Niger Delta's window for change

The largest militant group in Nigeria's volatile oil-rich region called for a truce this week after the country's new president promised improvements for the people.

from the June 7, 2007 edition

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Umuechem, Nigeria - Deep in the heart of Nigeria's volatile petroleum-producing region, Charity Jonah-Jim and her family survive on oil production – not crude oil, but crudely produced palm oil that she and her children make by hand.

Ms. Jonah-Jim and her children earn $10 a week making cooking oil from palm kernels only yards away from pipes carrying millions of dollars of oil away from their troubled Niger Delta region each year. She strains to think how Nigeria's vast oil reserves – which provide the US with more than 10 percent of its oil – have bettered her life. "The road!" she exclaims at last. The tarmac of an access road built by Royal Dutch Shell is an ideal place to chop the palm kernels.

Jonah-Jim's village of Umuechem is in Rivers State, which receives over $1 billion a year from the federal government for health, education, infrastructure, and other basic services. Various multinational oil companies have poured millions of dollars into development projects. Shell, the largest operator, says it spent over $50 million on community development projects in 2006 alone.

Despite the money that has flowed through the delta, most residents here are still without clinics, schools, water, and electricity. But some aid workers say they are seeing improvements by working more closely with communities. Their success could be a valuable lesson for oil companies and for Nigeria's new president, Umaru Yar'Adua, who has promised to bring stability to the delta, where militias and criminal gangs have forced a 25 percent cut in oil production.

"Umuechem is typical of what happens when community development goes wrong or gets corrupted," says Chris Newsom, adviser to the London-based Stakeholder Democracy Network, which works in the delta. "It is not the case that all projects are like that, but enough of them are to create a huge relationship problem between communities and companies."

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