The Price of a Barrel of Oil

AKARAOLU, Nigeria -- Olimini sweats profusely in Chief Steward Job's unlit chamber. He sweats all the time, but his high animation and the humid murk of the oven-like room make the perspiration cascade from his body, soaking his white T-shirt and stinging his eyes. He doesn't sit; he bounces around the room like a trapped bat, arms gesticulating wildly, eyes ablaze, voice raised.

His raised voice is as much a matter of necessity as it is passion. Outside the mud hut it's almost impossible to talk. A roaring, dancing, twisting tongue of fire jets from the ground 700 yards from where we're sitting, a 300-foot natural-gas blowtorch lunging into the white African sky.

With ever-increasing passion, Olimini, the secretary for the local council of elders, voices villagers' frustrations with the gas flare and the oil company that put it there. Besides the constant heat and noise, the flare is also responsible for a wide range of health and environmental problems in Akaraolu. Everything from dead streams and empty forests to increased instances of miscarriage and lunacy can be attributed to the flare, says Olimini.

"Sometimes we'll move like a madman and men will lose their brains," Olimini says as he flits about the room.

Endless Days

Visiting reporters are the only people who are impressed by the gas flare. Residents of the village have long assimilated it into their lives. It has burned night and day nonstop for 30 years. They've gotten used to not sleeping well and not seeing the moon and the stars. They're accustomed to yelling at one another to be heard over its roar. And they've adapted to temperatures 10 to 30 degrees higher than normal. Closer to the flare, the heat becomes deadly. None of the village's residents under the age of 29 has known a dark and peaceful night's sleep.

The flare is owned by AgipPetroli S.p.A. of Italy, one of six multinational oil companies with operations in Nigeria that extract a combined average of two million barrels of crude oil a day from the Niger Delta region. Like the other companies, Agip finds it cheaper and easier to flare off the gas, a byproduct of oil drilling, than to capture it. Although Nigeria is believed to have the world's eighth largest reserve of natural gas, there's almost no market for the fuel in the country and no infrastructure to capture it and transport it for use somewhere else. So it burns relentlessly, morning, noon and night.

This is a source of great irony in places like Akaraolu. While oil that will eventually be fed into sport utility vehicles the world over is pumped from beneath their towns, flares light up the sky with wasted energy, a fraction of which could power their village forever. As it is, most villages in the oil-rich Niger Delta have no electricity, and it's sporadic at best in the handful of towns fortunate enough to be wired to the state power company. Even in large cities like Port Harcourt, the teeming capital of Rivers State, the Nigerian Electric Power Association can keep the lights on for only a few hours each day, with barely enough energy to power a 60-watt bulb. Everything is dim, and appliances function at half capacity, if they function at all. Rolling blackouts are the norm, and businesses without their own diesel generators don't stay open long in Nigeria.

There's one generator in Akaraolu and when there's gasoline to fuel it, it's used to operate the chief's air conditioner and a small refrigerator in a closet-like general store. The proprietor keeps Cokes and Nigerian-bottled Guinness stout on hand, a relief for visiting journalists not accustomed to the village's extreme heat.

The lack of gasoline or power in towns like Akaraolu, in spite of the icon of international energy consumption that's roaring on the village's outskirts, is surprising only to those unfamiliar with Nigeria's special breed of corruption and governmental incompetence.