Yes, Nigeria. The reserves of sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producer were deemed sufficiently important for the Pentagon to create a special African command. With the Middle East unstable – particularly after the war in Iraq – it became important for the US to secure supplies from Nigeria. But as Karl Maier, former correspondent of The Independent, accurately showed in his 2002 book This House Has Fallen, Nigeria was anything but stable.


Peel, a Financial Times correspondent, takes us to the country that has become synonymous with continuous gas flaring, where massacres occur routinely, where the oil legacy includes the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists, where the economy is drained by overwhelming, pervasive corruption, where stoned militia steal oil in ramshackle boats racing through creeks, and where armed men claim control over resources. Each time they abduct an employee of an oil company, production declines, and oil prices spike higher. Peel delivers a gory account of the sepulchral landscape with enormous sympathy for the people who live there, and has nothing but contempt for the authorities who have brought the Niger Delta to this pass.

Oil and democracy, it would seem, don't mix. When Dick Cheney ran Halliburton, the controversial company with interests in oil industry services, he famously remarked that it was unfortunate that the good lord did not place all the world's oil beneath the soil of democratic countries.