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Oil Revenues, Security and
Stability in West Africa
Vandy Kanyako
Oil Revenues, Security and Stability in West Africa
Vandy Kanyako
Oil Revenues, Security

and Stability in West
Africa
Vandy Kanyako
Conflict Resolution Program
Portland State University
Portland, OR, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-37985-8 ISBN 978-3-030-37986-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37986-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
This book is the product of extensive research and several years of collab-
oration and dialogue with many individuals and groups to whom I owe a
debt of gratitude. It would not have been possible without the generous
funding I received from the faculty development grant at Portland State
University. The book would not have been possible without the support
and encouragement of various individuals, organizations and institutions,
both inside and outside of West Africa. My foremost thanks goes to all
those individuals and civil society organizations and grassroots community
groups that are working every day to draw attention to the core issues
covered in this book. Their support and guidance provided rich mate-
rials that helped in making this endeavor feasible. A big thank you to all
those who took time out of their busy schedule to meet with me or share
ideas via different mediums throughout the process of writing this book,
including PC David Mandu Farley Keili-Coomber of Mandu Chiefdom,
Sierra Leone, whose incisive knowledge of local laws and natural resource
owenership proved invaluable.
To my colleagues in the Conflict Resolution program at Portland
State University, Portland, Oregon, (Dr. Patricia Schechter [Interim
Director], Dr. Robert Gould, Dr. Harry Anastasiou, Dr. Barbara Tint,
Dr. Amanda Byron, Dr. Rachel Cunliffe, and Dr. Tom Hastings), I am
eternally grateful for your collegial support, Dr. Schechter’s encourage-
ment and professional guidance was particularly critical to the success of
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
this venture. I say a big thank you as well to Aislyn Matias, our hard-
working Program Coordinator who helped to weave the different strands
together!
To my family and friends, I would like to express my deepest gratitude.
It was a great comfort and relief to know that you were pushing me on
and motivating me to embark on this project. Your words of encourage-
ment kept me going till the very end. To my son Iveagh who kept asking
“Dad, Is the book done yet?” I say big thank you (with hugs) for your
patience and understanding.
To Dr. Susan Shepler of American University in Washington DC, and
my colleague at the West Africa Oil Watch, Dr. Robert Tynes, my heartfelt
thanks for your intellectual inspiration and continued support. A note
of appreciation to my research assistants for this project: Evan Way, Lisa
Serrano and Anisuz Zaman, who put in countless hours to help me meet
the deadline.
I’m eternally grateful to the various reviewers and endorsers including
Dr. Lansana Gberie, Dr. Jeffrey Colgan, and Ambassador Herman J.
Cohen. Your work on the extractive industry in particular and on sub-
Saharan Africa in general, has been a great source of inspiration for me.
Versions of Chapter 5 on community agitation has appeared in the
Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict, and I am grateful to The
Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies for letting me repro-
duce it in this book.
Finally, to the team at Palgrave Macmillan: Alina Yurova, Balaji Varad-
haraju, Rachel Moore, and countless others who made this venture a
reality my heartfelt appreciation. There are countless others that I have
not listed here, more out of the need for brevity, rather than out of negli-
gence. If your name is not listed, please understand. I appreciate all of
your efforts in helping me reach this milestone in my professional journey.
Contents
1 Introduction: Human Security, Oil Revenues, and

Conflict 1
2 The History and Geology of Petroleum in West Africa 25
3 External Stakeholders and the Geopolitics of Oil 45
4 Oil Revenues and the State 73
5 Oil and Community Agitation 109
6 Civil Society and Global Frameworks 143
7 Managing Disputes in West Africa’s Petroleum Industry 165
8 Conclusion: Implications for the Field of Conflict

Resolution 191
Epilogue: West Africa and the Pandemic of Oil 213
Index 215
vii
Abbreviations
AU African Union
BBLS Barrels
BCM Billion Cubic Meters
BOE Barrels of Oil Equivalent
BP British Petroleum
CENTAL Center for Transparency and Accountability in Liberia
CNOOC China National Oil Corporation
CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation
CSO Civil Society Organization
CSPOG Civil Society Platform on Oil and Gas
DACDF Diamond Area Community Development Fund
DFID Department for International Development
ECOMOG Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group
(peace enforcement arm of ECOWAS)
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
EEZ Exclusive Economic Zone
EIA Energy Information Administration
EITI Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
ENI Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi
EPA Economic Partnership Agreements
ERA Environmental Rights Action
FNLA National Liberation Front of Angola
GDP Gross Domestic Product
ICISD International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
IEA International Energy Agency
IMF International Monetary Fund
ix
x ABBREVIATIONS
IMTD The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy

INGO International Non-Governmental Organization
IOCs International Oil Companies
IYC Ijaw Youth Council
JVC Joint Venture Contracts
LCIA London Court of International Arbitration
LDI Liberia Democratic Institute
LOGI Liberia Oil and Gas Initiative
MEND Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta
MODEC Mitsui Ocean Development & Engineering Company Inc.
MOSIEN Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality
MOSOP Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People
MOU Memorandum of Understanding
MRU Mano River Union
NACE National Advocacy Coalition on Extractives
NEITI Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative
NEPDG National Energy Policy Development Group
NEPG National Energy Policy Group
NEW National Elections Watch
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
NMJD Network Movement for Justice and Development
NOC National Oil Company
NOCAL National Oil Company of Liberia
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
PSA Production Sharing Agreement
PSC Production Sharing Contract
SANONGOL Sociedade Nacional de Combustiveis
SERAP Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project
SINOPEC China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation
SLEITI Sierra Leone Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative
SLIMM Sierra Leone Indigenous Miners Movement
UMaT University of Mines and Technology
UN United Nations
UNCLOS UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
UNITA National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola
USAID United States Agency for International Development
USEIA US Energy Information Administration
USGS United States Geological Survey
WACSI West Africa Civil Society Institute
WACSOF West Africa Civil Society Forum
WANEP West Africa Network for Peacebuilding
WAOFCO West Africa Oil and Fuel Company
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Oil zones of West Africa: February 2010 (Credit U.S.
Geological Survey. Department of the Interior/USGS) 36
Fig. 4.1 Oil rents (% of GDP) (Source Estimates based on sources
and methods described in “The Changing Wealth of
Nations: Measuring Sustainable Development in the New
Millennium” [World Bank 2011]. License: CC BY-4.0) 89
Fig. 4.2 Oil rents (% of GDP) in West Africa (Source Estimates
based on sources and methods described in “The Changing
Wealth of Nations: Measuring Sustainable Development in
the New Millennium” [World Bank 2011]. License: CC
BY-4.0) 90
Fig. 4.3 Military expenditure (% of GDP) (Source Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI], Yearbook:
Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, ID
MS.MILXPND.CN. License: Use and distribution of
these data are subject to Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute [SIPRI] terms and condition) 98
Fig. 4.4 Military expenditure (% of GDP) in 1999 (Source
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI],
Yearbook: Armaments, Disarmament and International
Security, ID MS.MILXPND.CN. License: Use and
distribution of these data are subject to Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI] terms and
condition) 99
Fig. 5.1 Civic response to oil ‘capture’ 131
xi
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Oil endowment in West Africa 37

Table 4.1 Oil wealth of West Africa (for select countries) 80
Table 4.2 Oil companies occupying oil blocks in Sierra Leone and
the estimate payout in 2013 85
Table 4.3 Types of production agreements 91
Table 4.4 National oil companies of West Africa 93
Table 4.5 Oil-fueled mega projects of West Africa 100
Table 5.1 Actors, grievances, and grievance articulation 125
Table 6.1 Global regime for enhancing the peace properties of oil 154
Table 6.2 Key concerns of international non-governmental
organizations 155
Table 7.1 Types and nature of conflicts in the oil industry 169
Table 7.2 Colonial legacy: West Africa’s border disputes 171
Table 8.1 Natural resources of West Africa 196
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Human Security, Oil Revenues,

and Conflict
The Rising Profile of West Africa’s Oil Wealth

West Africa is in the midst of an oil frenzy. The frenetic search for hydro-
carbons in what has been described as the “oiliest patch in the world”
(Black 2012; Baumüller et al. 2011) has become so intense and wide-
ranging that there is planned or ongoing oil exploration in all of the
15 countries that officially make up the regional trade bloc: the Eco-
nomic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS. Traditional oil
exporters such as Nigeria have strengthened their capacity, and new oil
economies from all over the region are emerging on the scene. With the
fourth-largest proven reserves in the world after the Middle East, North
America, and Europe, West Africa accounted for 7% of the world’s total
output in 2007. At the end of 2011 the region had an estimated 132.4
billion barrels, an increase of 154% over the 1980 figure of 53.4 billion
barrels (Palazuelos 2012). The region is projected to increase its produc-
tion from 1935.90 in 2018 to 3006.24 thousand barrels per day in 2024
(Ghazvinian 2007; Mordor Intelligence 2018). More than any other nat-
ural resource, oil has thrust the region onto the world stage in unprece-
dented ways.
The region’s ongoing economically viable oil finds have been made
possible by a host of factors, foremost among which is technological
advancement in the petroleum industry. Thanks in part to improved
technology, knowledge about the region’s geology, especially its under-
explored maritime and offshore regions, especially its offshore regions, is
© The Author(s) 2020 1

V. Kanyako, Oil Revenues, Security and Stability in West Africa,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37986-5_1
2 V. KANYAKO
improving rapidly. Most of the new reserves are deep-sea oil fields that
can now be exploited by new technology and drilling techniques includ-
ing extended reach and complex path drilling, ideal for the region’s ultra-
deep waters. Other relevant factors include the relative stability in the
region following the conclusion of its civil wars in the early 2000s. The
conclusion of the civil war in Angola in 2002 and the consolidation of
democracy in Nigeria, has also helped fuel the oil boom in the region.
Externally, the perennial instability in the traditional petroleum regions
such as the Persian Gulf, has forced governments and oil companies to
look for alternative sources for oil in places like West Africa. Continued
high prices on the global market for the “Sweet crude” variety, which hit
a record high of $164.64 in 2008 helped to make West Africa attractive
to foreign direct investment.
The intensifying oil activities have been made possible in part by for-
eign direct investment from some of the largest international oil com-
panies (IOCs) in the world. A combination of what is referred to in
oil parlance as supermajors, majors, independents, and state-owned com-
panies are snatching up exploration licenses and establishing exploration
agreements with African governments in an unprecedented manner. Since
2009, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Texaco, three of the largest transna-
tional corporations in the world, have spent about $10 billion (all cur-
rency in US dollars except otherwise stated) annually toward West Africa’s
oil exploration (Watson 2009; Roberts 2006). According to the World
Bank (2012), between 2009 and 2011 foreign direct investment to the
region increased by 36% to $16.1 billion. Not surprisingly, a sizeable pro-
portion of this investment has been concentrated in the petroleum indus-
try. The economies of at least half of the 16 countries that make up the
region have experienced a 6% annual growth since 2002 (World Bank
2012). Buoyed by production from its enormously wealthy Jubilee Oil
Field, Ghana’s economy expanded by a whopping 13.4% between 2010,
when production started on Jubilee Oil Field, and 2011. The country
hitherto known as the gold coast, is now the fastest-growing oil economy
on the continent.
Of equal importance to the rising profile of West Africa in the global
political economy is the entry of China into the region’s oil sector. The
world’s second-largest net importer of petroleum products has intensi-
fied its involvement in Africa in general and West Africa in particular
over the last three decades. Through its three state-run companies—the
China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China Petroleum and
1 INTRODUCTION: HUMAN SECURITY, OIL REVENUES, AND CONFLICT 3
Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), and the China National Oil Corpo-

ration (CNOOC)—China has signed a raft of trade deals and bilateral
agreements with various governments in the region, including Nigeria,
where CNOOC completed a $2.3 billion deal to buy a 45% interest in
an offshore oil-mining concession (Frynas and Paulo 2007, p. 231). For
example, trade between China and Nigeria, which was a mere $2 billion in
2000, had reached a whopping $18 billion by 2010 (Egbula and Zheng
2011). As China expands into the region, with new deals in Angola and
interests in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, it will create new frontiers, a
new wave of ventures and increase demands for West Africa’s oil on the
international market (Clarke 2008, p. 75).
The region has several advantages that make it appealing to global
oil companies and foreign governments nervous about their energy secu-
rity. Most of the newest and most profitable finds such as in the Jubilee
fields in Ghana are located offshore, and in the deep (5000 feet/1524
meters) and ultra-deep waters (1830–2130 meters/approximately 6000–
7000 feet) off the Atlantic Ocean. Offshore oil is of particular interest to
external investors and host governments alike largely because it is not yet
fully developed and is somewhat insulated from political turmoil on the
mainland, something that has plagued the Nigerian oil industry since its
first export in 1958.
Geography and access to some of the biggest consumer markets also
play a role in enhancing West Africa’s rising profile in the global energy
sector. West Africa is the land mass situated just west of the United States;
the reserves are just opposite the eastern seaboard of the United States.
Being closer to the US eastern seaboard than the Middle East means West
African oil can get to one of its most important markets much in a short
amount of time with relatively little hassle. For example, the shipping
distance from Sekondi/Takoradi in Ghana to Texas is about 5730 nautical
miles; from Port Harcourt to Houston, Texas, is 6790 nautical miles. In
comparison, the distance between Saudi Arabia, the world’s most prolific
oil producer, and Houston, Texas, is 7912 nautical miles.
In addition to proximity, the offshore oil in the Gulf of Guinea is
attractive to American markets and production firms in particular because
it does not have to pass through major choke points or high-risk security
areas such as the Straits of Hormuz, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Strait of
Malacca, or any other narrow canals on its way from the Gulf of Guinea
across the Atlantic Ocean to refinement companies on the southern or
eastern seaboard of the United State, where majority of US refineries are
4 V. KANYAKO
located near navigable waters to take advantage of economical waterborne

transport for both import and export (Servant 2003).
Moreover, securing oil investments in the Gulf of Guinea is politically
strategic for the United States, which is very much aware of the com-
petition it faces from the growing energy needs of Asian countries such
as India, Malaysia, North Korea, South Korea, and China. Securing oil
resources in Africa represents a US response to competition from China,
whose trade with the African continent, in general, has been on an upward
trajectory (30% a year) topping $50 billion 2006 up from $39.7 billion in
2005 (McDougal 2009). China’s entry into the West African oil market is
important for several reasons as will be illustrated throughout this book.
For some years, West Africa’s offshore oil fields have been increasingly
attractive, not least because oil companies are often able to make higher
profits per barrel than from other parts of the world (Ellis 2003). Accord-
ing to the Platts Oilgram Price Report (2013), the ocean shipping rate
from Nigeria is far cheaper, at $1.45 per barrel, than shipments from,
say, the US Gulf Coast to the US Northeast refineries, which would cost
a shipper between five and six dollars per barrel. This essentially means
more profits for the oil companies when shipping crude from West Africa.
It is not just the quantity of oil that is now being drilled in West Africa
that has caught the world’s attention and interest. Its commercial oil is
of the highest grade and thus highly desirable. West Africa produces the
“Sweet crude” variety, which is among the most coveted in the world
largely because it contains low volumes of sulfur, suitable for process-
ing light refined petroleum products. The quality of Nigerian crude, for
example, is especially well adapted for use in US refineries (Ellis 2003,
p. 135), and indeed in other refineries around the world.
From the investor’s perspective, the historical circumstances of each
country in West Africa also works to the advantage of the international
oil companies. At least from the oil companies’ view the fact that West
African oil is divided up among several relatively weak countries, in dif-
ferent phases of their oil development and confronted by cultural and
language barriers (French, English, Portuguese and Spanish), they are
unlikely to coalesce into a formidable oil block to pose a major threat
in the form of an embargo or other forms of punitive measures.
In addition to the economic potential of oil and the foreign direct
investment that oil attracts, the subregion is also doing well on the demo-
cratic front. The region is experiencing a widening of the democratic
space, as evidenced in the frequent holding of national elections, some of
which have resulted in the change of unpopular governments. Since the

end of the Cold War, West Africa’s political systems have undergone both
rapid and momentous changes. A region that once accounted for more
than 70% of all military coups in Africa is now on a seemingly unstoppable
march toward pluralistic forms of governance. Without a doubt, compet-
itive general elections—often conducted under the scrutiny of the inter-
national community—have played a pivotal role in this seismic political
shift. More West African governments today have been chosen through
free and fair elections than at any other time in the region’s history. In
the region, as in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, elections are much
more than just a means of choosing public officials and changing govern-
ments. Due to the symbiotic relationship between poor governance and
instability, elections have also come to be viewed as a means of conflict
management (Kanyako 2007). Since 2002 both Sierra Leone and Liberia
have consistently conducted free and fair elections. Successive elections
in the Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria
and even a change of regime in Angola have since helped to boost the
democratic credentials of the region. There is no military regime in West
Africa, a fairly common type of governments in the 1970s and 1980s.
Increased democratic space means people have more avenues to express
grievances against unpopular policies such as the types often generated by
a rapacious and highly profitable business like oil.
By all indications therefore, oil, the world’s most sought after com-
modity, with its vast market opportunities and global reach, should
be a blessing to West Africa. If managed diligently the region’s natu-
ral resource-driven economies, partly hobbled by the devastating civil
wars of the 1990s, should experience a much-needed boost for estab-
lished as well as prospective first-time oil-producing countries. Even
non-producing countries in the region could stand to benefit either
directly or indirectly from the foreign investments that are flowing into
the region. In April 2019, the Gambia, one of the smallest countries
in the subregion with no known natural resources of note, signed a
contract with BP to explore for oil and gas in the country. Sierra
Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, are all frantically scouring their maritime
zones for signs of oil. Like the Gambia, they hope to join the likes
of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the region’s oil powerhouses: Nige-
ria and Angola in harnessing their oil reserves. It is perhaps not sur-
prising, therefore, that within the oil industry and government circles
in particular, that a lot of excitement exists about the ongoing discov-
eries about the region’s energy future. The general expectation is that
6 V. KANYAKO
the discovery of oil, the world’s most dominant fuel, can help promote
socioeconomic development, as it has done in countries in the Middle
East, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Sweden.
In spite of these positive developments and high expectations around
new oil finds, foreign direct investment, relative stability, and high global
demands—the ongoing discoveries have renewed concerns about the
possibilities of an entrenched “oil curse,” a phenomenon in which a
petroleum-endowed nation or region fails to transform its abundant oil
wealth into sustainable growth. These fears are not unfounded. If history
is anything to go by, the experiences in the region’s most established oil
economies, shows that successive governments (military or democratic)
have not exploited their vast oil wealth to benefit their citizens, or to
achieve prosperity and their desired socioeconomic ends. Both Angola
and Nigeria epitomize this concern: their vast oil revenues have either
been squandered or the wealth has not trickled down to their general pop-
ulations. Even though it earns over $8 billion a year from crude oil sales,
Nigeria’s per capita income stands at a mere $290 per year (Ghazvinian
2007). Though Angola’s is higher, at $4980 according to recent World
Bank estimates, it is marked by a huge wealth disparity between a small
upper class and an increasingly large impoverished population.
The other concern is that the introduction of petro-capitalism into a
region that has been adversely affected by the resource-fueled civil wars
of the 1990s and other major public health emergencies such as the 2014
Ebola outbreak, is bound to have major ramifications for the tentative
peace and stability that now prevails in large parts of West Africa. The
region consists predominantly of weak states that have experienced vary-
ing degrees of challenges to their internal stability since independence in
the 1960s. Eight of the 16 countries that make up the West Africa region
have experienced various forms of political and social instability in the
last two decades. Some of these conflicts—such as the devastating wars in
Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and even Nigeria—have been attributed to
a combination of resource mismanagement, bad governance, and years
of marginalization by the ruling elites of the region’s largely youthful
population, of whom more than 64% are under the age of 24 (United
Nations Population Fund 2018). Oil and poor governance are bound to
have major implications for state and human security in West Africa.
An oil bonanza in an environment of weak institutions and poor gov-
ernance creates all manner of accountability issues as well. A government
that derives its revenue from oil, evidence from both the region and else-
where shows, is less likely to be accountable to its citizens. Flush with oil
money, or in anticipation of a continued oil boom, oil-rich governments
often embark on wasteful public projects with little benefit for the wider
population. That is already playing out in the region. In anticipation of a
continued oil boom, some of the producer governments have embarked
on major politically—driven public projects that only benefit the priv-
ileged few. For example, having come into considerable wealth in the
1980s, Nigeria embarked on building a brand-new capital in Abuja, with
the construction of the city center alone costing a whopping $3.5 bil-
lion (Deloitte 2014). President Bongo of Gabon commissioned the 650-
kilometer Transgabonais rail line to Franceville in 2005 mainly to move
manganese from the interior to the coast, at the cost of $362 million.
The end result of all of these rapacious spending is that despite intensive
oil production in both countries for more than forty years, the average
citizen is no better off than they were before the oil finds in 1955 and
1956, respectively.
Unsurprisingly, because of the seeming lack of transparency and
accountability, the continuing emergence of a West Africa-wide oil indus-
try has become a magnet for all manner of campaigners and activists,
often opposed to the rapacious effects of oil drilling on people, institu-
tions and the environment. Abuses and human rights violations in the oil
industry has become a cause celebre for many crusading organizations
(and individuals) around the world, including nongovernmental orga-
nizations (NGOs) working on human rights, social justice, gender, and
peacebuilding. The London-based Global Witness and a host of local
advocacy organizations have used a moral and ethical lens and the con-
cept of redistributive justice to draw attention to the negative impacts
of the petroleum industry in regions such as West Africa. These cam-
paigning groups argue that the redistribution of profits and the long-
term negative effects on peoples and the environment has to be factored
into any oil contracts in regions such as West Africa, a region where oil
extraction has often been associated with human rights abuses (Barrera-
Hernandez et al. 2016, p. 8; Human Rights Watch World Report 2013).
Such critics of the industry, including various domestic and international
organizations are quick to point out that in spite of the enormous oil
revenues, many citizens remain excluded from, or are at best marginal
participants in, emerging oil sectors and the ensuing resource activity.
They point out that local communities often tend to bear the risks of
losses, such as environmental degradation and health impacts. The main
8 V. KANYAKO
environmental impacts are felt in the coastal regions, whose communi-

ties often are faced with “localized costs” including abandoned pipelines
that cause spills, water, and air pollution, and land damage (Barrera-
Hernandez et al. 2016, p. 7).
As a result of growing awareness of the negative impacts of petroleum
extraction, the twin issues of transparency and accountability are gain-
ing traction around energy and resource development. There are growing
calls by nongovernmental organizations and other watchdog institutions
for corporate and regulatory actors to be answerable as well as responsive
to the needs of the communities from which the resources are extracted
(Barrera-Hernandez et al. 2016, p. 2). Local communities are now assert-
ing their rights to be involved in decisions about energy and projects that
impact their traditional ecosystem and way of life. This has energized var-
ious “bottom-up” movements and local organizations. They now call for
explicit economic and social benefits from energy project development
and resource extraction.
As a result, virtually all oil companies have now been forced to pay
attention to their operational environment. Many adopt Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) measures that are in theory designed to go beyond
purely environmental protection and management and include actions
aimed at helping address the problems of the community in which they
conduct their business. The broad and diverse set of actions includes those
at the micro level (social infrastructure such as roads and hospitals) and
macro-level (to tackle poverty, and assist the declining manufacturing and
agricultural sectors…) and, as a result, expectations are often generated
among local stakeholders with respect to their contribution to the devel-
opment of the country (García-Rodríguez et al. 2013, p. 375).
Such corporate efforts are however limited in their positive impacts
on the affected communities. In fact evidence shows it actually causes
more harm than good as it often intensifies tensions among various social
groups. At the community level, the presence of oil and the mode of
distribution of its proceeds have inflamed competition among various
social groups, who use corporate support as an endorsement of com-
munity claims over others (Watts 2003, p. 64). In the Niger Delta, a
recent European Union report found that the way the oil corporations
engaged with local communities through development projects caused
conflicts between communities participating in such projects and those
that did not directly benefit (Baumüller et al. 2011). The discovery of oil
and the encroachment into the region’s fragile and unique biodiversity
by the oil companies carry major implications for the region’s marine and
coastal ecosystem, and by extension for its coastal people’s way of life.
With two of the region’s largest economies being petro-states, the pro-
liferation of commercially viable oil finds, there are questions around
the regional implications in the area of peace and stability. As West
Africa is slowly being transformed into a petro-region, some fear that
the region might become susceptible to the resource curse phenomenon,
as evidenced in the case of Nigeria and to some extent Angola, where
entrenched corruption and patrimony has circumscribed the industry. The
general thinking is that the ongoing discoveries, if unchecked will have
major implications for the peace and stability of one of the world’s most
politically—unstable regions. If managed well however petroleum rev-
enues could harness the good potential of oil, spur growth and minimize
social conflicts, The tried and trusted methods and strategies utilized by
various official (track 1) and unofficial (track 2) methods at thwarting or
reducing oil-induced violence and harnessing the transformative powers
of oil will play a critical role in preventing such conflicts. These issues are
key to understanding the political economy of West Africa’s “oil complex”
and its potential for promoting human security, peace and stability.
Objectives and Approach

The book maps the correlation between oil extraction and state and
human security in West Africa. More specifically, it analyzes oil revenue
flows and the role of the various stakeholders (both domestic and inter-
national) in West Africa. To do so the book contextualizes the nature of
conflicts and human security challenges in oil-producing regions in West
Africa as well as identify possible solutions for addressing cases of conflict
and human rights violations associated with oil extraction in the region.
Theories on human needs as propounded by Burton (1990), civil society,
and global governance have been utilized to foster a deeper understand-
ing of the conflict and peace “properties” of oil in a region such as West
Africa. The relationship between unmet basic human needs and natural
resource agitation and grievances described by Murshed (2002, p. 389)
as “motivations based on a sense of injustice in the way a social group is
treated.” is nothing new in West Africa. This book expands on that argu-
ment as it traces the history and evolution of such grievances in the oil
industry. How oil and grievances intersect forms a core element in this
analysis in this book.
10 V. KANYAKO
Challenges
The oil industry is notoriously difficult to study. Politics, the economy,
geography, and the actors involved all add to the complexity and chal-
lenges. It has often been described by critics as a secretive industry. While
official data on reserve estimates are found in different places, there
is really no comprehensive state-of-the-art measure of the volumes of
proven, probable and possible reserves (Clarke 2008, p. 382). To com-
pound the problem further, oil contracts are treated as state secrets, often
managed by the executive branch of government, with details of deals and
contracts known only to a closed circle of top government insiders. Fur-
thermore, the field is highly technical and littered with jargon that might
pose challenges to an “outsider” researcher with a passing interest in the
topic. A typical oil contract is of varied types (production sharing con-
tracts and joint ventures); has many parts and phases (exploration, pro-
duction, and development) and involves a multitude of powerful stake-
holders (both domestic and international) with vested interests ranging
from profits to the environment.
In spite of the secrecy and difficulties in penetrating a rather reclusive
industry, what is often easy to discern is the effects (especially the nega-
tive impacts) of oil extraction on a society. The book draws on a review
of the relevant documents (including company and newspaper reports)
and from interviews and focus-group sessions with representatives of civil
society and communities from across the region conducted between 2013
and 2015. It has been further enriched by insights gained from extensive
field-based engagements in the region over the last two decades, including
fieldwork in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the twin cities of Sekondi/Takoradi in
Ghana’s western region, and in southern and western Sierra Leone and on
the coastal and border regions of Liberia. Researching for this book has
involved directly organizing or participating in trainings, workshops, and
other formal and informal engagements around the extractive industry
with civil society thought leaders and community members from countries
as diverse as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroon, Guinea,
Angola, the Gambia, and Senegal. Interactions with experts and indus-
try watchers both within and outside the region have also contributed
immensely to broadening my horizons and interests in the subject mat-
ter. In the summer of 2015 the author traversed London, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland
in a bid to gain firsthand insight into the transformative influence of oil as
a critical natural resource and as a global product. To address adequately

the strategic challenges that petro-capitalism poses for West Africa’s
regional stability and human security, one must understand the transfor-
mative powers of petroleum revenue vis-à-vis the complex realities of the
region’s changing geopolitical landscape and its linkages to the outside
world.
Oil industry demarcation is at best an imperfect science, made difficult
by the fact that oil flow does not follow the contours of official political
boundaries. The countries that compose West Africa include Nigeria and
several non-OPEC countries. The latter group includes seven important
producers, three small producers, and many nonproducers. The impor-
tant producers are Angola (defines the southern limit of West Africa),
Cameroon, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast,
and Mauritania (defining the northern limit of West Africa). The small to
medium producers are Benin, Ghana, and Senegal. The nonproducers
include Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sao Tome and Principe,
Sierra Leone, and Togo. This book properly contextualizes world-wide
oil industry’s operations in West Africa, a strategic enclave in the global
political economy. The challenge is that some countries that are econom-
ically in West Africa, especially in oil terms, such as Angola and Gabon,
are politically not considered West African as they are not members of the
Economic Community of West African States.
This book breaks new ground in how it approaches the study of natu-
ral resources in West Africa. First, it utilizes a West Africa–specific regional
approach, with emphasis on countries that are in the two main geological
oil zones of the Senegal Basin and the Gulf of Guinea respectively. The
regional approach is useful for understanding patterns and trends across a
wider geographical area with mostly consistent socioeconomic and politi-
cal features. A regional study of petroleum industry is the most productive
approach to understanding patterns, dynamics, and the modus operandi
of a rather reclusive industry. That is mainly because country-specific or
firm-specific studies, though important, are not always ideal for capturing
larger trends and the complexities of a large and powerful industry.
There are other reasons for adopting a regional approach. This is
the first time in the history of West Africa that the discovery of oil
has taken a regional dimension, with more countries set to become
“first-time producers.” Also, the impact of oil on a community and
its ancillary effects (oil spills, armed groups, environmental degrada-
tion, and piracy, to name a few) are both transnational and regional in
scope and are critical to understanding the region’s human security chal-
lenges. For example, the coastal communities, which are the frontline
12 V. KANYAKO
stakeholders in the region’s emerging offshore oil industry, share simi-

lar riverine-based socioeconomic activities (farming, fishing, and trading)
and are thus heavily dependent on the coastal terrain for their sustenance.
With the oil finds located largely offshore, a threat to their way of life
often triggers various forms of social unrest whose impact could be felt
across borders.
Country-specific or firm-specific studies, though important, tend to
utilize a pro-business approach that fails to capture the larger trends and
complexities. In Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea, Soares de Oliveira
(2007, p. 163) argues that a singular country or company focus would fail
to capture other external powerful forces or the wider ramifications in oil
investment decisions. As such a regional study of the petroleum industry,
as adopted in this book, is the most productive approach to understanding
patterns, dynamics, and the modus operandi of a rather reclusive industry.
The Urgency of Oil

This is the first time in the history of West Africa that one natural resource
has become the common political and economic denominator in the
majority of the countries in the same geological zone. More than 12
countries in the region are either oil producers (Nigeria, Ghana, Angola,
Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea) or have discovered or are on the verge
of discovering oil in commercial quantity (Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sierra
Leone, and Liberia). As more countries continue to explore for oil, there
is a need for a deeper understanding of the oil industry in the region,
including knowledge of the businesses and cultures involved, along with
West Africa’s unique socioeconomic and political context within which an
oil economy is taking shape. African hydrocarbons could prove decisive in
long-term economic relations, as it a strategic resource base for the mod-
ern, industrial, energy-importing world. As such, what happens in (West)
Africa’s oil (and gas) will have profound ramifications for both the pro-
ducer countries and indeed for the global economy. As Clarke (2008)
correctly points out, governments may stand or fall on the management
of this crucial industry (p. 72).
The diverse and competing foreign interests and investments in this
part of the world are not understood in depth, largely because their oper-
ations often evade scrutiny. As already alluded to at the beginning of this
chapter, a theme that will be explored in-depth in subsequent chapters,
the leading multinational oil companies are heavily invested in the region.
This book provides an insight into the motivations and modus operandi
of some of the most powerful and wealthiest transnational corporations
in the world. Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil are the world’s
second-, third- and fourth-largest transnational companies, respectively
(Economist 2012). In spite of their power and influence, not much is
known in terms of the details of their contracts or specifics on their gen-
eral operations. This is not surprising, given that the oil industry is one of
the most secretive in the world. Most of the easily available information
is put out by the oil companies themselves or through groups that they
sponsor, either directly or indirectly. While these pro-industry reports are
important contributions in their own right, they do not provide the full
picture of what is, needless to say, a very complex, opaque, tenacious, and
constantly evolving industry.
The key international oil companies (IOCs) that operate in the coun-
tries along the Gulf of Guinea and the Senegal Basin share similar charac-
teristics either through multicountry ownerships of oil concessions in the
region or as subsidiaries of one another. For example, in addition to the
big IOCs such as Shell and ExxonMobil, other lesser-known names, such
as African Petroleum and Anadarko have major stakes in several countries
in the region. A regional approach helps us better understand their inter-
ests and alliances. In very specific terms, therefore, the study provides an
opportunity to evaluate the commitments (known in the business world
as corporate social responsibility) of profit-seeking companies that operate
in a regulatory vacuum with lax laws and weak implementation.
The book also provides an alternative argument for curtailing the
resource curse. While the linkages between natural resources and conflicts
have received immense attention from both scholars and analysts of all
sorts (Sachs and Warner 1995; Collier 2000; Collier and Hoeffler 1999,
Klare 2002), there is very little focus on the varied nuances of the impact
of oil on societies or regions emerging from conflict. The book focuses on
the more multifaceted ways in which oil’s impacts are felt at various lay-
ers of societies and communities. Among other themes this book explores
the “Peace properties” of oil. The argument put forward here is that oil
by itself is not a “cursed” resource. In other parts of the world, includ-
ing the Scandinavian countries, it has been used to propel development,
peace, and stability. In West Africa it has the potential to foster com-
munication and dialogue among the various stakeholders. The stakes and
investments in oil are often so high that it requires cooperation among
14 V. KANYAKO
various stakeholders to make it economically viable. In short, where man-

aged diligently, oil can promote peace and sound development in a region
that is desperately short of these markers of progress.
Perhaps the most significant relevance of the study is its focus on the
perspectives of domestic actors in the region’s petroleum industry. The
book advances a theory of local agency in the oil industry by arguing
that diverse voices, including from “below” are critical to mitigating the
oil curse. Thus the perspectives of local communities, including women’s
groups, youth associations, and traditional and religious leaders as well
as representatives of oil communities form a centerpiece in this book.
The impact of oil on a community and its ancillary effects (oil spills,
armed groups, and piracy) are both transnational and regional in scope
and are thus important for understanding the region’s human security
challenges. In the end, it is these aggregate efforts of countless individu-
als and groups that make social change happens (p. 98). The key point,
which Ugor (2013, p. 85) gestures toward, is that oil communities, often
the ones that bear the brunt of the negative effects of oil are not pas-
sive but rather active agents of change. This book contributes to our
understanding of the agency of community groups in the political econ-
omy of West Africa by outlining their perspectives, actions, and counter-
actions. If nothing else the multicausal, multidimensional, and intercon-
nected nature of the issues surrounding oil in the region requires such a
bottom-up understanding of the rationale for the evolution of community
groups into what Ikelegbe (2005) refers to as a “mobilizational and agita-
tional force… involving ingenuity, vision, and resilience to get their voices
heard in a space dominated by oil-producing governments and powerful
international oil companies”.
Book Structure
To properly contextualize the complex relationship between a strategic
natural resource such as oil and its “conflict properties” in the context of
West Africa, I have divided the book into three main parts. The first part
(the centrality of oil) provides an analytical background to the growing
influence of hydrocarbons in the region’s two main geological oil zones:
the Senegal Basin and the Gulf of Guinea. The first section is mainly con-
cerned with the historiography as well as the geological and topographical
mapping of West Africa’s emerging oil economy. Here the book provides
a general historical overview of West Africa’s oil industry and outline the
relevant theoretical framework for understanding the “oil complex” phe-

nomenon. I focus on theories in the realm of the political economy of
conflict, especially around human needs, the paradox of plenty, resource
capture and the rentier state phenomena respectively.
In Part II (the stakeholders and core issues), which is made up of
Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I focus on the various external and internal stake-
holders in the West African oil industry. There I analyze the region’s polit-
ical economy and its linkages to the global petro-economy. This part also
deals with the varied forms of state and human security issues and chal-
lenges posed by the rapid incursion of petro-capitalism into West Africa.
The role of the producer governments in the region and their national oil
companies are also the subject of analysis in this section. The third and
final part (oil and peace) is made up of Chapters 6, 7, and 8 provides an
analytical assessment of the effectiveness of varied strategies to make West
Africa’s “big oil” more accountable to the needs and aspirations of its
people. The section outlines in very specific terms the possible outcomes
of an entrenched petro-capitalism as well as various multilayered efforts
by national, regional, and international third parties to manage oil-related
conflicts. It deals with the management and resolution of various types of
conflicts in the oil sector, as well as attempts made by various conflict
resolution mechanisms to prevent and resolve disagreements and disputes
in the industry. This section also contains the conclusion, which weaves
together all of the core elements relating to oil revenues and human secu-
rity. The core argument posited here is that the oil industry will shape
West Africa, and will in turn be shaped by other critical centrifugal forces
both within and outside the region.
This is how the rest of the chapters are broken down, starting with the
historical context, then moving on to the stakeholders and their modus
operandi; the fiscal dimensions of oil, its impact; agency of local commu-
nities, and ending with its implications for the conflict resolution.
Chapter 2: The History and Geology of Petroleum in West Africa

Commercial oil exploration and drilling in West Africa goes back nearly
a century. The region has experienced varied commercial oil exploration
phases that spans more than a hundred years. This chapter traces the his-
toriography and phases of the oil industry pointing out that the region’s
search for oil has been in fits and starts with exploration halted and
resumed often based on major events—some domestic, others global. The
16 V. KANYAKO
chapter also points out that West Africa’s oil finds are widely dispersed
and unevenly distributed, with the resource found in commercial quan-
tity in its onshore, offshore, deep waters, and ultra-deep waters. There
are primary producers, such as Nigeria, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea;
and there are secondary producers. The chapter outlines the various ways
the geography, geology, and history has positioned West Africa as a key
player in the global political economy of oil. It ends with a discussion of
the role of technology on the development of the region’s oil industry.
Chapter 3: External Stakeholders and the Geopolitics of Oil

West Africa has become a magnet for oil companies from all over the
globe. More than 500 oil (and gas) expatriate firms are participating vig-
orously in the region’s upstream and downstream energy sector. These
external stakeholders consist of states, investment and equity firms, multi-
lateral agencies, and an eclectic mix of well-established oil companies and
various Africa-specialist upstart companies. They are engaged in funding,
exploring, drilling, monitoring, and setting the policy agenda that shapes
the region’s oil commercial activities. Their collective investment portfo-
lios, commercial activities, and policy strategies have turned West Africa
into not just one of the most promising oil zones but also one of the most
heavily contested hydrocarbon provinces in the world. This chapter deals
with the expatriate business history of West Africa’s oil ventures, tracing
its cartel-like beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century, through the
colonial period, into the independence and postindependence era. The
key finding here is that because of their depth of technological experi-
ence, influence, wealth, and global reach, the role of external actors is key
to understanding West Africa’s modern resource extraction environment.
The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the wider implications
of expatriate business activities for the subregions status in the global oil
industry.
Chapter 4: Oil Revenues and the State

Oil revenues are becoming increasingly crucial to the political economy
of West Africa. Both oil-rich and oil-scarce countries in the subregion are
generating funds from the intense oil exploration and drilling activities
taking place right across the West African coastline. In some countries in
the subregion, as much as 85% of export earnings are derived from oil.
The ensuing revenue streams, which come in various forms—bonuses,

taxes, rents, and production sharing or joint-venture contracts—should
in theory enable West Africa’s governments to address sorely neglected
developmental problems. Though in theory the increased oil revenues
enable producer countries to allocate additional resources for infrastruc-
ture and social services including construction of roads, hospitals, schools,
in practice the monies are often used to fund megaprojects and strengthen
state security at the expense of human security. This chapter outlines the
different oil revenue streams, their allocation, and the varied ways they
impact state and human security, exploring the political economy of oil:
in particular, the social, economic, and political ramifications of oil rev-
enue flows in the subregion. It posits that governments’ spending habits
as well as foreign and domestic and foreign policies, including investment
in public infrastructure and social services, often directly correlate with
the price of oil on the global market. All of this in turn carries major
implications for both foreign and domestic policy.
Chapter 5: Oil and Community Agitation

The incursion of petro-capitalism into West Africa has activated grievances
among the region’s oil host communities in unprecedented ways. From
Pujehun District in southern Sierra Leone to Takoradi in Western Ghana,
from Bomahun in southeastern Liberia to the well-publicized Niger Delta
in southern Nigeria, the ancillary effects of oil and the mode of distribu-
tion of its proceeds have inflamed passions among populations that are
often exposed to enormous negative externalities with few tangible ben-
efits. This chapter focuses on the symbiotic relationship between oil and
grievances at the community level in West Africa. It explores the eclectic
nature of these grievances and the wide array of actions adopted by oil-
producing communities in seeking redress for perceived injustices ema-
nating from the region’s emerging petroleum industry. The chapter also
focuses on the creative strategies used by various local communities to
gain concessions from the international oil companies and the host or
producer governments. The chapter concludes that the failure of West
Africa’s petroleum industry to translate oil wealth into human-centered
development, as outlined by the UNDP (2013), that meets the socioeco-
nomic aspirations of the oil host communities in particular and the coun-
tries in the region as a whole has the potential to undermine the region’s
shaky peace and stability.
18 V. KANYAKO
Chapter 6: Civil Society and Global Frameworks

The ongoing discovery of oil across large swaths of West Africa and its
negative impacts on people and the ecosystem has attracted a plethora
of critics from the nongovernmental sector. This chapter explores the
intersections between existing global frameworks and those of local civil
society agencies as they promote transparency and accountability in West
Africa’s petroleum industry. Unofficial efforts by nongovernmental orga-
nizations in articulating the needs and demands of various affected com-
munities across the region are discussed and analyzed. Through their mul-
tistakeholder and watchdog initiatives at all levels of society, an eclectic
mix of nongovernmental and civil society organizations have continued
to exert pressure on producer governments and oil companies for the
transparent use of proceeds from the region’s emerging oil wealth. Using
a combination of judicial measures, research, and documentation of vio-
lations, reports, and in some cases direct nonviolent action, civil society
has become a factor in crystalizing the growing influence and impact of
petro-capitalism in West Africa. Varied multi-track efforts are critical to
ensuring that West Africa’s oil riches become a catalyst for development
and sustainable growth rather than a curse that hinders and stunts the
region’s socioeconomic growth and undermines its stability.
Chapter 7: Managing Disputes in West Africa’s Petroleum Industry

The oil industry is one of the most conflict-prone natural resource extrac-
tion environments in the world. The sheer scale of the investment,
the complexities and protracted nature of the various agreements, the
plethora of stakeholders and the bewildering number of interests both
domestic and international all coalesce to make disagreements and dis-
putes of all sorts inevitable in the oil industry. This chapter explores the
nature and types of conflicts and the mechanisms used to produce success-
ful mutually beneficial agreements in the region’s nascent oil industry. It
critically assesses the role of national, regional, and international actors
engaged in resolving or preempting the various oil-driven conflicts across
the subregion. A combination of track 1 (state level and formal diplo-
matic) and track 2 diplomacy (informal and nonstate level) have been
applied to quell or reduce oil-induced and other natural resource-based
conflicts. This chapter also explores the joints policy efforts designed to
help countries manage their differences through various conflict resolu-

tion mechanisms.
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Implications for Conflict Resolution

In the brief concluding chapter, the issues of oil, peace, and conflict are
revisited. The chapter looks at the wide-ranging ramifications (real and
perceived) of the expanding oil industry on various facets of life in West
Africa: human security, community relations, securitization of the state,
military–civil relations, maritime and riverine activities, and international
conflicts. It explores the implications of these phenomena for the field of
conflict resolution, which emphasizes the amicable resolution of disputes
and the fostering of dialogue and communications among the various
stakeholders.
Core Themes of the Book

On the surface, this is a book about oil. It is about how a natural resource
that was at best marginal to the global economy a mere 150 years ago, has
now become one of its most critical and most sought after, leading nations
who perceive a threat to their energy security to go to war over it. But the
book is much more than that just an extractive resource project. It deals
with several interconnected and overlapping themes ranging from politics
to the economy to protracted social issues in a small but strategic corner
of the world. Oil is about profits and state security as it is about people,
communities, the environment, and the institutions that shape and are in
turn affected by the network of interactions between and among some-
times diametrically opposed forces, both small and gargantuan, domestic
and global.
Another core theme that runs throughout the book is the relationship
of oil, a strategically critical resource, to conflict and peace. Jeff Colgan
(2013) considers oil’s relationship to international conflict as “central to
understanding contemporary world politics.” Using empirical data from
several case studies he showed that petro-states-defined as states that have
at least 10% of GDP derived from oil exports-are twice as prone to inter-
national conflict as non-petro-states. In Petro-Aggression, When Oil Causes
War (2013, p. 11) the author argues quite convincingly that the propen-
sity of petro-states to engage in conflict comes about when leaders, espe-
cially revolutionary ones, converts large proceeds from oil into “military
20 V. KANYAKO
and political assets in support of aggressive foreign policy.” In what he

termed as “petro-aggression,” he points out that “oil income enables
aggressive leaders to eliminate political constraints, reduce accountabil-
ity, and take their countries to war.” Using the case studies of Sudan,
Libya, and Iraq, Colgan argued that at the domestic level, oil facilitates
risky behavior on the part of petro-state leaders. This argument builds
on one posited earlier by Klare (2002) who pointed out that oil inten-
sifies competition between states more than any other natural resource.
Some of these, the author points out, are due to historical factors such
as the poor delineation of national borders or by attempts of big pow-
ers to shore up allies in resource-concentrated but turbulent regions. It
is for these reasons, he argues, that the United States in particular has
either signed defense pacts with several countries in the region, or has
sold huge quantities of sophisticated weapons to these countries. Klare’s
analysis also posits that international conflict resolution will come under
a lot of strain as nations and nonstate actors engage in a free for all fight
to protect “national security” in the case of governments, or to access the
oil wealth through the use of force. Klare contends that power struggles
over petroleum, among others, will be the engine driving international
politics in the near future. As such, the foreign policies of most west-
ern governments will be shaped by the desire to control access to these
resources. Such policy will be based on military power projection, partly
because these resources are often located in the most volatile regions of
the world. This point had been taken up a year earlier by the National
Energy Policy Development Group in a May 2001 paper when it argued
that as natural resources become scarce and depleted, they will lead to
more friction between people both within and across borders, and subse-
quently wars. Signs of these predictions are already coming to pass in West
Africa. Oil-fueled border disputes, have intermittently flared up between
Nigeria and her neighbors, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. In the case
of Cameroon the two have engaged in several armed skirmishes over the
potentially oil-rich Bakassi peninsula which was awarded to Cameroon by
the International Court of Justice in November 2007.
In spite of these potential negative impacts, there is also empirical evi-
dence (at least in West Africa) to suggest that oil could help various stake-
holders including states and communities better manage their differences
in a more peaceful manner. Where oil finds are located near common
borders states have realized it is in their best interests to negotiate and
amicably resolve their differences to ensure that everyone benefits. They
are increasingly utilizing various multi-track diplomatic efforts to harness

the full potential of oil proceeds and oil-related foreign direct investment
for socioeconomic development and the peaceful resolution of conflicts
between and within states, as well as at the community levels. The regional
lens adopted in this work explores the wide range of creative methods
and techniques used at the domestic, national, regional, and global levels,
ranging from formal peacemaking to grassroots human rights advocates,
to address the region’s intractable conflicts. Harnessing the “Peace prop-
erties” of oil is key to making West Africa, home to 5% of the world’s
population, strong, secure, viable and a dependable member of the global
economy.
Summary
West Africa is in the midst of an oil frenzy. The region is projected to
provide around 7–10% of the world’s total output in the next decade.
A constellation of factors has coalesced to turn the region into an “in-
creasingly attractive prize both by major energy-importing states and by
transnational energy corporations” (Raphael and Stokes 2011, p. 22).
These factors included technological advances in the way petroleum is
explored and drilled; high global demand; seemingly endless upheaval in
the Persian Gulf and North Africa, where the world’s largest oil reserves
are found; the phenomenal rise and growing energy needs of China; and
the consistently high prices that oil fetches in the international market.
The region’s oil is generally of the highest quality (commonly called sweet
crude, in petroleum parlance) and thus highly desirable: it is less costly to
process into the refined product. Also, West Africa’s proximity to Europe
and the United States means its oil can get to some of the largest and
most important global markets much faster and cheaper as opposed to oil
from places like the Middle East. From the oil companies’ perspective,
the fact that most of the oil finds in West Africa are located offshore is
a major incentive to source there. This is because such exploration and
drilling make it largely immune to onshore instability and community-
level conflicts. Furthermore, the West Africa region itself has a very small
local consumption market, meaning that the vast majority of whatever is
produced will be headed mainly for the international market. This book
explores the reasons for the region’s rise in profile, the modus operandi
of the varied stakeholders, including the responses of the grassroots com-
munities often affected by the negative consequences of oil drilling and
22 V. KANYAKO
the efforts at peacemaking. What happens in West Africa’s oil industry has
major implications for the rest of the world.
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CHAPTER 2
The History and Geology of Petroleum

in West Africa
The History and Evolution of West Africa’s Oil

West Africa was one of the first subregions to make contact with the Euro-
pean world in what eventually became known as the Atlantic interconti-
nental trading system. Beginning with the Portuguese contact in 1444,
the Dutch, French, English, and Scandinavians soon followed. Between
the 1580s and 1670s, various European ships landed on West Africa’s
shores, including Cape Verde, Senegambia, the Gulf of Guinea, and West
Central Africa, which includes Angola. They engaged in commerce with
the natives and eventually established trading posts all along the coast to
guarantee military protection for their commerce. They exchanged Euro-
pean goods such as cutlery, china, guns, and gunpowder for ivory, red-
dyed woods, beads, gold, and eventually slaves (De Golyer 1965, p. 169).
These early transactional encounters marked the beginnings of West
Africa’s interaction and engagement with global commerce. That the
region was rich in natural resources was not in doubt. The area was vari-
ously known to the Europeans during this period as the Grain Coast, the
Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, and around the eighteenth century the Seep
Coast. The Atlantic intercontinental trade marked a major turning point
both for intra–West African trade and for the more sinister commerce: the
Transatlantic Slave Trade.
The region’s early commerce with the outside world was built largely
on the exploitation of its natural resources. Three institutional practices
established during these early encounters laid the foundation for the
© The Author(s) 2020 25

V. Kanyako, Oil Revenues, Security and Stability in West Africa,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37986-5_2
26 V. KANYAKO
brand of petro-capitalism that emerged a few centuries later. The first

is that most of this early trade was carried out by private traders and
businessmen, with some on the payroll of various trading companies, the
precursors to today’s multinational corporations. The second is that the
companies that were eventually set up were largely state-sponsored or in
some cases state-owned. Such was the case for the West India Company,
a chartered company set up by the State General’s Office in the Nether-
lands in 1621. Even where they were considered private, the companies
still depended to a large extent on “home country” protection, and occa-
sionally financial support, to keep them afloat. The third point is that
these companies were granted monopoly rights over the natural resources,
especially to the minerals that were found in abundance in this part of
the world. For example, the Dutch granted the West India Company a
monopoly over all Atlantic commerce. The British, Spanish, and French
all utilized the same practices of favoring their national or home com-
panies over others. All of these practices shaped the extractive industry
that emerged in West Africa in the eighteenth century and well into the
twentieth century.
The West African region has experienced varied commercial oil explo-
ration phases that spans more than a hundred years. Oil was known to
exist in West Africa as far back as the eighteenth century, when the Por-
tuguese noticed seeps and slicks in present-day Angola. In spite of this
however our knowledge of history and growth of oil in the subregion is
rather uneven. For example, not much is known about pre-1950s com-
mercial oil exploration and production. During the colonial era (between
1857 and 1947), Ghana was known to the British (and French) colonial
authorities who administered the region as the Seep Coast—on account
of the number of tarballs and other evidence of oil that were found along
the coast. (New African 2012). Between the eighteenth century, when
knowledge of the existence of oil became known, to the dawn of the
twentieth century, when the British discovered oil in commercial quantity
in the Niger Delta, major powers—including Britain, France, Germany,
the USA, Portugal, Spain, and international oil companies such as Shell
and Exxon, to name just two—vied for control of the continent’s vast
natural resources and engaged in frenetic prospecting for commercial oil.
In spite of the overwhelming evidence of the availability of oil in the
region, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century, when the British
discovered commercial oil in Nigeria’s Niger Delta in the early 1930s,
2 THE HISTORY AND GEOLOGY OF PETROLEUM IN WEST AFRICA 27
that most of the world started paying attention to West Africa’s oil via-
bility. The reasons for the delay in harnessing West Africa’s oil potential
are manifold, ranging from financial, logistical, political, economic, and
technological challenges. The most important of the reasons for the delay
lies elsewhere, in other parts of the world, where the technology and the
capital to extract oil first started.
The Drake Well oil creek drilling in Pennsylvania in 1859 is generally
considered to be the genesis of modern oil drilling. Edwin L. Drake, a
conductor for the New York and New Haven Railroad, who had no prior
knowledge of the oil business, is known as the “father of the petroleum
industry” because he devised a technology and technique of driving a
pipe down to protect the integrity of the well bore that revolutionized
how crude oil was produced and launched the industry on a large scale
(American Oil and Gas Historical Society 2019).
Prior to Drake’s revolutionary techniques, early oil exploration and
drilling was unsophisticated. Primitive methods of locating oil were largely
through trial and error, known in the industry as “wildcatting,” often
undertaken by enthusiastic prospectors with no scientific background or
knowledge and who largely depended on guesswork. But what these early
oil moguls lacked in scientific method they more than made up for in
enthusiasm and tenacity. De Golyer (1965, p. 120) described it best:
“Most of the world’s early production was found by men who knew no
more of origin or occurrence of oil than they did of the inner workings
of a slot machine. They drilled. They pulled the lever and hoped for the
jackpot.” As one could imagine, such a rudimentary search for what was
soon to become the world’s most sought after resource, was highly ineffi-
cient and expensive too. De Golyer gave the example of the United States,
where in 1948 “out of the 6,182 wildcat wells that were drilled (at the
cost of about a billion dollars each) seven out of eight were dry” (1965,
p. 120).
Following Drake’s remarkable discovery, the nascent oil industry began
to register modest progress in the next four decades. Thanks largely to
his contributions to the industry, the great age of oil discovery started
in earnest in the twentieth century when the first great oil strike was
recorded on January 13, 1901, at Spindletop in eastern Texas, near the
Louisiana border (De Golyer 1965, p. 117). This was the first-recorded
large-scale commercial oil well.
Shortly after these technological breakthroughs of drilling for oil, mod-
ern techniques of harvesting oil in commercial quantities (including the
28 V. KANYAKO
dry rotary auger method; rotary drill; and the mechanical percussion
drill method) all began to spread to other parts of the world, including
Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and subsequently sub-Saharan Africa. At
the time of Drake’s discovery, in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Russia, with one of the world’s known oil reserves began to modernize its
oil production in the highly lucrative Baku region by replacing its unso-
phisticated manual-labor techniques, where locals reportedly used “rags
and buckets” to scoop up oil sleeks, with modern and more sophisticated
borehole techniques (Goldman 2008, p. 18). The Middle East, which is
today the world’s largest-known deposit, did not hit oil until the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, with the discovery of oil in Iran in 1907,
followed by Saudi Arabia in 1938 by the ARAMCO Consortium (Gold-
man 2008, p. 21).
Why did West Africa lag behind? To start with, oil is a very difficult
and complicated natural resource to harness. Prospecting for it efficiently
requires a deep knowledge of geology as well as huge financial resources.
It is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world. Locating oil,
especially in the early days when oil-drilling technology was in its infancy
was incredibly difficult, made all the more difficult by the fact that those
initial efforts were not backed by science. As Golyer reminds us, it wasn’t
until the twentieth century that the field of geology truly gained recog-
nition in the oil industry. Prior to that, the industry depended largely
on digging holes and hoping for the best. Even though they knew of its
commercial worth, the colonial authorities in West Africa had a hard time
locating oil and an even harder time drilling for it.
With the entry of geologists who used scientific methods to locate oil,
most of the guesswork in oil exploration was eliminated. Geology and
other scientific methods helped determine with more certainty the avail-
ability (or not) of oil, the quantity of the find, as well as help determine
whether it is technically feasible to extract and the overall commercial
viability of the enterprise. The combustible nature of the material makes
extracting oil, processing it, and making it available to the end user even
more complicated. The field of geology helped make the industry safer
and more efficient.
With the scant information about the genesis and modus operandi of
the oil actors before 1950, scholarly and public analyzes do not bother
to interrogate the nature and forms of horizontal and vertical relation-
ships, often hugely disadvantageous to the West African countries, that
evolved among the stakeholders, both local and international. The role of
the colonial state and the pioneer oil explorers, many of whom were wild-
catters, is key to understanding the nature of the industry that emerged in
the late nineteenth century in what became the oil-producing countries
of Angola and Nigeria. Potential for economically viable oil has been rec-
ognized since at least the nineteenth century, when sustained exploration
for oil in most countries commenced (Clarke 2008, p. 3). The region’s oil
exploration and development occurred over four main time periods (colo-
nial/preindependence; postindependence; post–Cold War, and the glob-
alized twenty-first century). Each historical time period registered slow
but steady progress toward prospecting, exploring, and developing com-
mercial oil in the region.
Colonial Period/Preindependence (Exploration and Discovery)

The growing demand for oil, partly fueled by the invention and wide
use of the internal-combustion engine created a huge demand for and
an acute shortage of petroleum. At the turn of the twentieth century,
oil production was heavily concentrated in a handful of countries. For
example, in the whole of the British Empire, commercial oil was produced
only in Burma and Canada by 1900.
Though the oil shortage was marginally offset (3.8%) by commer-
cial production in countries such as India, Canada, Trinidad, Egypt, and
Brunei, it did not adequately address the limited availability problem
(Steyn 2006, p. 251). By 1918, at the end of the First World War, the
frenetic search for reliable oil supply forced the European powers to look
elsewhere for alternative sources of fuel, a commodity that had proven
decisive in the just-concluded war. West Africa was a natural choice, as it
was already known at that point that pieces of bitumen and oil seepages
were noticeable over a wide geographical area in the zone now known
as the Gulf of Guinea. The various European powers made more funds
available, both as loans and grants, to various oil prospectors from their
home countries or friendly governments. For example between 1945 and
1958 the French government quadrupled its tropical Africa investments
with special focus on “countries bordering the ocean” (Twomey 2001,
pp. 80, 81).
It was during this post-World War era period that the economic struc-
tures, policies, and political relations that have had a lasting impact on the
subregion were created. These had an enduring legacy on the way and
manner in which the industry evolved. From about the 1850s and 1940s,
most of sub-Saharan Africa was under the direct or indirect control of
30 V. KANYAKO
seven European powers: Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium,

Spain, and Portugal. West Africa, which was dominated by the French
and British, was central as it had vast natural resources and trade goods,
including palm oil, cotton, palm kernel, rubber, gold, and groundnut,
that the colonialists desperately needed. The control for these resources
set in motion both a political and economic battle for supremacy, between
especially Great Britain and France that was to have a major impact on the
region and indeed the rest of the world.
The colonial era established beyond all reasonable doubt that the
region had oil. Around the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese dis-
covered oil in what is now Angola. Oil and gas exploration in Ghana
(which was then known as the Seep Coast) got underway in 1896 when
the West Africa Oil and Fuel Company (WAOFCO) commenced explo-
ration in an area known as Half-Asini. In 1909 the French company, the
Société Française de Petrole, followed suit with their own commercial
prospecting and drilling (Openoil 2012). Soon after this surface indi-
cation of petroleum, which included mainly onshore oil seeps, was also
established in at least seven countries in and along the Gulf of Guinea,
including Gabon, Cameroon, and Nigeria. In 1926 petroleum explo-
ration was initiated in Gabon by the French company Elf, with drilling
commencing in earnest in 1934 (Clarke 2008, pp. 158, 181).
With petroleum exploration underway during the colonial period,
the ultimate goal for Britain and France in particular, was to exploit
the critical resource for commercial purposes. The colonial authorities
also centralized the process of commercial exploitation by encourag-
ing the joint public-private enterprises. Not surprisingly, most of the
international companies during this era, including those focused on oil,
were either partly or wholly government—owned. Such an arrange-
ment meant for example that the security and safety of the compa-
nies’ overseas staff were the ultimate responsibility of the home gov-
ernments. As part of the centralization process during this era, all poli-
cies on extraction were decided in major cities like London and Paris,
and with the sole aim of benefiting the home country and not the
local economies, as was the case with most of the region’s extractive
industry. For example, as soon as oil was discovered in Nigeria, the
British government passed an ordinance in 1914 making any oil and
mineral under Nigerian soil legal property of the British Crown. The
colonial governments gave special concessions to their home country
oil companies. On the eve of the Second World War, in 1938, the
British government granted Shell (then known as Shell D’Arcy) sole
rights over the exploitation of “all minerals and petroleum throughout

the entire colony” (Steyn 2006).
Thanks in large part to the devastating effects of the Second World
War, the 1950s were particularly active in the exploitation of the region’s
oil industry. The colonial governments made a desperate attempt to com-
mercially exploit West Africa’s oil. With their respective economies in
ruins following the conclusion of the war, both Great Britain and France
started vigorously drilling for oil in their respective colonies. They opened
up the industry to more companies which in turn led to the proliferation
of oil prospecting in the region.
Though these initial attempts were short-lived, it was a success as the
investment paid off as they opened up the industry to more investments
and eventual commercial discoveries which began to “yield dividends by
the 1950s with the commencement of commercial drilling in Nigeria,
Gabon and Angola” (Clarke 2008, p. 181). Angola’s first onshore oil was
produced in the 1950s, and the first offshore was produced in Cabindan
waters in 1968. Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon were to follow shortly in 1953
and 1956, respectively. In the Gambia, modern oil exploration got under-
way in 1956. Four years later, in 1960, British Petroleum (BP) drilled
two onshore wells, followed by the purchase of acreage by Chevron. Oil
was discovered in Nigeria in 1956 at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta after
a half century of exploration through largely to the pioneering efforts
of the Nigerian Bitumen Company and British Colonial Petroleum com-
panies, respectively, which by 1908 had succeeded in drilling for oil in
an area known as Okitipupa, in present-day Ondo state. Oil exploration
in Cameroon started some 70 years ago (Clarke 2008, p. 175; NNPC
2019). It was also during this era that the first commercial oil from the
region was exported from Nigeria in 1958. This intensified the search for
commercial oil in the region, which has not abated since.
The struggle for independence upped the stakes and altered the politi-
cal and economic landscape for both West Africa and the colonial powers
in profound ways. Given the unpredictable and sometimes violent nature
of independence, especially following Guinea’s turbulent separation from
French colonial rule in October 1958, it became a race against time for
the European colonial powers to either exploit as much of the region’s
natural resources as possible or to design new arrangements with the
soon-to-be independent countries that will enable former colonial mas-
ters to continue to hold sway over the region’s economic independence.
They did both. Home governments and the oil companies redoubled their
32 V. KANYAKO
efforts, knowing fully well that independence for the region and continent
as a whole, was just a matter of time. West African countries were soon to
gain their independence from the European powers in the 1960s, only to
realize that political independence did not equate to economic indepen-
dence.
Because of the critical nature of oil and its strategic importance to
nations even in its early phase of its widespread use, even political inde-
pendence did not necessarily lead to the severance of African nation’s
economic ties with the former European colonizers. If anything, the busi-
ness and economic ties were strengthened further, to the extent that
the same companies that were visible and active during the colonial era
remained the dominant players in the extractive industry in the region
even after independence. Political independence from colonial rule did
not amount to economic independence. The newly independent African
leader’s hands were tied. Their countries lacked the financial means and
the technical know-how to drill for oil on their own. For companies such
as Shell and Exxon, it was business (and profits) as usual. The preferred
strategy of the African leaders, therefore, was to seek some kind of an
accommodation with the various foreign powers, mainly those from which
they had just gained independence, to continue to extract and sell their
natural resources, including oil (Twomey 2001, p. 81).
Postindependence and the Cold War (Drilling and Exportation)

The period following the end of colonialism (1960s–1990s) was by far
one of the most important and active phases in the oil exploration and
development in West Africa, as it witnessed drilling and commercial
exploitation. For the first time, control of the region’s natural resources
came under the direct governance and control of Africa’s postindepen-
dence leaders, who were desperate for funds to undertake their various
national development projects. In a bid to gain economic independence,
the continent’s new political masters embarked on various capital accu-
mulation projects, chief among which was the commercial exploitation of
their natural resources, including oil. They wasted no time in exploring
for oil, whose world demands had risen considerably. For example, less
than a year after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, its govern-
ment granted oil exploration rights to the little-known Tennessee Sierra
Leone Inc., an affiliate of the Tennessee Gas Transmission Company of
Houston, Texas (New York Times, March 24, 1962). Around this time,
in the first half of the twentieth century, shallow drilling for prospectivity
was conducted by Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Gabon, with sur-
face indication of oil and gas recorded in all geological littoral areas at this
time (Clarke 2008, p. 73).
The situation in Ghana exemplifies the methods, approach, and dilem-
mas faced by newly independent African countries who for their survival
looked both to the West and also to each other through various bilat-
eral and multilateral arrangements. The country was known not just for
gold but had signs of oil by the time it gained independence in 1958
from Great Britain. In 1963, AGIP an Italian oil company was awarded a
contract to construct an oil refinery at the port of Tema, Bight of Benin
to process imported crude oil from neighboring Nigeria. In its heyday in
the mid-1970s, the plant had a processing capacity of 43,000 barrels a day
(McCaskie 2008, p. 322). While importing oil from its neighbor, Ghana
embarked on aggressive oil prospecting as a way to reduce dependency on
outsiders, a stated objective of its independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah.
Through his efforts and initiatives, including nationalizing TOR in 1975,
Ghana became a modest oil producer in 1978 (Clarke 2008, p. 181).
By the late 1960s—a few years after independence for most African
countries—oil exploration, which had until that point largely been con-
fined onshore, started moving offshore. International oil companies
shifted their focus to offshore exploration again, partly influenced by
global developments thousands of miles away. On September 10, 1964,
the United Nations ratified what became known as the Geneva Conven-
tion on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone. Article 1 of the
32-article document states categorically that “the sovereignty of a State
extends, beyond its land territory and its internal waters, to a belt of sea
adjacent to its coast, described as the territorial sea” (Clarke 2008, p. 73;
United Nations 1964, p. 2). This provided West Africa’s littoral states
with the legal instruments to extend their reach beyond the territorial
borders to maritime borders with full access to all the natural resources
contained therein.
By the 1970s, the focus on the offshore terrain progressed steadily,
with some spectacular results. Initial wells were drilled on the shelf and
shallow water, followed by drilling in deeper waters, especially in countries
like Angola, Gabon, and Nigeria, paid off with series of discoveries (Horn
2018).
34 V. KANYAKO
Post–Cold War (Expansion and Consolidation)

The Cold War had a major impact on oil exploration in the region. Many
countries were hobbled by the constraints imposed by the division of the
world into two main spheres of influence: communism versus capitalism.
Both Nigeria (1967–1970) and Angola, two of the region’s leading pro-
ducers, were embroiled in major civil wars that claimed the lives of mil-
lions of their citizens. Things changed quickly in the industry, however
as oil exploration and development progressed rapidly in the aftermath of
the Cold War with search for commercial oil moving into the deep water,
off the Atlantic Coast where 40% of new oil fields, yielding more than
500 million barrels have been found (McCaskie 2008, p. 318).
Twenty-First Century and Beyond (Commercial Export)

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, West Africa had gained recog-
nition as a growing oil province, one to be reckoned with in the
global petroleum industry. It had witnessed a series of new ventures,
which includes the expansion of the oil search from traditional and well-
established countries to new prospects. Another focus involves moving the
prospecting for oil from onshore (with all its attendant consequences) to
deep and ultra-deep waters. Angola has already set the pace where two-
thirds of its newest and most profitable finds are in ultra-deep waters off
the coast of the Atlantic Ocean (Clarke 2008, p. 73). Advances in tech-
nology, trade liberalization, and increases in foreign direct investment (the
theme of Chapter 3) all helped to open up the subregion’s oil industry
for further exploration. The end result was spectacular oil finds, which
attracted more investors. Now West Africa is firmly established as an oil
province and a key member of the international petroleum industry.
The region’s search for oil has been in fits and starts. Serious explo-
ration was halted and resumed often based on major events—some
domestic, others global—much larger in scope, such as the First and
Second World Wars and the fight for independence and indeed available
technology. Because of the technologically—intensive nature of oil explo-
ration and extraction, the hydrocarbon sector, as important as its always
been to the region’s political economy, developed relatively late, com-
pared to less financial, and technology intensive extractive industry such
as diamond, timber, or gold. Only 20 years ago neither Equatorial Guinea
nor Ghana was known for oil (Clarke 2008, p. 262). That has changed
with oil exploration in all countries of the region.
Once the region gained independence, the new leaders were faced with
challenges in exploiting their oil potential. They lacked the resources and
technical know-how to harness oil—a notoriously technology-heavy and
large investment industry. It was a catch-22 situation: severing political
ties while as a matter of expediency relying on the Europeans for eco-
nomic development. Africa’s new leaders quickly found out that political
independence did not mean economic freedom. To be able to make the
best out of their natural resources they still needed to rely on overseas
partners, often their former oppressors, to help them harness the resource.
After years of difficulty Africa is positioned for improved exploration
and development, with West Africa as the main source of oil, accounting
for well over half of total production of the continent’s oil. The region’s
crude output has been rapidly improving and will continue to do. What
is new is the scale of the finds and the growing number of actors, both
domestic and international. By 1980 only Nigeria was producing oil on
a commercial basis. By 2000, 12 of the 16 countries in the region had
commercially—viable oil finds and productions. Due to rising competition
in the global energy market, the nature and character of the industry has
witnessed a dramatic shift over the last three decades.
West Africa’s Geologic Oil Provinces

Where the region known as West Africa starts or ends is a matter of
intense debate. According to the United Nations Statistics Division, West-
ern Africa comprises 17 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte
D’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Maurita-
nia, Niger, Nigeria, Saint Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Oth-
ers agree- to some extent. The Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS), the African Union, and even the African Development
Bank Group (2005) have different geographic subcategorizations. Mem-
ber countries making up ECOWAS do not include St. Helena or Maurita-
nia (which left in 2002). The highly regarded Oil and Gas Journal adds
Cameroon, Congo (Brazzaville), and Mauritania to the count of coun-
tries that make up West Africa. According to the African Development
Bank (2013) the region consists of 15 countries, eight of which are from
the CFA zones while Nigeria, Ghana, Cape Verde, Guinea, The Gambia,
Liberia, and Sierra Leone are non CFA members. With the exception of
Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire all member countries of the region are net oil
importers.
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"There's a dash about that fellow that's fine!" remarked Trafford to Von
Hügelweiler, who was standing near him, wrapped during inaction in a big
military ulster.
The Captain of the Guides had already in his own mind ruled
Schmolder out of the competition, exaggerating his faults to himself with
egotistical over-keenness. Einstein, however, was skating so brilliantly that
Von Hügelweiler was beginning to experience the deepest anxiety lest he
should prove the ultimate winner of the coveted trophy. The anxiety indeed
was so deep that he refused to admit it even to himself.
"Wait till we come to the second part of the competition—the free-

skating," he retorted. "Free-skating requires great nerve, great endurance,
and absolute fitness. It is there that Einstein will fail."
When Einstein had finished his compulsory figures amid a round of

applause, Von Hügelweiler slipped off his long ulster. For a moment a bad
attack of stage-fright assailed him,—for there is nothing quite so nerve-
racking as a skating competition before a critical judge and an equally
critical audience,—and his heart was turned to water and his knees trembled
with a veritable ague; but a cheer of encouragement restored him to himself,
and he struck out for glory. With head erect, expanded chest, arms
gracefully disposed, and knee slightly bent, he was about as pretty an
exponent of Continental skating as one could wish to see. He travelled
rapidly and easily on a firm edge, his turns were crispness itself, the
elegance of his methods was patent to the least initiated.
General Meyer following slowly with note-book in hand, smiled

appreciatively, as he jotted down the marks gained from time to time by his
brilliant "counters," "brackets," and "rocking turns." The crowd roared their
applause, and in the music of their cheers, Von Hügelweiler's depression
vanished, and his heart sang an answering pæan of jubilee. Like most
nervous, self-centred men, he most excelled before an audience when once
the initial fear had worn off. And now he was skating as he had never
skated before, with a dash, energy, and precision that drew redoubled cheers
from the spectators and audible applause from the royal box. Even Meyer,
he reflected, with all his malice, could hardly dare to give another the prize
now; to do so would be not merely to violate justice, but to insult the
intelligence of every man and woman on the ice.
At the conclusion of his effort, Trafford congratulated the Captain

warmly on his performance. Von Hügelweiler's dark eyes shone bright with
pleasure. Already he saw himself crowned with the invisible laurels of
undying fame, receiving the massive silver trophy from the royal hands.
"Thanks, my American friend," he said, heartily, "go on and prosper."
With a few bold strokes Trafford started on his attempt to do superbly

what others had done faultlessly. His style instantly arrested attention. Here
was no lithe figure full of lissom vitality and vibrant suppleness; no
graceful athlete whose arms and legs seemed ever ready to adopt fresh and
more elegant poses. But here was an exponent of the ultra-English school, a
rigid, braced figure travelling over the ice like an automaton on skates, an
upright, inflexible form, sailing along on a perfect edge at an amazing
speed, with a look of easy contempt on his face alike for the difficulties of
his art and the opinion of his watchers.
Ever and again there was an almost imperceptible flick of the ankle, a
slight shifting of the angle of the shoulders, and some difficult turn had
been performed, and he was travelling away in a slightly different direction
at a slightly increased rate of speed. The crowd watched intently, but with
little applause. They felt that it was wonderful, but they did not particularly
admire.
To Von Hügelweiler,—trained as he was in the theory and practice of

the "Continental" school,—the performance seemed stiff and ugly.
"Mein Gott," cried Einstein, "at what a speed he travels!"
"He wants a bigger rink than the Rundsee!" exclaimed Schmolder. "A
man like that should have the Arctic Ocean swept for him."
Von Hügelweiler was less complimentary.

"I don't think we need fear the American, my friends," he said. "He
skates his figures fast and big, but with the grace of a dummy. Such
stiffness is an insult to the Rundsee, which is the home of elegant skating.
See with what a frowning face General Meyer follows this American
about!"
"If you can learn anything from Meyer's face," said Captain Einstein
drily, "you should give up the army and go in for diplomacy."
"Wait till he comes to the free-skating!" went on Von Hügelweiler.

"That needs a man with joints and ligaments—not a poker. Our friend will
find himself placed last, I fear; and I am sorry, for he has come a long way
for his skating, and he seems an excellent fellow. I will say a few words of
encouragement to him."
But Trafford had just then momentarily retired from the rink. He was
changing his skates for the pair he had bought at Frau Krabb's the previous
evening.
At the free-skating, which followed, Franz Schmolder broke down

altogether. His knee failed him when he had performed for three minutes
instead of the necessary five. Einstein, who followed, did well up to a point.
But five minutes' free-skating is a fairly severe test of condition, and the
big, burly soldier did not finish with quite the dash and energy he had begun
with. Von Hügelweiler, however, gave another splendid display of effective
elegance, and again drew resounding cheers for his vigorous and attractive
performance. He himself made no doubt now that he was virtually the
winner of the King's Cup. He had worked hard for his success, and was
already beginning to feel the glow that comes from honourable effort
generously rewarded. Meyer would doubtless be sorry to have to place him
first, but in the face of Einstein's and Schmolder's comparative failure, and
the American's stiffness, no other course would be open to him. Von
Hügelweiler, however, watched Trafford's free-skating with interest,
dreading, with an honest and generous dread, lest his amiable rival should
disgrace himself. To his astonishment, Trafford was no longer a petrified
piece of anatomy skating with frozen arms and arthritic legs. He beheld
instead an exponent of the Continental school, who seemed to have in his
repertoire a whole armoury of fanciful figures and astounding tours de
force. Trafford was as free and unrestrained now as he had been severe and
dignified before. Graceful, lissom, filled with an inexhaustible,
superabundant energy, he performed prodigies of whirling intricacy, dainty
pirouettings, sudden bold leaps, swift changes of edge, all with such
masterful daring and complete success that the whole ring of spectators
cheered itself hoarse with enthusiasm.
"Bravo! bravo!" cried Von Hügelweiler, clapping him heartily on the

back at the conclusion of his effort. "It is good to see skating like that! If
you had skated the preliminary figures with the same zeal you have
displayed just now, we Grimlanders would have to deplore the departure of
a national trophy from our native land."
Trafford accepted the left-handed compliment in silence, lighting a

cigarette while General Meyer totted up the amount of marks he had
awarded to the several competitors. After a few minutes' calculation,—and
after his figures had been checked by a secretary,—the General skated back
to the front of the royal box and announced his decision to the King. Then,
at a word from his Majesty, a gentleman in a blue and yellow uniform
placed a gigantic megaphone to his lips, and turning it to the various
sections of the crowd, announced:—
"The King's Prize: the winner is Herr George Trafford; second, Captain
Ulrich Salvator von Hügelweiler."
The American received the announcement with complete outward

calmness. And yet those hoarsely spoken words had touched a chord in his
heart that he had believed snapped and irrevocably broken. For a moment
he lived, for a moment the cheers of his fellow men had galvanised into
healthy activity the dead brain that had lost interest in all things under the
sun. The success itself was a trivial affair, yet in a magic moment he had
become reconciled to life and its burden, vaguely thankful that he had kept
the first barrel of his revolver free from powder and ball.
"Congratulations, Herr Trafford," said General Meyer, who now

approached him with proffered hand. "Escort me, I beg, to his Majesty, who
will present you with the cup. You will also receive a royal command to
dine to-morrow night at the Palace."
"Congratulations, Herr Trafford," said another voice.
Trafford looked round and beheld the competitor who had been placed
second. The tone of the felicitation was one of undisguised bitterness, the
face of the speaker was the ashen face of a cruelly disappointed man. And
Von Hügelweiler, honestly believing himself cheated of his due,—and not
bearing to see another receive the prize which he felt should have been his,
—slunk from the scene with hate and misery and all uncharitableness in his
tortured soul. Then, as he took off his skates, the cheering broke out again,
and told that the American was receiving the trophy from the King's hand.
An ejaculation of bitterness and wrath burst from his lips.
Hardly had he breathed his angry word into the frosty air when a small
hand plucked at his fur-lined coat, and looking round he perceived a
charming little face gazing into his own.
"Why so cross, Captain?'" asked the interrupter of his execration.
Captain von Hügelweiler's hand went up to the salute.
"Your Royal High——"
"Hush! you tactless man," said the Princess Gloria, for it was no other.
"Do you want to have me arrested? For the sake of old times," she went on,
putting her arm in his, "I claim your protection."
But Hügelweiler had not thought of delivering the exiled Princess to the
authorities! For one thing, his mind was too occupied with self-pity to have
room for State interests; secondly, he was still in love with the fascinating
creature who looked up at him so appealingly, that he would sooner have
killed himself than betrayed the appeal of those wondrous eyes.
They were strolling away from the Rundsee in the direction of the town,
and a straggling multitude of the spectators was streaming behind them in
the snowy Thiergarten.
Von Hügelweiler's lips trembled a little.

"It is good to see you again, Princess," he whispered. "It is comforting,
just when I need comfort."
"Comfort!" echoed his companion with a grimace. "You were swearing,

Ulrich! You are a good sportsman, you should take defeat with better
grace."
"I can accept open defeat, Princess, like a man, though I had set my
heart on the prize. But I was not fairly beaten. The American skated his
figures as ungracefully as they could be skated."
"Why, he skated marvellously," declared the Princess enthusiastically. "I

never saw such speed and daring on the ice. The man must have been born
with skates on. I never saw a finer——"
"Nonsense!" broke in the irate Captain, forgetting both manners and

affection in the extremity of his wrath. "He won because General Meyer
had a grudge against me. He asked me last night to do a dirty piece of work.
In the name of loyalty he wished me to murder a civilian; but I am a Von
Hügelweiler, not an assassin, and I refused, though I knew that by so doing
I was ruining my chances of success to-day."
The Princess Gloria pressed his arm sympathetically.
"The King's service frequently involves dirty work," she said, looking at
him out of the corner of her eyes.
"So it appears!"
"Why not embrace a service that calls for deeds of valour, and leads to
high honour?"
Von Hügelweiler looked at the bright young face that now was gazing
into his so hopefully. A thousand memories of a youthful ardour, born
amidst the suns and snows of Weissheim, rushed into his kindling heart. He
had lost the King's Cup; might he not wipe out the bitter memory of defeat
by winning something of incomparably greater value? There was a price, of
course; there always was, it seemed. Last night it was the honour of a clean
man; to-day it was loyalty to his King. But how much greater the present
bribe than that offered by the Commander-in-Chief! The intoxication of
desire tempted him, tempted him all the more shrewdly because of his
recent depression. What had he to do with a career that was tainted with
such a head as the scheming Jew, Meyer? What loyalty did he owe to a man
served by such officers and such method as was Karl? The Princess's eyes
repeated their question, and their silent pleading shook him as no words
could have done.
"What service?" he asked falteringly.
"My service," was the hushed retort.
"And the reward?" he demanded.
"Honour."
"And—love?"
There was silence momentary, but long enough for the forging of a lie.
"Perhaps," she breathed, looking down coquettishly.
A great light shone in the Captain's eyes, and the sombre beauty of his
face was illumined by a mighty joy.
"Princess Gloria," he cried, "I am yours to the death!"
CHAPTER SIXTH
"WEIN, WEIB, UND GESANG"

That evening Mr. and Mrs. Robert Saunders were George Trafford's
guests in a private room of the Hôtel Concordia. In the centre of the dining
table stood a big silver trophy of considerable value and questionable
design. As soon as the soup had been served, Trafford solemnly poured out
the contents of a champagne bottle into its capacious depths. He then
handed it to Mrs. Saunders.
"Felicitations," she said, taking the trophy in both hands, "I drink to St.
Liedwi, the patron saint of skaters, coupled with the name of George
Trafford, winner of the King's Cup."
Saunders was the next to take the prize in his hands.
"I drink a health unto their Majesties, King Edward of England and
King Karl of Grimland, and to the President of the United States," he said;
and then bowing to his host, "Also to another good sportsman, one Nervy
Trafford. God bless 'em all!"
Trafford received the cup from Saunders, his lips muttered something
inaudible, and tossing back his head he drank deep.
"What was your toast, Mr. Trafford?" demanded Mrs. Saunders quietly.
The winner of the cup shook his head sagely.
"That is a secret," he replied.
"A secret! But I insist upon knowing," returned the lady. "Tell me, what
was your toast?"
Trafford hesitated a moment.
"I toasted 'Wein, Weib, und Gesang,'" he announced at length.
"Wine, woman, and song!" repeated Mrs. Saunders. "A mere abstract
toast, which you would have confessed to at once. Please particularise?"
"The 'wine,'" said Trafford, "is the wine of champagne, which we drink
to-night, '89 Cliquot. 'Woman,' is Eve in all her aspects and in all countries
—Venus victrix, sea-born Aphrodite, Astarte of the Assyrians, Kali of the
Hindoos. God bless her! God bless all whom she loves and all who love
her!"
"And the song?" demanded Saunders.
"The song is the one I have heard one hundred and fifty times since I
have been here," replied Trafford. "Its title is unknown to me, but the
waiters hum it in the passages, the cabmen chant it from their box seats, the
street-boys whistle it with variations in the Bahnhofstrasse."
"That sounds like the Rothlied," said Saunders. "It is a revolutionary

air."
"I like it enormously," said Trafford.
"Of course you would," said Saunders. "You have the true Grimlander's
love of anarchy. But if you wish, we will subsequently adjourn to the Eden
Theatre of Varieties in the Karlstrasse. I am told that the Rothlied is being
sung there by a beautiful damsel of the aristocratic name of Schmitt."
"I have seen her posters," said Trafford, "and I should like, I confess, to
see the original. But what of Mrs. Saunders? Is the 'Eden' a respectable
place of entertainment?"
"It is an Eden of more Adams than Eves," said Mrs. Saunders. "No, I do
not propose to follow you into its smoky, beer-laden atmosphere. I am
going to accompany Frau generalin von Bilderbaum to the opera to hear 'La
Bohême.' But before I leave I want further enlightenment on the subject of
your toast. 'Wein' is all right, and 'Gesang' is all right, but what about
'Weib'? I thought you had sworn off the sex."
"Sworn off the sex!—Never! True, I offered to one individual my heart,

and hand, and soul; but the individual deemed the offering unsatisfactory. I
now offer to the whole female race what I once offered to one member of
it."
"Polygamist!" laughed Saunders.

"No," explained Trafford, "it's a case of first come, first served."
"You are offering your heart and hand and soul to the first eligible
maiden who crosses your path?" asked Mrs. Saunders, with upraised brows.
"My heart and hand," corrected Trafford with great dignity.
"Come, come," Saunders broke forth, "it's time we were off!"
* * * * *
The auditorium of the Eden Theatre was a long oblong chamber, with a
crude scheme of decoration, and no scheme of ventilation worth speaking
about. It possessed, however, a good orchestra, an excellent brew of lager
beer, and usually presented a tolerably attractive show to the public of
Weidenbruck. For the sum of four kronen per head Saunders and Trafford
obtained the best seats in the building. For the expenditure of a further
trivial sum they obtained long tumblers of the world-famed tigerbräu.
"A promising show this," said Trafford, lighting a large cigar. An

exceedingly plump lady in magenta tights, was warbling a patriotic ditty to
the tune of "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?"
"More quantity than quality," commented Saunders cynically.

"Personally,—not being possessed of your all-embracing enthusiasm for
womanhood at large,—I find myself looking forward to the next item on the
programme."
"What's that? The 'Rothlied'?"
"No. Midgets."
Trafford uttered an exclamation of disgust.
"Little things amuse little minds," he said rudely. "Give me a strong

man or a giant, and I will watch with interest."
At this point the curtain descended on the plump warbler, and a

powdered attendant in plush knickerbockers removed the number 7 from
the wings, and substituted the number 9.
"Oh, it isn't the midgets yet, after all," said Saunders, consulting his
programme. "It's the Schöne Fräulein Schmitt—the beautiful Miss Smith. I
wonder if she's as lovely as her posters."
As the curtain drew up again, a young girl tripped lightly on to the

middle of the stage, and it was at once manifest that the epithet "schone"
was no mere advertising euphemism.
Her black skirt was short, her black bodice low, and her black picture
hat exceedingly large, but her limbs were shapely, her eyes marvellously
bright though small, and there was a vivacity and grace in her movements
that put her predecessor to shame. When she sang, her voice proved to be a
singularly pure soprano, and,—what was more remarkable,—gave evidence
of considerable taste and sound training. The song was a dainty one, all
about a young lady called Nanette, who conquered all hearts till she met
someone who conquered hers. And then, of course, Nanette lost her art, as
well as her heart, and could make no impression on the only man who had
really touched the deeps of her poor little soul. The last verse, naturally, was
a tragedy,—the usual tragedy of the smiling face and the aching bosom. The
idea was not exactly a novel one, but the air was pretty, and the singer's
personality won a big success from the commonplace theme. Anyway, the
audience rose to her, and there was much clapping of hands, clinking of
beer glasses, and guttural exclamations of enthusiasm.
"Bravo!" cried Trafford ecstatically, "Bravo! Bravissimo! Behold an

artist among artistes, a fairy of the footlights! Bravo! Well done, beautiful
Miss Schmitt!"
"Charming," agreed Saunders more calmly, "and, strangely enough,

extraordinarily like a young lady I met a few years ago."
"Perhaps it is the young lady," suggested Trafford. "I noticed she fixed
her beady black eyes on you during the last verse."
"I think not," said Saunders drily. "The young lady I was referring to
was a somewhat more exalted personage than Fräulein Schmitt."
The fascinating songstress re-appeared for her encore, and this time the
orchestra struck up a martial air with a good deal of rolling drums in it.
"My 'Gesang,'" whispered Trafford excitedly.
"The 'Rothlied,'" said Saunders.
Again the Fräulein sang, and now the burthen of her song was of
battlefields and war's alarms. The tune was vastly inspiriting, and the
audience knew it well, taking up the chorus with infectious enthusiasm.
"It's great!" muttered Trafford, twirling excitedly at his moustaches. "By

the living Jingo, it's great!"
And of a truth the air was an intoxicating one. There was gunpowder in
it, musketry and cold steel, reckless charges and stern movements of
advance. One caught the thunder of hoofs and the blare of bugles. Its
infection became imperious, maddening even,—for the audience forgot
their pipes and their tigerbräu, and beat time to the insistent rhythm, till the
chorus gave them a chance of imparting their enthusiasm to the roaring
refrain. The girl herself seemed the embodiment of martial ardour. She trod
the stage like a little war-horse, her eye sought the gallery and struck fire
from the beer-loving bourgeoisie. For a second her gaze seemed to fall upon
Saunders mockingly, and with an air of challenge. Then she glanced round
the crowded house, held it spellbound, lifted it up, carried it to high regions
of carnage, self-sacrifice, and glory. The audience roared, clapped,
screamed with exuberant acclaim. Their state was frénétique—no other
word, French, English, or German, well describes it.
"By George, she's a witch!" said Trafford. "She's as dangerous as a time

fuse. I'll be hanged if I don't want to fight someone!"
The encore verse was more pointed, more sinister, less general in its
application. It spoke of wrongs to be righted, tyranny to be overcome,
freedom to be gained. It hinted of an uplifting of the proletariat, of armed
citizens and frenzied women, of tumult in square and street; it breathed of
barricades and civic strife, the vast upheaval of a discontented people
determined to assert their rights. Men looked at each other and stirred
uneasily in their seats, and then glanced round in apprehension,—as if
expecting the entrance of the police. The song was a veritable
"Marseillaise," a trumpet call to revolution, a match in a barrel of
gunpowder; and with the final chorus and the stirring swing of the refrain,
all remnants of prudence and restraint were cast to the winds. The house
rose en masse; men mounted their seats and waved sticks and umbrellas
aloft; a party of young officers drew their swords and brandished them with
wild insurgent cries. Forbidden names were spoken, cheers were raised for
popular outlaws and suspects, groans for unpopular bureaucrats and the
King's favourites. It was an intoxicating moment,—whatever one's
sympathies might be,—and it was obvious enough that the temper of the
people was frankly revolutionary, and that the authorities would be quite
justified,—from their point of view,—in arresting the audience and the
management en bloc.
"We'd better clear out," suggested Saunders; "there's going to be

trouble."
"If there's a row," announced Trafford grimly, "I'm going to be in it.

You've seen stirring times over here before, but I'm a novice at it, and I
want blooding. Shall we raise three cheers for Karl and fight our way out?"
"Not if you want to keep your thick skull weather-proof," was the
sensible retort. "There's always discontent in Grimland, but there's a big sea
running just now, and it isn't wise to fight the elements. Sit tight, my friend,
and you'll live to see more exciting things than a noisy night at the Eden
Music-Hall."
The curtain was down again now, but the audience still roared for the re-
appearance of their favourite, still clamoured for another verse of the
intoxicating song.
"Hullo! what's this?" cried Trafford. An attendant had edged her way up
to Saunders, and was offering him a folded note on a tray. "If you have any
pleasant memories of the winter of 1904, come round to the stage door and
ask for Fräulein Schmitt." That was the purport of the note, and after
reading it, Saunders handed it to Trafford.
"Then it must be your lady friend, after all," maintained the latter,
smiling at his friend.
"It must indeed," acquiesced Saunders with a frown. "Come round with
me now."
"Why not go by yourself?"
"Because I am a married man," replied Saunders, "and I want a

chaperon." And together the two men left the still noisy house and made
their way to the stage door.
Under the guidance of a pale youth in a shabby pony coat, they entered
a gloomy passage, ascended a steep flight of stone steps, and halted before a
door, which had once been painted green.
The pale one knocked, and a clear musical voice gave the necessary
permission to enter.
A naturally bare and ugly room had been rendered attractive by a big
stove, several comfortable chairs, and an abundance of photographs,
unframed sketches and artistic knick-knacks. It had been rendered still more
attractive by the presence of a charming young lady, who was engaged—
with the assistance of her dresser—in removing all traces of "make-up"
from her comely lips and cheeks.
The lady in question came forward with an air of pleasurable

excitement, and smiling a warm welcome to the Englishman, cried:
"So you have come, Herr Saunders! You have not, then, altogether
forgotten the winter of 1904?"
Saunders took the small hand which had been extended to him and
bowed low over it.
"Heaven forbid, my dear Princess—or must I call you Fräulein Schmitt,

now? No, indeed, so long as I have memory cells and the power to consult
them, I shall never forget the winter of 1904. It gave me an angel for a wife,
a king for a friend, and—must I say it—a princess for an enemy. That fierce
enmity! It is by no means my least pleasurable remembrance. There was so
much fun in it, such irresponsible laughter, that it all seems now more like
the struggle of children for a toy castle than anything else."
"Ah, but you forget that I lost a dear father and a loved brother in the
struggle for that toy castle!" There was almost a life-time of sorrow in the
young girl's voice.
Again Saunders bent his head.
"Pardon me, Princess," he said, "I did not forget that, nor the fact that
you nearly lost your life, and I mine. But my memory loves rather to linger
on the bob-sleighing excursions, the tea-fights at Frau Mengler's, the
frivolous disputations and serious frivolities—all with such a delicious
substratum of intrigue."
"You have a convenient memory, mein Herr," she said quietly. "You
remember the bright things, you half remember the grey, the black you
entirely forget."
Saunders' smile faded, for there was still a touch of sadness in the girl's
words. Under the circumstances it was not unnatural, but he thought it more
considerate to keep the interview from developing on serious lines.
"The art of living is to choose one's memories," he said lightly. "He who
has conquered his thoughts, has conquered a more wonderful country than
Grimland."
"And so marriage has made of you a philosopher, Herr Saunders?" she

returned, her soft lips curling a trifle contemptuously. "Well, perhaps you
are right—if we take life as a jest, death, then, is only the peal of laughter
that follows the jest." And then, turning to the American, she chided
Saunders with: "But you have not presented your friend!"
"I must again crave pardon—I had quite forgotten him," apologised
Saunders. "Your Highness, may I present my very good friend, Mr. George
Trafford of New York—the winner of the King's Cup."
The American bowed low before this exquisite creature; then uplifting
his head and shoulders and twirling his moustache—a habit he had when
his emotions were at all stirred—he asked with true American directness:
"Am I speaking to a princess of the blood royal or to a princess of

song?"
The princess and the Englishman quickly exchanged amused glances,

and a moment later there came from the girl a ringing laugh, a delightful
laugh bubbling over with humour, with not a hint of the sorrow or the
bitterness of a few moments before, while Saunders hastened to say:
"Both, my American friend! You are addressing the high-born Princess

Gloria von Schattenberg, cousin to his Majesty King Karl of Grimland!"
"Then I congratulate the high-born princess less on her high birth than
on her inimitable gift of song," said the American gallantly.
The Princess acknowledged the felicitation with a bewitching smile.
"Thank you, Herr Trafford," she said simply. "It is better to be a music-
hall star in the ascendant than a princess in exile—it is far more profitable,
isn't it?" No answer was expected, and in a trice her mood changed again.
"When I fled the country three years ago, Herr Trafford," she continued, "I
was penniless—my father dead, and his estates confiscated. True, an
allowance—a mere pittance—might have been mine had I returned and
bowed the knee to Karl." She stopped, her feelings seemingly too much for
her; in a moment, however, she had mastered them. "But I was a
Schattenberg!" she cried, with a little toss of her head. "And the
Schattenbergs—as Herr Saunders will testify—are a stiff-necked race.
There was nothing to be done," she went on, "but develop the gifts God had
given me. Under an humble nom de guerre I have achieved notoriety and a
large salary. Germany, France, Belgium, I have toured them all—and my
incognito has never been pierced. So when I got hold of a splendid song I
lost no time in hastening to Weidenbruck, for I knew it would go like
wildfire here."
"A most dangerous step." The comment came from the American, but
there was a light of frank admiration in his eye.
"Oh, no!" she protested, a faint touch of colour in her cheek, denoting
that his approving glance had not escaped her. "It is years since I was in this
place." And smiling at the Englishman, now, she added naïvely: "My
features are little likely to be recognised."
"Indeed!" voiced Saunders, a touch of satire in his tone. "Photographs of

the exiled Princess Gloria are in all the shop-windows, her personality is
more than a tolerably popular one. When they are placed in conjunction
with those of the equally popular Fräulein Schmitt, will not people talk?"
"I hope they will do more than that," confessed the Princess, growing
excited.
"You want——?"
"I want Grimland," interrupted the Princess; and added loftily: "nothing
more and nothing less. You will have me arrested?"
"Not yet!" declared Saunders with his brightest smile. "The night is cold
—your dressing-room is cosy. No, my fascinating, and revolutionary young
lady, the truce between us has been so long unbroken that I cannot rush into
hostilities in this way. Besides, we are not now in 1904, and——"
"Oh, for 1904!" cried the Princess, her eyes ablaze with the light of
enthusiasm. "Oh, for the sweets of popularity, the ecstasy of rousing brave
men and turning their blood to wine and their brains to fire! I want to live,
to rule, to be obeyed and loved as a queen!"
In an instant Trafford felt a responsive glow; he started to speak but

Saunders already was speaking.
"Princess," the Englishman was saying coldly, "popularity is champagne

with a dash of brandy in it. It is a splendid pick-me-up. It dispels ennui,
migraine, and all the other troubles of a highly-strung, nervous system.
Only, it is not what medical folk call a 'food.' It does not do for breakfast,
luncheon and dinner. After a time it sickens."
"Popularity—the adulation of my people would never pall on me,"

returned the Princess, gazing off for the moment, absorbed in a realm of
dreams.
"No, but the police might take a hand," intimated Saunders grimly.
"There is a castle at Weidenbruck called the Strafeburg. As its name
implies, it is intended otherwise than as a pleasure residence. It is a
picturesque old pile, but, curiously enough, the architect seems to have
neglected the important requirements of light and air. You would get very
tired of the Strafeburg, my Princess!"
"The people of Paris got very tired of the Bastille," retorted the Princess
hotly and flashing a defiant look at the Englishman. Trafford's hand
clinched in sympathy for her. Never was maid so splendidly daring and
reckless and fascinating! "They got very tired of Louis XVI.," the voice was
still going on, "and the people of Weidenbruck are very tired of the
Strafeburg."
To Trafford's astonishment the Princess's eyes showed danger of filling

upon uttering these last words. Her perfect mouth quivered, and of a
sudden, she seemed to him younger—certainly not more than nineteen.
Again he was tempted to interfere in her behalf, but again Saunders was
before him.
"They got tired of a good many people in Paris," the Englishman said
slowly. "Ultimately, even of Mére Guillotine. But supposing this country
rose, pulled down the Strafeburg and other interesting relics, and
decapitated my excellent friend, the King; supposing after much cutting of
throats, burning of buildings, and shootings against the wall, a certain
young lady became Gloria the First of Grimland, do you imagine she would
be happy? No—in twelve months she would be bored to death with court
etiquette, with conflicting advice, and the servile flattery of interested
intriguers. Believe me, she is far happier enchanting the audiences of
Belgium and Germany than she would be in velvet and ermine and a gold
crown that fell off every time she indulged in one of her irresponsible fits of
merriment."
"I might forget to laugh," said the Princess sadly. "But no, I cannot, will
not, take your advice! Do you not suppose that nature intended me to fill a
loftier position than even the high firmament of the Café Chantant? No, a
thousand times no, Herr Saunders—I am a Schattenberg and I mean to
fight!"
The American could not restrain himself an instant longer.
"Bravo!" burst out Trafford enthusiastically. "There's a ring in that

statement that warms my heart tremendously!"
A swift frown clouded Saunders' brow. It was plain to see that the
Englishman was much annoyed at the American's outspoken approval of the
Princess's purpose; but she broke into the laughter of a mischief-loving
child.
"And you—are not you a friend of King Karl?" she inquired of Trafford,
while a new light shone in her eyes.
The American gave a furious twist to his moustache before answering.
"Mrs. Saunders, I believe, has recommended me as his Commander-in-

Chief," he said with mock gravity, "but the appointment has not yet been
confirmed. 'Till then my services are at the disposal of the highest bidder."
"My American friend's services are of problematic value," put in

Saunders, recovering his temper. "He is an excellent skater, but a
questionable general. He has had an exciting day and a superb dinner. With
your permission I will take him back to his bed at the Hôtel Concordia."
The Princess had not taken her eyes off of the American since he had
last spoken.
"He has energy," she mused, looking into space now, "also the capacity
for inspiring enthusiasm, and I am not at all sure that he has not the instinct
of a born tactician."
"But I am," Saunders broke in bluntly. "Princess, we have the honour of

wishing you good-night!"
The Princess laid a delicate hand on the Englishman's arm.
"Herr Saunders," she said, "I will ask you to see me home."
Saunders shook his head.
"You must excuse me," he said. "To-night, I am neutral, but neutral

only. I am the King's guest and must not aid the King's enemies."
"Good loyal man!" exclaimed the Princess. "Plus royalist que le roi!"
And then turning to the American: "And Herr Trafford? He will not refuse
to perform a small act of courtesy?"
"Trafford accompanies me!" declared Saunders firmly.
"I'm hanged if he does!" spoke up Trafford. "The lady wants to be seen

home—and I'm going to do it if I swing for it!"

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Oil Revenues, Security and Stability in

West Africa 1st ed. Edition Vandy

Preventive Diplomacy, Security, and Human Rights in

Political Violence and Oil in Africa: The Case of

Islam And Security In The West 1st Edition Edition

Contemporary French Security Policy in Africa: On Ideas

Gender and HIV in South Africa 1st ed. Edition

Petroleum Resource Management in Africa: Lessons from

Challenging the United Nations Peace and Security

Disruptive Technologies, Innovation and Development in

Oil Revenues, Security

ISBN 978-3-030-37985-8 ISBN 978-3-030-37986-5 (eBook)

1 Introduction: Human Security, Oil Revenues, and

2 The History and Geology of Petroleum in West Africa 25

3 External Stakeholders and the Geopolitics of Oil 45

4 Oil Revenues and the State 73

5 Oil and Community Agitation 109

6 Civil Society and Global Frameworks 143

7 Managing Disputes in West Africa’s Petroleum Industry 165

8 Conclusion: Implications for the Field of Conflict

Epilogue: West Africa and the Pandemic of Oil 213

IMTD The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy

Table 2.1 Oil endowment in West Africa 37

Introduction: Human Security, Oil Revenues,

The Rising Profile of West Africa’s Oil Wealth

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), and the China National Oil Corpo-

located near navigable waters to take advantage of economical waterborne

which have resulted in the change of unpopular governments. Since the

environmental impacts are felt in the coastal regions, whose communi-

Objectives and Approach

a critical natural resource and as a global product. To address adequately

stakeholders in the region’s emerging offshore oil industry, share simi-

The Urgency of Oil

various stakeholders to make it economically viable. In short, where man-

relevant theoretical framework for understanding the “oil complex” phe-

Chapter 2: The History and Geology of Petroleum in West Africa

Chapter 3: External Stakeholders and the Geopolitics of Oil

Chapter 4: Oil Revenues and the State

The ensuing revenue streams, which come in various forms—bonuses,

Chapter 5: Oil and Community Agitation

Chapter 6: Civil Society and Global Frameworks

Chapter 7: Managing Disputes in West Africa’s Petroleum Industry

help countries manage their differences through various conflict resolu-

Chapter 8: Conclusion: Implications for Conflict Resolution

Core Themes of the Book

and political assets in support of aggressive foreign policy.” In what he

are increasingly utilizing various multi-track diplomatic efforts to harness

The History and Geology of Petroleum

The History and Evolution of West Africa’s Oil

© The Author(s) 2020 25

brand of petro-capitalism that emerged a few centuries later. The first

Colonial Period/Preindependence (Exploration and Discovery)

seven European powers: Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium,

rights over the exploitation of “all minerals and petroleum throughout

Postindependence and the Cold War (Drilling and Exportation)

Post–Cold War (Expansion and Consolidation)

Twenty-First Century and Beyond (Commercial Export)

West Africa’s Geologic Oil Provinces

"Wait till we come to the second part of the competition—the free-

When Einstein had finished his compulsory figures amid a round of

General Meyer following slowly with note-book in hand, smiled

At the conclusion of his effort, Trafford congratulated the Captain

"Thanks, my American friend," he said, heartily, "go on and prosper."