state, to be run in the political and financial interests of America and Britain, interests with which no constitutional right is to be allowed to compete. With this in mind, the fact that Ireland is nominally a democracy is only convenience of inheritance. The State as presently operated is fundamentally anti-democratic.
© The Tara Foundation, 2006