Security threat over Africa oil
2005-03-13 17:13
Abuja - African naval chiefs sparred with US top brass the past week over how to share responsibility for protecting the continent's burgeoning oil supplies from political instability, war, piracy and terrorism.
Senior defence experts and military officers met in the Nigerian capital Abuja for a week-long Pentagon-sponsored seminar on energy security and the implications of a new African oil boom in the troubled Gulf of Guinea region.
While African commanders urged the countries that will come to depend on African oil to fund a rapid expansion in local navies to protect it, western delegates warned that more must be done to combat an oil-fuelled looting spree.
Nigeria, Angola, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea are already major suppliers of oil to the United States and their reserves are about to surge higher as energy majors win the rights to drill huge new fields in deep waters for offshore.
The new finds will inject vast sums into the region's struggling economies but previous experience has shown that oil can bring misery as well as hope.
Despite earning an estimated US$340bn in the four decades since oil was first discovered under the twisting creeks of the Niger Delta, Nigeria has remained trapped in a downward spiral of poverty and political corruption.
It is now Africa's largest oil producer, accounting for more than 2.5 million barrels a day, but political and military leaders still cream off oil revenues for personal use while three-quarters of the country lives in abject poverty.
Rampant crime
Meanwhile, the vast profits to be made from kidnapping, piracy and the large-scale theft and smuggling of crude oil finance a network of private and ethnic militias and fuel a conflict that kills around 1 000 people every year.
Now, with oil firms seeking new deep-sea fields and smaller players such as Cameroon, Sao Tome and Principe and Chad looking to get into the act, fears have been raised that rampant criminality could destabilise the entire region.
"Disputes within and between oil-rich states in the Gulf of Guinea could become ideological or regional," warned Admiral Samuel Afolayan, chief of staff to the Nigerian navy, at the "Energy and Security in Africa" seminar.
Afolayan warned that if the US did not pay to equip his tiny navy with modern vessels, he would be unable to counter the menace of "illegal bunkering" - the theft of crude - and the resulting gang violence.
But many western delegates warned privately that the Nigerian navy would have to fight deep-rooted corruption among its own officers, who are among the privileged few to have grown unusually rich during Nigeria's oil boom.
General Carlton Fulford, the head of the US department of defence's Africa Centre research body, said that the recent court martial of two Nigerian admirals caught aiding in the theft of an oil tanker was encouraging.
"But is probably goes higher than that," he warned.
Problems originated abroad
Bunkering is "not an international security problem. It's a Nigerian issue, and they have to deal with it ... Nigeria is my biggest single concern".
Afolayan, however, insisted his problems originated abroad.
"Criminal international cartels, mostly based in Europe, operate fleets of tankers. These tankers are known to bring in dangerous weapons. If not checked, such activities may render the region unsafe for shipping," he said.
"The activities of these criminals and their international collaborators could result in a situation similar to those in the Middle East," he said.
African military leaders hope that the US may be persuaded to pay to reinforce their fleets in order to secure stable supply of oil from the Gulf of Guinea; insurance against rising demand and unrest in the Middle East.
Within the next ten years America is expected to get up to a quarter of its oil and a rising amount of natural gas from west and central Africa, last year it received just under 10% of its imports from Nigeria alone.
Thus far, however, US military involvement has been limited.
Nigeria recently received four World War II-era patrol boats - its entire sea-going fleet - from the US Coastguard and has begun to buy eight 25-foot Defender-class fast response boats from a private US supplier.