7-15-05,10:00am

THE discovery of oil in Africa would seem to have begun to reinsert the continent into the dynamics of world trade and has resuscitated considerable interest on the part of the US government. In the autumn of 2002, the British magazine The Economist made an accusation to that effect that was echoed by officials and researchers.

In an interview for Asia Times Online published in the fall of 2003, US security analyst Michael Klare, the author of Resource Wars, warned of Washington’s potential implication on the African continent. When asked where the next oil conflict after Iraq could emerge, Klare responded, 'I think in Africa, the situation there is heating up.'

To illustrate the basis for such statements, in 2001 a report by Vice President Richard Cheney on US national energy policy affirmed that Africa would be 'one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the United States.' On February 1, 2002, Walter Kansteiner, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, stated, 'African oil has become an appealing national strategy for us.'

In a December 2001 report by the National Intelligence Council titled 'Global Trends for 2015,' it is predicted that by that year, one-fourth of US oil imports will come from Africa.

This past February, a small group of top US generals visited Africa on separate trips considered far from routine. This group included the head of the United States European Command, General James L. Jones, commander of the Marine Corps, and his deputy commander, Air Force General Charles Wald. Except for the region known as the Horn of Africa, the US European Command supervises all operations in extensive territories. The backdrop to these visits is widespread growing pressures by the oil industry and conservative political groups in the Unite States to obtain secure energy sources outside the Middle East. In recent months, the northern power has been sending Special Forces troops to Sahel, Mauritania, Chad, Mali and Nigeria. These forces are part of a program called the Pan-Sahel Initiative, designed to provide anti-terrorism training. It has also been described as a program to train regional armies and have them at the disposal of the U.S.

The US Special Forces involved operated out of Germany under the pretext of providing aid to the needy. But it has already been affirmed that small island of São Tomé and Príncipe in western Africa could be the location chosen for a US naval base. Its strategic position in the Gulf of Guinea, where oil was recently discovered in deep waters, was the basis for a meeting between Bush and that country’s former President Fradique de Menezes in 2002.

The regional US allies do not have navies, and São Tomé and Nigeria share an area that appears to possess 11 billion barrels of oil. Many other recently-discovered reserves are also located near the coast. Currently, Nigeria supplies 10% of US oil needs.

During colonial times, Europe made an economic division of Africa so that each territory specialized in the production of a particular commodity to supply the colonizers’ needs for raw materials. After decolonization and as a result of the colonial legacy, African countries’ economies have depended almost exclusively on agricultural production and the exploitation of minerals such as gold and diamonds. Africa’s participation in world trade dropped from 4% to 2% during the 1990s, and currently, excluding South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria, this participation is nearing 0%.

Oil production in Gulf of Guinea states (Nigeria, Congo, Gabon, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea) now amounts to more than 4.5 million barrels per day, exceeding that of Iran, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. Currently, the United States is importing almost 15% of its oil from that region, and it is predicted that that figure will continue to rise, reaching 25% by 2025. For its part, in 2000, the European Union was already importing 22% of its oil from the Gulf of Guinea countries. Many of those countries are among the world’s poorest.

So, where are the profits from these sales of 'black gold' going to end up?

Since the discovery of oil in the 1960s, Nigeria has become the top producer of that resource in Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, the country exports about 2.2 million barrels daily and it has an installed capacity to export 4 million per day, making it the seventh-largest producer of crude in the world, and the fourth-largest exporter to the United States.

Given rising oil prices and modern technology, transnational corporations are drilling hundreds of oil wells in Sub-Saharan countries consumed by poverty and disease.

Western interests are moved by the desire to take complete control of those resources, by applying direct pressure, image operations, or promises with supposed expectations, such as the new-style Marshall Plan announced by Tony Blair, which proposes to double British cooperation in African development, with stress placed on trade (with the UK and the U.S.) as a condition for aid.

Such conditions are similar to those imposed by Bush in his strategy for 17 countries, eight of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. As part of the plan, the US president has been playing host at the White House to leaders of African countries that he didn’t know existed, but that the US intelligence services did. At the same time, Washington is charging full steam ahead to establish US transnationals like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Marathon Oil, Amerada Hess and Ocean Energy in the extremely rich Gulf of Guinea, which has become a priority for the U.S. – not for humanitarian reasons, but for its huge reserves of hydrocarbons and gas.

It is estimated that the African sub-soil contains almost 9% of the world’s oil reserves, some 100 billion barrels. And although the cost of extraction is higher than in the Middle East, given that oilfields are located offshore, the quality is excellent and has low sulfur levels.