OIL PIPELINES OF DEATH IN NIGERIA.

Within a 10km radius in the Onne, a popular oil port in the troubled Niger Delta oil rich region of Southern Nigeria, is the Petrochemical Industries, the refineries and the biggest fertilizer plant south of Sahara,Benebule, a fisherman lived in Onne and has never seen a night fall in all of his 30 years on earth .It is daylight all around him 24/7.
Gases are flared off from the oil wells abutting his village.


This is not about gas flaring, pipelines crisscrosses nook and crannies of the creek, where he made fishing his trade albeit polluted streams and degraded earth.
I wont take on a mammoth like Shell or Chevron Texaco, you may ask the widow of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the late environmentalist and writer who was judicially murdered in 1995, for standing up to the government and her collaborators in the oil game.



Regarding those pipelines, they bring oil as far as Kaduna some 1000km up North in Nigeria, Lagos and other Nigeria major cities are served by these thousands of kilometers of oil pipelines.
The designs are that all reaches of the republic should have oil at the next gas sation, right.
Wrong.
The pipelines are dilapidated, poorly maintained (for a sector that is so obviously profitable. it is almost criminal, the level of neglect) although monies are allocated each year, powerful cabals with ties to authorities vandalize the pipelines with armed escorts and siphoned off oil to be sold in bourses of black markets all over Nigeria and beyond.



That may have been alright ,since corruption and sharp practices are taken in these shores, but the vandals never properly fixes the pipelines after taking their fill, they leave it leaking and the hapless citizens ,for whom time have stood still for a thousand years, the artisan who makes $30:00 a month with 10 children as dependants, moped rider known locally as ”okada riders” who makes about $50:00 per month ,a lucrative employ after deducting rebates to policemen ,highway officials ,the local council, Vehicle Inspection Officers ,name it and an army of unemployed citizens coupled with an ever present fuel crises. Nigerians like other citizens the world over likes to make the odd fast buck, he pilfers from the leaking pipelines.



Through the grapevines, another pipeline has broken, come one come all and siphon oil, women abandon their wares in the markets square, commercial drivers double parked their vehicles on the highway, pastors abandon their flocks and seers stopped seeing for a while, they are all going to take from the national cake as oil and related matters are known in Nigeria.
They make brisk business selling petrol from jerry cans, open bowls, bottled water bottles, empty jars of salad cream, buckets and even polythene nylons (yes….) ,they will make enough in one hour ,what they wont make in a month selling on the highway to motorists ,who cant get fuel to buy at the gas stations.
Nigeria is the fifth largest producer in OPEC.



The temptation is too great, they will take their chances, after all it is a nation of risk takers, our number one risk taker is the average Nigerian leader, possibly a coup plotter now made good.

It is not rocket science to know that someone somewhere among the hopeless multitude will strike a match or light a cigarette, the result is a conflagration of atomic proportions (pun intended).

Charred bodies, women with kids on their back burnt to death, those at the epicenter of the conflagration will never have the honour of even their ashes buried by their loved ones, take a gander to the picture of the charred corpse, people are so unconcerned, they could have been at the beach watching beach volley ball, life is cheap here .
The masses have been so traumatized by the neglect and looting of their country by their leaders, that they have lost their inate humanity.
They are too busy looking for the next meal.




This piece hasn’t been concluded ,you can help conclude it.

40,000 STOCKS OF MICROSOFT SHARES AND AN ESCALADE.

Ali Ahmed ,his real name ,made picking pieces of scrap metals ,which he takes to a weighing center for less than a cent a kilogram ,I cant do the fractions any longer,, his employ, he has two wives and 11 children, his poverty is so overwhelming that it is surreal ,there is beauty in that bent back ,where all hope seemed to have lost, welcome to a typical family life in sub-Saharan Africa.

Why are we like these, living on less than a dollar a day?

Black, African Americans, African in sub-Saharan and wherever they are in the Diaspora are bellyaching about effects of slave trade on our being the most backward of all the races on earth, this weekend like most weekends in the past 400years .

They want reparations, simple, sort of 40,000 stocks of Microsoft shares and an Escalade.
I am an African living in sub-Saharan hell, I am actually at loss at this calls for subsidies in our life.

Slavery ,I need to state categorically was and probably the most banal of atrocities committed in the last 2000 years, at least Jesus Christ had the power to resurrect after 3 days ,the blacks has been relegated to the background of humanity forever ,if current events are to be projected.

There are less than three black countries on earth that is being properly governed, aside Botswana, South Africa and Namibia, tell me a country where there is a black man in power and the economy is not a basket case.

Even the three countries afore mentioned, their economies are held in trust by their Caucasian citizens. South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki is a professional president and a first rate leader, he might as well be leading Belgium as 90 % of the economic activities and monies are in the hand of Caucasians and other races except the black peoples of South Africa, remember these other races forms less than 10% of the population.
Why is this so in South Africa?
The legacies of apartheid?
Well…

Nigeria is a basket case if ever there was one. An oil rich country with abundant human and natural resources, her leaders are bandits who ordinarily should be in jail, they had bled the country dry.
With huge oil receipts but it is still one of the poorest countries on earth with less than $500 as per capital income, down there with Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.
What account for Nigerian problems?......slavery? Apartheid? Colonialism?...

Definitely not slavery or apartheid nor even colonialism, because she got her independence on a platter of gold and the colonialist never touched her oil receipts, it was stolen by her leaders to financial institutions in the West.

Every other decade, Bob Geldolf and other rock stars stage some feel good concerts, smoke pot and generally try to revive fading careers, claiming drawing attentions to Africa and other black people’s problems of debts, ,AIDS,corruptions,malaria etc.
It is absolute baloney.

African problems are much deeper than some handouts from some receipts from rock concerts.

It is corruption in a holy wedlock with stubborn cultural overtones.
Our culture is designed and built around corruption, the Balogun “the war general:” in Yoruba mythology marries the finest woman, love had never had any part to play, the man needs a large family to till the land, sort of enslaving his own household.


Any wonder why he sold his own brothers to slavery in the new world.

And they were the lucky ones, Muhammed Ali, the boxing legend, at the height of his prowess visited Africa and thanked his Allah, that his grand folks caught that ship.
Our intellectuals, doctors, engineer and whoever can purchase a visa and pay immigration experts are fleeing the continent in what has been described as the second slavery, it is the same during the first shipments some over 4oo years back,it is the most physical sound ,that can make the voyage across the Atlantic, now it is the
most intellectually sound.

The West will always win.

Why are our best brains fleeing our continent? Our leaders have made our continent unlivable.

Anthony Daniels writing in The Telegraph of London said “why is Africa alone of all the continents poorer per capital now than 20 or even 40 years ago, despite the fact that it had received about $500billion from the rich countries” He continued “why is it always hovering on the brink of chaos”?

Reasons and excuses are never in short supply.

· Colonialism
· Slavery
· Bundling together of different tribal groups to form a country
· Poverty
They are all excuses, Africans and black people need to shed that toga of culturally imbedded corruption.

The average African official from the lowly clerk to the Head of State is a very corrupt person, take Nigeria as an example, the President probably has over 60 children, which is a very conservative estimate, his Vice President has over 40 children, all living at state expenses, how can any nation move forward with those kinds of leaders?

They will defend their shortcomings as it is African and their culture permits it, in the age of internet, in an age of people going to the moon, it is how we can procreate and spend public wealth for our pecuniary benefits that is our culture.

How many children does Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore modernizer had?
What about Bill Gates of Microsoft, the richest man in the world?

The African man in authority is not to be trusted; he will amass wealth and cling to power till he is disgraced.

Africans are poor because we are very corrupt, we expect our officials to be corrupt too, Africans don’t build institutions, we have no regard for legacies.
There is no institution we cant corrupt, be it democratic form of government, autocracy, military juntaship, market economy, command economy.
Name it, we will corrupt the system and it will become an albatross to us

A point of instance, in Nigeria ,Ikoyi neighborhood was a first class high brow island developed by the British colonialist, it has sweeping boulevards, well tended gardens, good road networks ,most of the houses were on an acre of land, as soon as the British left and we Africans moved in ,it became a ghetto ,the sewers are now open ,the roads were not maintained ,arbitrary development took over,Ikoyi is now a ghetto of misshapen houses ,where a mechanic workshop rest next to a 10 storey motel.

That is Africa, chaos, disorderliness and it is from the top.

Our leaders don’t even obey traffic lights.
The most rudimentary measure of good citizenship, obey just traffic lights, we are not saying file your tax returns or other arcane rocket science like separate the public funds from private funds ,no just stop and obey traffic lights, check out Lagos on a dog day afternoon.

Bono and gangs may stop making music and harassed all the world leaders about African debts, Bill Gates may donate all his fortune to Africa, the G8,may forgive our debts and advance us a trillion dollars, let oil reach $200:00p/b we will waste it at the altar of corruption and bad governance and call it a conspiracy by the West against our race.
Failures are never wont for excuses.

Equatorial Guinea has over $3.8 billion in oil receipts last year, her less than half a million people are still one of the poorest people on earth, take a minister of Agriculture earning the odd $60,000:00 per annum salary, how was he able to purchase a Malibu mansion for $35million .Effects of slavery?
Colonial hangover?

It is pure and unadulterated greed and this our lot here.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema is the minister and son of the president of that country.

Even where there are ray of hope, they are steps too slow and insignificant to make any impacts on the world stage.

The best of our society are in the West, take the former Nigerian Finance Minister,Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,a Harvard trained economist, she did not stay a night in Nigeria after resigning her appointment, she fled back “home” to the West, every first class brain or street smart scammer is finding his way to the West or even Uzbekistan ,as far away from Africa as possible.

The first official corrupt action of an average African leader is to buy a mansion in the West and relocate most of his sibling, he has no confidence over the country he presides, most Nigerian leaders say it with pride the number of their children schooling in expensive institutions in the West and we know the salaries of civil servants.

By the way, what about that 40,000 MS share and that Escalade?

Leonard Lawal is genuinely pissed at our people.

Lagos,Nigeria.
+234-8033274465

questinvest.quest@gmail.com