How big oil destroys the world: A real-life saga of greed - Salon.com
▻http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/how_big_oil_destroys_the_world_a_real_life_saga_of_greed
Corruption in Africa is often described in the West as if it were an endemic condition, rather than one that has been deliberately induced.
Imperialism in the 19th-century sense no longer exists, but the neo-imperialism of the current age rests upon oil companies and other outside corporate interests who have found that breeding and nurturing a corrupt and semi-Westernized local #elite is the easiest way to do business in the developing world.
As one Ghanaian activist tells Boynton, any attempt by Africans to resist this system leads to ideological pushback. When a newly elected Ghanaian government decided to exercise its right to take a second look at the Kosmos contract in light of the oil field’s massive value, the Wall Street Journal described its decision as “local thuggery.”
It didn’t have to be this way, and still doesn’t. Yes, I’m aware that the era of African nationalism and African socialism in the 1970s had grave problems, some of which stemmed from its status as a zone of proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. But almost everything about this situation was accurately predicted, years ago, by Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba and others: Any time people in the developing world allow their natural resources to be exploited according to rules of the “free market,” rules written by Western corporations and/or Western governing elites for their own benefit, they will come away worse than they were before. Is there an exception to this to be found anywhere in the world?