Blood and Treasure

When I visited Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta in 2000, I fully expected to find a low-level war going on, with local Nigerians pitted against the foreign oil companies in their midst. It had only been five years since Nigeria’s military rulers had executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues on what were widely seen as murder charges trumped up to silent protests about environmental damage done by oil production in nearby Ogoniland. Media reports on the troubled oil region emphasized the deep divisions between the two sides and highlighted violent incidents.

I was more than a little surprised to discover, on visiting the offices of Shell Petroleum Development Corp., a joint venture between the international oil firm and the Nigerian government, that 97 percent of the 5,000 permanent employees were Nigerian and that whenever a job became available, the company was deluged with...