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DRAMA IN THE NIGER DELTA
Daniel Balint-Kurti, ASSOCIATE FELLOW, AFRICA PROGRAMME, CHATHAM HOUSE
PredatorsCircle
The story goes that Nigerian rebels have kidnapped three western expatriate workers and
killed them in cold blood. It is the first time they have murdered hostages and the political
and economic fall-out in one of the world’s top oil-producing nations could be huge. Oil
companies are under attack from the media for putting their workers at risk. The Nigerian
government is threatening an all-out offensive which could trigger full-scale civil war.
t HE SITUATION IS FICTIONAL, BUT
the issues raised about the
Niger Delta in the upcoming
prime-time television drama
Blood and Oil are very real.
Despite their relevance to
Britain, these matters are rarely discussed
here. This country is home to a Nigerian
community estimated by the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office at anywhere from eight
hundred thousand to three million, and is also
Shell, which produces over half of Nigeria’s oil.
More than thirteen million Nigerians – about ten
percent of the country’s population – live in the
Niger Delta, an area the size of Scotland which
produces almost all its crude oil. Millions of homes
are along creeks heavily polluted by the effluent of
the oil industry, and most do not have access to even
basic infrastructure such as clean water, electricity,
education and healthcare. Increasingly violent
militia groups have thrived in this situation, drawing
their footsoldiers from the ranks of the poor.
the base, jointly with Holland, of Royal Dutch This is the world that Blood and Oil, to be
B B C / T I G E R A S P EC T
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screened on BBC2 early next year, explores, appeared to be blatant theft: for example,
as its two female protagonists try to discover how a local government chairman spent
who killed the oil workers and why. Claire vast sums on non-existent projects, ‘including
Unwin, played by Jodhi May, is the distraught a “demonstration fish pond” with neither
wife of Mark, one of the kidnapped men, water nor fish and a “football academy” that
and she has travelled to Nigeria to try to push has never been built’.
for her husband’s release. Such corruption and the flaunting of wealth
Alice Omuka, played by Naomie Harris, by regional governors, who serve visiting
is a British woman of Nigerian origin employed journalists champagne and travel in private