Living in Peace and Wisdom on our Planet

by Lisa Ling, AC360° Special Correspondent

I'm so upset by what I experienced here today that I can barely think straight.

I'm in the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, a place essential to the U.S. economy.  The communities along the delta literally live atop a virtual goldmine—black gold that literally make's the world's engines run. Oil. Underneath the surface of the ground here, lies one of the richest sources of crude oil on the planet.

Nigeria is the 5th largest supplier of oil to the United States and is the 12th biggest oil producer in the world. It was discovered here in the 1950's, and big oil companies have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil out of the ground here ever since. Over the years, it's made some people colossally rich. Colossally.

Logic would suggest that the people living above this tremendously lucrative resource would benefit from its riches. But the situation here defies logic. The millions of people who live along the delta are considered some of the world's poorest. There is no electricity and clean water and basic services like medicine and quality education are severely lacking.

How can this be?

The exorbitant amount of money that's been made here has flowed not into the pockets of the locals, but into the coffers of oil companies and the hands of corrupt government officials. For years, oil companies have been extracting oil from here with little regard for how it's affected the communities that surround their operations. Allegations of payoffs to local officials here are rife. Anyone with a pair of eyes would see that the fortunes being generated from Nigeria's abundant oil supply have not been distributed anywhere close to fairly.

It gets worse. Since 1976, there have been well over 6,000 oil spills that have resulted in the contamination of the water and land off of which these communities have lived for generations. The amount of oil that's been spilled here is 50 times more than what the Exxon Valdez released. Miles and miles of pipeline have been laid underground in the region, some of which are decades old and corroding. While in country, we were told that four months prior, a large oil spill had occurred in the Bodo region, which had only recently been clamped—three months after the breach. Contrary to Shell's initial reports of sabotage, we were told from community members that an old pipeline had fractured resulting in a massive spewing of oil into the delta. We traveled by boat to find the source of the spill.... Read rest of the article