Oil

A small deviation from Rwandan affairs to contemplate oil. Although it is of course not a deviation given the frenetic Rwandan commitment to growth. Everywhere gangs of sweating men with pickaxes and shovels are quickly opening holes in the red earth to lay cables and then quickly closing them, everywhere road crews are preparing potholed tracks for paving, often supervised by Chinese in bamboo hats.

In the Guardian weekly (18/06/10) the scientific advisor to President Paul Kagame writes that Rwanda’s economy is growing at 8 to 9% per year, and he estimates that “rises in oil prices over the next two decades will cumulatively cost Rwanda some 30% of its GDP”. The author, David King, advises that the country decouple its economy from oil.

That’s not happening although Rwanda has weaned itself off one oil product, plastic bags. Until recently I thought this a progressive environmental move, but I now think it is driven by a desire to appear clean, like Singapore, in order to attract business. (Maybe I am wrong on this because Rwanda has a startling number of dual flush toilets, including in my own house, so perhaps there is a growing environmental ethic in the country.)

But what was on my mind when I began to write was with the oil tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, which is grieving many of friends in Canada and the United States.

I force myself, with difficulty, to contemplate this disaster on the other side of the world. I read the dispatches from the Louisiana marshes written by my journalist friend Dahr Jamail and I try to stretch my mind and heart far enough open to contemplate what it really means that all the crabs are climbing out of the water onto shore, something they never do. What does it really mean to be exposed to dispersants that aggravate your throat and disturb your breathing and cause your face to break out in a rash?

I don’t feel big enough for this. I don’t know how to hold this, how to make room for more suffering. I worry because I am not aroused.

It is an article in Jeune Afrique that brings me to my hurt and anger. My elementary French is adequate to bring me to confrontation with the disaster that is right here on this continent and this somehow connects me to the global world and the Gulf of Mexico.

Ancient, defective, poorly monitored off shore drilling platforms stretch through the Gulf of Guinea, from the Cote D’Ivoire to Angola, with no capacity for response to emergency situations. Small marginal companies operate under any kind of regulatory radar. The same day as the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon a tanker accident leaves a load of petroleum in the Gulf. “Bad climate conditions,” says the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company.

It’s just everyday business in African waters.

Dotted throughout the Gulf are offshore storage platforms converted from converted mono hulled oil tankers forbidden to navigate many western waters, including the Gulf of Mexico. These platforms are not designed to withstand the heavy impact of the ships coming to load.

These ‘Floating Production Storage and Offloading’ stations allow companies to avoid on shore pipelines and the aggravating local resistance. And why go on shore when most of the oil is not for Africa, anyway?

It all adds up, says Jeune Afrique, to “un cadeau empoisonne pour les cotes africaines.” A poisoned present for the African coast.

Whenever we grieve the Gulf of Mexico, when we fight the Canadian tar sands project, when we confront our own oil dependency, let us allow that to bring us into awareness the global impact of big oil, for example, the oil poisoned and impoverished people of the Niger delta who continue to resist Shell.
I imagine a meeting between the Niger delta residents who have been battling big oil for decades with the shrimp fishermen of the Louisiana marshes. What a conversation that would be.

Back in landlocked Rwanda, the Canadian company Vangold has been searching for oil, an idea in part driven by the success of Heritage Oil, another Canadian company which located oil in neighbouring Uganda.

Vangold is excited by the possibility of oil in various places in Rwanda, including in the depths of Lake Kivu and spent $3 million USD on seismic studies to assess oil reserves. Vangold is in discussion with the Rwandan government.

Oil rigs in Lake Kivu? That could signal the approaching end of the fisherman in their pirogues, the end of the cormorant like birds that skim the water, the end of the nascent tourist industry that brings foreigners to the lake in oil guzzling vehicles traveling on the new fast well-paved roads.

I share the sorrow of my friends at home.