West’s thirst for oil helped ruin Africa

TWO generations have elapsed since vast swathes of Africa took their independence – Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960. Yet still the horror stories emerge. Now veteran foreign correspondent Paul Kenyon has produced a startling book to explain why.

We know that the gold and the diamonds were discovered, exploited and effectively purloined by colonial kleptomaniacs but the third gigantic asset was oil and that discovery came under the rule of a range of native African military dictators. The true rape of the continent has occurred under them over the past 60 years. But they needed help to strip their own homelands bare to fatten their own wallets – and they got it: from the Western oil giants and their governments. In Dictatorland – The Men Who Stole Africa, Mr Kenyon narrates a jaw-dropping tale of greed, corruption and brutality in which our holier-than-thou politicians played their full part.

Take Nigeria alone. It was always a mess from the start – an amalgam of mutually hostile ethnic groups railroaded into a supposed union for the convenience of colonial Britain. The Muslim north had nothing in common with the Christian south and everyone knew it. But it didn’t matter because both were poor, with palm oil in the south and peanuts in the north. Then someone struck oil.

Civil war broke out in 1967 when the Igbo people of the south-east seceded after suffering a series of savage pogroms, convinced that for them safety could only lie in separation. The capital Lagos was not in the hands of elected politicians but of a military junta that had come to power in a bloodstained coup. Harold Wilson’s Britain promptly took its side and for two-and-a-half years poured in the weapons and ammunition, while constantly lying to us and the world by pretending to be neutral. But why? Why did we not use our influence to broker a ceasefire? Because the newly discovered oil was under the feet of the Igbo, so they had to be destroyed.

And destroyed they were. I was right in the middle of it, watching what was going on and knowing who was behind it but helpless.

By the end an estimated million children had been starved to death but hey, Lagos gave the oil contracts to Shell BP and it was all covered up. So job done. But a job to be proud of?