Riches in Nigeria Lost After Arrival

Familiar story, once again slowly ...

NYT

8 February 2011

Riches in Nigeria Lost After Arrival

By ADAM NOSSITER

YENAGOA, Nigeria — The oil money has coursed through this swampy, sprawling settlement in the Niger Delta, a paper gusher that has yielded ambitious unfinished skeletons: a ghostly high-rise hotel; a luxury shopping center-in-waiting; a giant hospital that is mostly empty; housing and other projects, some completed but many not.

Closer to the people, schools are crumbling, commerce spills from squalid shacks, soldiers operate checkpoints and militants hide in the creeks.

Billions of dollars of Nigeria’s immense oil riches have been funneled to places like this in the last year alone, yet they have not brought the country peace. The region is still plagued by huge disparities of wealth, kidnappings, sabotage and threats of more to come.