[BPSDB] I want to tell you a story. It's a story about oil. It's a story about (obliquely) climate change. It's a story about corruption and murder, and it's a story about poverty in Africa. But most of all, it's about a government official who was sacked after failing to get the money he stole to pay his witchdocter refunded. Welcome to the Niger Delta.

Not exactly a leading tourist destination, Nigeria is probably best known in the West for its oil exports. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, oil has formed a substantial part of the Nigerian economy - something like a quarter of a trillion dollars' worth of the black goo has been extracted from the Niger Delta region, and yet Nigeria remains one of the poorest nations on Earth, and the Niger Delta remains one of the poorest regions of that nation.

Sam Edem and the Niger Delta Development Commission
The incredible story of Sam Edem gives us some clue to why that might be. Until August 2008, Edem was the head of the Niger Delta Development Commission, the government agency responsible for "the rapid, even and sustainable development of the Niger Delta into a region that is economically prosperous, socially stable, ecologically regenerative and politically peaceful."

Sam Edem pursued his own goals, and they were largely incompatible with the lofty ambitions of the agency he was employed to run. In August, he was fired by President Umaru Yar'Adua, and then charged by the police with theft and criminal conspiracy.

Edem somehow managed to obtain around US$4m, but quite how he managed this on a government salary is unclear. His lawyers said it was donated by well-wishers to fund an election attempt, while the working assumption of the police is that it was stolen government funds.

Edem used the money to hire a witchdoctor, who was instructed to kill two of his rivals at the agency, and to use his powers to direct more lucrative state contracts to him. As part of this process, he took part in a "fortification" ritual which involved going to a graveyard at midnight, burning around US$2 million in cash and smearing the ashes from the money over his naked body.

Bizarrely, he initiated the police investigation that led to his own demise, when he approached the police complaining that the "sorcerer", Perekabowei Ogah, had tried to swindle him out of millions of pounds, accusing him of being an agent for political rivals. Detectives became suspicious though when Edem apparently couldn't account for the source of his money.

Greenhouse Emissions:

I'll come back to witchcraft in a moment, but first a quick but relevant interlude. I promised you a bit of global warming in this blog post, and here it is. As well as oil, Nigeria's oil fields are full of natural gas, which the oil firms operating in the area simply burn off. The scale of this burning is absolutely vast - 2bn cubic feet per day in 1999 - although recent interventions have reduced this figure somewhat.

Aside from the health implications for those living in the area, this flaring represents one of the largest single sources of greenhouse gases in the world, but it's a source that oil companies have been rather reluctant to curb. Their own - and to some degree reasonable - defense is that the region is so unstable that investing too much money on new infrastructure could be economically disastrous for them.

Witchcraft, Religion and the Suppression of Dissent:
The residents of the Niger Delta have plenty to be pissed off about then. Sam Edem's story is far from an isolated case of corruption, and indeed the situation with government agencies such as the Niger Delta Development Commission is so bad that even Shell have gone public with their concerns over local corruption, and the World Bank have been expressing concern over the region.

It should come as no surprise that the region has seen plenty of trouble and violence, but Stephen Roblin, who has worked with the Nigerian Humanist Movement in the country, has written a fascinating first hand account based on his own interviews, that suggests that the culture of witchcraft and religion may in fact be contributing to obscuring the true causes of corruption - such as the large-scale theft of oil revenues - from the people.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread and taken very seriously, and those named as witches - adults or children - are ostracized from their communities. Or worse. The Guardian describes cases where a child has been named a witch: "In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush."

This is serious stuff then, not the isolated nonsense of a couple of villages or a handful of people, but a national meme that has grown out of control. What does this have to do with corruption and oil money? In Roblin's interviews in the region, a disturbing pattern emerged.

"During the two months I spent interviewing Nigerians on the topic of ritual killing almost every interviewee made connections between this phenomenon and corruption. According to such interviewees many of the Nigerian political and business elites participate in ritual killing as a means to obtain the wealth necessary to actualize political and business ambitions and to protect themselves from and overcome opposition. For the interviewees, using human body parts for ritual is seen as corrupting supernatural forces in order to achieve corrupt ambitions. The association between Nigerian elites and ritual killing demonstrates a collective belief that political and economic power is corrupt and illegitimate."

In short, power, corruption, and belief in witchcraft are so closely correlated in Nigeria that the population largely believe that all powerful people are corrupt, and that their power has been gained through witchcraft. This obscures the real, mundane causes and agents of corruption, and the religious community are - intentionally or otherwise - directly enabling this concealment to happen.

"With Christian pastors, particularly Pentecostal, preaching that outcomes in the physical world are a result of the spiritual world, religion is implicated in obscuring the root cause of corruption. Instead of religious organizations using their mass support to challenge the corrupt political order harming their congregations, religious leaders encourage Nigerians to pray for better leaders."

Of course, prayer is a strategy that does not appear to have worked for Nigerians so far. Religious leaders are perfectly placed to challenge corruption, but instead they basically feed off of it. Christianity is especially culpable, having effectively adopted and absorbed witchcraft as it spread into the region. The rest of Roblin's article is well worth reading, but raises the question, what can we do?

Organizations like the Nigerian Humanist Movement are working hard in the region trying to curb the rising tide of witchcraft hysteria, but against a background of deeply held beliefs in Christianity, witchcraft and ritual killings, they face an uphill struggle.

Oil companies operating in the region are a popular target, but while it's always worth holding such firms to account for their environmental records, they are in no position to dictate what happens to the money they invest in the region, and cannot be held responsible for how the government spends its money. Western governments could crack down on the government with sanctions, but this is unlikely as long as we rely on Nigerian oil, and especially so now that China are increasingly expanding their influence on the continent.

The final point of connection with the West is through the Anglican Church, but Nigerian church leaders have already all-but-split from the Anglican community over the issue of homosexuality in the clergy.

And so for now there seems to be little we can do. Nonetheless, issues like this deserve to be brought to wider attention, and charities like the Nigerian Humanist Movement deserve all the help and support they can get. We in the West are prospering on the back of trade deals such as those we have we Nigeria, and it is our duty to question why Nigerians aren't benefitting from these deals too.

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Final Note: Entries like this take a lot of effort to write, but usually end up getting far less attention than the trivial stuff I churn out about less serious topics. If you care about what I've written - and if you've made it this far you probably do - then I'd appreciate some link love or perhaps a little Digg. :)