Bob asked:


Oil. short, audacious and new. Just three letters, but three letters with such telling powers that now man cannot act without worrying about how the almighty oil will react. Oil is an arrogant commodity. See the power that oil has conferred on Saudi Arabia, a/kingdom, if without oil, that could have been feeding on sand and crying for alms like poor and drought-stricken Ethiopia. But God has chosen to smile on the desert kingdom by giving it more oil than it knows what to do with. Its potentates can afford to wrap themselves in rich silk and Kashmir, going around the world and buying up the whole place.

That’s the power of oil. Some people like its smell. It has an aromatic effect on some, while it makes others literally sick. It’s like speed drugs-cocaine and heroin-to quite a few. It makes them high and feel that they ate flying on cloud 9. See what oil did to the Shah of Iran. Its effect on him was so hallucinatory and alcoholic, a dangerous mixture, that the man stated to feel like the good God Himself, and if not quite so, that he was close enough to Him that he could pass himself off as the king of kings. But when the effect cleared, the Shah found himself driven off the peacock throne, stateless and homeless, ill, contrite, dead and buried like a commoner that he was.

And where did oil get this power from? Automobile, of course. The Germans started it in 1885 when Karl Benz manufactured the first internal-combustible engine. He was followed in the same year by a fellow German engineer called Gottlieb Daimler who improved on the discovery of Benz. The two finally teamed up to create Daimler-Benz and manufacture the Mercedes Benz. The romance of the name Mercedes Benz should not be drowned in the flighty discussion of oil. Mercedes was the name of the daughter of a diplomat friend of karl Benz. He named the Daimler-Benz car after the girl. How romantic!

It is the connection between automobile and oil that has given petroleum its potency, for without the use of petrol to drive an automobile, so much oil will not be consumed and it will not, accordingly, have such a hold on the politics and economics of the world.

Oil and automobile combined to change the world for ever. Oil is the intoxicant of mankind. Oil needs automobile and automobile needs oil. Man has to move and so he needs automobile and all those things that oil drives. Oil lives on the fast lanes of the American freeways and German autobahns and the Nigerian death-trap called expressways.

Europeans didn’t have enough oil. Americans did but didn’t want to burn up all it had in one day. Hence the search for oil around the world. And then oil was found in incalculable quantities under the hot desert of Araby. And then the politics of oil on the world economic

See what oil has done to Nigeria. Before oil was lifted in this country in 1958, Nigeria lived in order and planned with a cool head. The farmers tended their cocoa and oil palm plantations and cotton and groundnut farms. Everybody was happy, and those who were wealthy knew they were wealthy because they worked hard. Then oil came and everything went haywire.

The farmers left the farms and the youth came to town. Nobody wanted to touch dirt and carry baskets of cocoa and groundnuts and palm kernels on his head. Why? Come to the city and live the easy life. Life was too easy, and nobody waited long enough to ponder the question of where oil was leading the nation. Oil made everything possible, including the Nigerian civil war.

Emeka Ojukwu looked down to the delta and saw all that oil and couldn’t understand why he should share it with those up country. Those up country looked down beyond the node of Ojukwu and couldn’t see why they should let the bearded rebel make away with all the oil. And then the fight to finish. Gowon won the war, thinks to the millions rolling in from the oil fields.

Oil money was in such abundance that Yakubu Gowon felt that government was easy. If Nasser and Selas sie could do it, he thought, why not him? If problems arose, throw money at them. Set up commission, dole out money to all and sundry and live happily ever after. But things didn’t quite turn out that way. The money was easy and in abundance, but Nigeria had enough of Gowon and his easy approach to tough problems, and so went Gowon. Oil had begun to make life uncertain for Nigeria.

But the money kept rolling in. and the country finally ended up with Shehu Shagari who made more money from oil than all the governments before him put together. He got so used to spending money that he didn’t know when he finished what was in the kitty and then started borrowing from home and abroad. And by the tine he left the centre-stage, Shagari had borrowed more money than all the governments before him, and the country is now suffering for it.

Oil has lured Nigeria into a quagmire from which the country can’t get out without bleeding. And oil doesn’t seem willing to help get the country out of the depth. The black gold that was selling for $40 a barrel was selling for something like $25 dollars a barrel. Nigeria which was selling some two million barrels a day during the day of Shagari was now producing less 1.5 million barrels a day doing the time of Buharri the country was over its head in oil, and the black crude is not a pleasant stuff to be drowned in. Nigeria was suffocating from the oil curse. Millions of Nigeria graduates are roaming the street of the nation in search of white collar jobs that is not available. As most youth will say big thanks to cyber fraud. That has created employment for most Nigeria youths.

Without any technology to talk of, the only way out of the quick sand of oil for Nigeria is the return to the soil. That is Nigeria’s moral equivalent of war that it must wage against the uncertainty of oil. Soil is more durable and dependable than oil. Nigeria, mankind, and other countries who largely depend on for that matter, must make peace with the soil and damn the arrogance and deceptiveness of oil.



ARIEL