Nigeria pipeline blaze 'kills 26'

Rival Nigerian gangs have been fighting for control of oil supplies
Thieves tapping an oil pipeline in Nigeria set it ablaze as they fled from police, causing an explosion that killed more than 20 people.
The fire around the pipeline spread to a riverside community in Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos.

Police said they had recovered 26 bodies, but did not rule out discovering more corpses in the river.

Nigeria, an Opec member, has regular problems with gangs who steal oil and siphon refined petrol from pipelines.

The pipeline caught fire late on Tuesday night in Sanki-Ilado, a village lying in wetlands in the Apapa district east of Lagos, a police spokesman said.

The pipeline, operated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), was reportedly damaged in 11 places.

Police said the men fled after damaging the pipeline.

The resulting explosion tore through the village, killing more than two dozen and injuring more.

The spokesman said uniformed police may be among the dead if more bodies are recovered.

Nigeria exports around 2.5 million barrels of crude oil each day.

But it is then forced to buy back petrol, diesel and other refined fuels from non-oil producing countries at a far higher price.

The government has reaped around $280bn from oil over the past 30 years.

Militias and gangs in the Nigerian delta regularly attack the pipelines to siphon off the valuable crude oil.

Crooked non-democratic government...........

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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

This just in: Internet scammers in Nigeria!

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THE PERFECT MARK
by MITCHELL ZUCKOFF
How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.
Issue of 2006-05-15
Posted 2006-05-08

Late one afternoon in June, 2001, John W. Worley sat in a burgundy leather desk chair reading his e-mail. He was fifty-seven and burly, wit glasses, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a bushy gray beard. A decorated Vietnam veteran and an ordained minister, he had a busy practice as Christian psychotherapist, and, with his wife, Barbara, was the caretaker of a mansion on a historic estate in Groton, Massachusetts. He lived in comfortable three-bedroom suite in the mansion, and saw patients in a ground-floor office with walls adorned with images of Jesus and framed militar medals. Barbara had been his high-school sweetheart—he was the president of his class, and she was the homecoming queen—and they had fou daughters and seven grandchildren, whose photos surrounded Worley at his desk

Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to “CEO/Owner.” The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: “With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country, for onward dispatch and investment.” Mbote explained that he had been chief of security for the Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who had secretly sent him to South Africa to buy weapons for a force of élite bodyguards. But Kabila had been assassinated before Mbote could complete the mission. “I quickly decided to stop all negotiations and divert the funds to my personal use, as it was a golden opportunity, and I could not return to my country due to my loyalty to the government of Laurent Kabila,” Mbote wrote. Now Mbote had fifty-five million American dollars, in cash, and he needed a discreet partner with an overseas bank account. That partner, of course, would be richly rewarded.

Mbote’s offer had the hallmarks of an advance-fee fraud, a swindle whose victims are asked to provide money, information, or services in exchange for a share of a promised fortune. Countless such e-mails, letters, and faxes are sent every year, with a broad variety of stories about how the money supposedly became available (unclaimed estate, corrupt executive, and dying Samaritan being only a few of the most popular). Worley, who had spent his adult life advocating self-knowledge and introspection, seemed particularly unlikely to be fooled. He had developed a psychological profiling tool designed to reveal a person’s “unique needs, desires and probable behavioral responses.” He promised users of the test, “The individual’s understanding of self will be greatly enhanced, increasing the potential for a fulfilled and balanced life.” And Worley was vigilant against temptation. Two weeks before the e-mail arrived, he had been the keynote speaker at his eldest granddaughter’s graduation from the First Assembly Christian Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He cautioned the students about Satan, telling them, “He’s going to be trying to destroy you every inch of the way.”

Still, Worley, faced with an e-mail that would, according to federal authorities, eventually lead him to join a gang of Nigerian criminals seeking to defraud U.S. banks, didn’t hesitate. A few minutes after receiving Mbote’s entreaty, he replied, “I can help and I am interested.” His only question was how Mbote had found him, and he seemed satisfied with the explanation: that the South African Department of Home Affairs had supplied his name. When Worley attributed this improbable event to God’s will, Mbote elaborated on the story to say that Worley’s name was one of ten that he had been given, and that it had been pulled from a hat after much prayer by someone named Pastor Mark. (A more likely possibility is that his e-mail address was plucked from an Internet chain letter, which he received and passed on, that promised a cash reward from Microsoft to anyone who forwarded the letter to others.) In e-mails, phone calls, faxes, and letters during the ensuing weeks, Mbote laid out the plan: If Worley would pay up-front costs, such as fees to a storage facility where the cash was being kept, and possibly travel to South Africa to collect the money, he would receive thirty per cent, or more than sixteen million dollars.

Worley told Mbote that he lived his life with the “utmost integrity” and didn’t want to jeopardize that. He also said that he couldn’t fund the operation. (Though he would report nearly a hundred and forty thousand dollars in income in 2001, he had declared personal bankruptcy in the early nineties, had relatively little saved for retirement, and wanted to help his grandchildren through college.) No problem, Mbote answered; “investors” would provide up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for airfare and other expenses needed to move the money to the United States, while Worley would act as middleman and curator of the funds.

As promised, in late August, 2001, Worley received a check for forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars, purportedly from one such investor. It was from an account belonging to the Syms Corporation, the discount-clothing chain whose slogan is “An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer.” Worley was wary. He called the Fleet Bank in Portland, Maine, where the check had been drawn. The bank told him it was an altered duplicate of a check that Syms had paid to the Maryland office of an international luggage manufacturer.

More at the New Yorker

I've read and heard many accounts of average Nigerians having to endure all sorts of toxicity and land damage from the oil operations while seeing next to nothing of the benefits of all that foreign exchange. That kind of ill-will combined with run of the mill banditry can't be good.

The more we place the fate of our economic engine in such unstable hands, the shakier our footing is.

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1984 300D, 138K

True about the oil industry in Nigeria. I know a Canadian oil exec who travels there frequently and who must hire a band of armed men and travel in convoy. According to him, the word, "corrupt" has no meaning, sort of the way Mexico has been spiraling downward into kleptocracy. NHe says the laws are on the books but it's a simple bribe that if you don't pay, your facilities will experience terrible accidents and fines will be imposed, etc. He holds his nose and does it.

Also true about the people getting next to nothing. Wealth is power, so it is distributed in tribal networks, mostly.

True about the oil industry in Nigeria. I know a Canadian oil exec who travels there frequently and who must hire a band of armed men and travel in convoy. According to him, the word, "corrupt" has no meaning, sort of the way Mexico has been spiraling downward into kleptocracy. He says the laws are on the books but it's a simple bribe that if you don't pay, your facilities will experience terrible accidents and fines will be imposed, etc. He holds his nose and does it.

Also true about the people getting next to nothing. Wealth is power, so it is distributed in tribal networks, mostly.

The problem with Nigeria is that they are too stupid to realize they need American operators to extract their oil, but they kicked all of them out a while back and are suffering the consequences.

I believe it. As much as I rant and rave about British abuses in Iran back when, the Iranians did about the same thing -- kicked the Brits out and then couldn't operate the wells, refineries, etc.

Jeez, hotheads to the right, hotheads to the left, heeere I yam, stuck in the middle....

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K