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By 2015, West Africa will supply 25 percent of the United States' oil consumption, warned Austin Onuoha and Rev. Antoine Berilengar on Thursday evening in their joint lecture titled, "African Oil and Poverty."
The event, which was sponsored by the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, took place at 7:30 p.m. in Fulton 511. The room was filled with students, faculty, and people from towns surrounding Boston College who were interested in the human rights and environmental consequences of extracting African oil.
The event began with a 10 minute primer on the oil industry, featuring an excerpt from "The Oil Curse," the second episode of the PBS documentary Extreme Oil, in which the documentary's production team traveled to Ecuador, a country where oil has been a source of poverty instead of wealth for the natives. It is now the site of a lawsuit concerning international corporate accountability, according to PBS's Web site.
Onuoha and Berilengar related Ecuador's situation to West Africa's. Each speech was accompanied by a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
Onuoha works for the Center for Social and Corporate Responsibility in Nigeria. He began his speech by educating the audience with statistics on Nigeria. "I'm from Nigeria - the capital of Africa," he said jokingly. Nigeria has a population of approximately 133,000,000 people and exports about 1 million barrels of oil per day, he said. Nigeria is a major source of oil. "It has about 350 billion U.S. dollars of oil," he said. "But the World Bank says the majority of the 130 million people of Nigeria live on less than $1 a day." To Onuoha, it seemed wrong that there was so much poverty amid all this wealth. His organization works to solve this problem."We need to build bridges of understanding," he said.
He said that the oil businesses grounded in Nigeria are obligated to help. The country lacks schools, hospitals, and other services that have been provided by oil companies working in other regions of the world.
"Their responsibility is to generate profits so they can provide dividends to their share holders. Why ask them to get involved? The answer is simple. Investment is profitable. If you do not invest in peace, you might end up without profits for your share holders," he said.
"By peculiar nature of industrial companies, they are very complex, they are demanding, they are capital-intensive," he said. One of the impacts is that there has been a total breakdown of community each one looking out only for itself.
The Center for Social and Corporate responsibility attempts to create equilibrium between the communities and companies by creating reliable governments, he said. The problem has evolved from economic to strategic. It is no longer a situation concerning money, but also one involving human rights.
History is useful in solving this situation, he said. "We need to spot where and when these situations successfully existed with harmonious circumstances before. We need to find those, learn from them, and apply them to West Africa," he continued.
Rev. Berilengar, of the Petroleum Revenue Oversight and Control Committee in Chad, agreed. "What is good in the U.S. and other countries of the world, should be good in Chad."
Berilengar similarly began his speech with a joke and facts about Chad. "My friend said that Nigeria is the capital of Africa, but I believe that Chad is. It is one of the largest countries in Africa with population of nine million."
This is smaller than Nigeria's, but unlike Nigeria, Chad is landlocked - a situation that has created difficulties in exportation, he said.
"Oil seems to be a curse in Africa and in many places of the world," he said. "We want it to be a blessing in Chad. And to do this we need to monitor the situation."
Berilengar admitted that the government and companies in Chad have mismanaged money. A law needs to be created to monitor the revenue accumulation of the oil companies, he said.
"This will bring peace,
he said. "There will be wealth to share."
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