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A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier

Amazon.com Price:  $21.44 (as of 05/05/2019 19:40 PST- Details)

Description

The largest U.S. trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa, petroleum-wealthy Nigeria exports half its day by day oil production to the USA. Like many African nations with natural resources coveted by the world’s superpowers, the country has been shaped by foreign investment and intervention, conflicts among hundreds of ethnic and non secular groups, and greed. Polio has boomed in conjunction with petroleum, small villages face off with giant oil companies, and scooter drivers run their own ministates. The oil-wealthy Niger Delta region at the heart of it all is a trouble spot as hot as the local pepper soup.

Blending vivid reportage, history, and investigative journalism, in A Swamp Full of Dollars journalist Michael Peel tells the story of this peculiar country, which grows ever more wild and lawless by the day as its refined petroleum pumps through our cities. Through a host of colorful characters–from the Area Boy gangsters of Lagos to a corrupt state governor who stashed money in his London penthouse, from the militants in their swamp forest hideouts to oil company executives–Peel makes the connection between Western energy consumption and the breakdown of the Nigerian state, where the corruption of the haves is matched only by the determination and ingenuity of the have-nots. What has happened to Nigeria is a stark warning to the USA and other economic powers as they grow more and more frantic in their seek for new oil sources: unbridled plunder sooner or later rebounds on those who have done the taking.

A Swamp Full of Dollars–shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award–shows that if the Arab world is the precarious eastern battle line in an intensifying world war for crude, then Nigeria has turn into the tumultuous western front.

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