Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
by Michael Watts
Michael Watts directs the Center for African Studies, University of
California, Berkeley.
Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both.
—Perry Anderson, "Scurrying Towards Bethlehem," New Left Review,
July–August 2001
In his 2006 State of the Union address, George Bush finally put into
words what all previous presidents could not bring themselves to utter
in public: addiction. The United States, he conceded, is "addicted" to
oil—which is to say addicted to the car—and as a consequence
unhealthily dependent upon Middle Eastern suppliers. What he neglected
to mention was that the post–Second World War U.S. global oil
acquisition strategy—a central plank of U.S. foreign policy since
President Roosevelt met King Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together
their "special relationship" aboard the USS Quincy in February 1945—is
in a total shambles. The pillars of that policy—Iran, Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf oil states, and Venezuela—are hardly supplicant sheep within
the U.S. imperial fold.
With surplus capacity in OPEC at an all-time low and speculation
running rampant in the commodity exchanges, Big Oil is awash with
money. Corporate profits are historically unprecedented. Chevron
netted a cool $14 billion in 2005, and first quarter earnings in 2006
are 50 percent higher than the previous year, a historic high obscene
enough to have Congress muttering about a windfall profits tax.
So-called supply risks in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria coupled with
the speculative impulses of the oil traders have driven up the price
of oil to around $70 a barrel, and a former oilman (surrounded by a
posse of former oilmen) stalks the halls of the White House. As if
that were not enough, the New York Times (March 27, 2006) reported
that through a "vague law" the U.S. government will waive, for the oil
supermajors, about $7 billion in state royalties over the next seven
years. All of this takes us back to the 1973 oil embargo and President
Nixon's Project Independence, designed to achieve U.S.
self-sufficiency by 1980. The policy failed miserably (U.S. dependency
upon imported oil in the late 1960s was 20 percent and is expected to
be about 66 percent by 2025) and Nixon resorted to maximizing domestic
supply and turning to reliable foreign suppliers at minimal cost—just
as George Bush intends to do.
It is no surprise, then, that alternative sources of oil should be
very much on the Bush radar screen (since conservation strategies or
increased gas taxes are conspicuously absent). Cheney's National
Energy Strategy Report in 2001 bemoaned the U.S. oil habit—"a
dependency on foreign powers that do not have America's interests at
heart"—long before the State of the Union address. A recent report in
the Financial Times (March 1, 2006) makes the new agenda crystal
clear. Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both
oil and gas) as the Gulf states, the continent "is all set to balance
power," and as a consequence it is "the subject of fierce competition
by energy companies." IHS Energy—one of the oil industry's major
consulting companies—expects African oil production, especially along
the Atlantic littoral, to attract "huge exploration investment"
contributing over 30 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by
2010. Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were
scarce, one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside
of Northern America was found in Africa. A new scramble is in the
making. The battleground consists of the rich African oilfields (see
map).
Energy security is the name of the game. No surprise, then, that the
Council on Foreign Relations's call for a different U.S. approach to
Africa in its new report, More than Humanitarianism (2005), turns on
Africa's "growing strategic importance" for U.S. policy. It is the
West African Gulf of Guinea, encompassing the rich on- and offshore
fields stretching from Nigeria to Angola, that represents a key plank
in Bush's alternative to the increasingly volatile and unpredictable
oil-states of the Persian Gulf. Nigeria and Angola alone account for
nearly four million barrels per day (almost half of Africa's output)
and U.S. oil companies alone have invested more than $40 billion in
the region over the last decade (with another $30 billion expected
between 2005 and 2010). Oil investment now represents over 50 percent
of all foreign direct investment (FDI) in the continent (and over 60
percent of all FDI in the top four FDI recipient countries), and
almost 90 percent of all cross-border mergers and acquisition activity
since 2003 has been in the mining and petroleum sector. The strategic
interests of the United States certainly include not only access to
cheap and reliable low-sulphur oil imports, but also keeping the
Chinese (for example in Sudan) and South Koreans (for example in
Nigeria)—aggressive new actors in the African oil business—and Islamic
terror at bay. Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the
"new frontier" in the fight against revolutionary Islam. Energy
security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new:
primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on
terror.
FULL TEXT;
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Yoshie
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