|
Cornelius
Sweden
1051 Posts |
 Posted - 27 Dec 2006 : 09:35:18
|
Tragedy due to rat race poverty and lack of adequate security in the oil industry…..
http://nigeriaworld.com/
http://kwenu.com/
As far as oil is concerned, it's time for the Fed Govt to settle nice nice with the Ogoni and other Riverine Delta people.
In the early 80s, I think that it was in 81, that Senator Francis Ellah himself not a Riverine man (of Umoku, Ekpeye district) tried to navigate a bill through the Rivers State House of Assembly. The thesis of his motion was simple: Rivers State (when the Federation was divided into 19 States) provided 56% of the total Federal revenue and did not derive a commensurate benefit - his motion, based on simple mathematics was that Rivers State should be subdivided into another 13 states in order to receive( as a whole) an adequate allocation from the Federal budget. Needless to say the motion didn't get very far, but the point was made.
Chief Melford Okilo was then Governor of Rivers State.
Next door to Rivers was Bendel state State, the second great oil producer in the Federation and Bendel's governor Dr. Ambrose Ali(married to an English woman) was spending more than 52% of the Bendel state budget on education! Education pays dividends!
This morning Kofi Sapathy informed me that in 1952, Ghana had a higher per capita income than South Korea. That was not a typograhical error that you just read: In 1952, Ghana had a higher per capita income than South Korea.
I told him that in 1962 Singapore and Sierra Leone were on par and at an equal level of development.
His rejoinder when I asked him about Malaysia palm kernel ****** seedlings being originally taken from Nigeria to start the palm agriculture in Malaysia in the early sixties and now a multi-BILLION business in that country, was that Ghana is now something like number 3 or 4 in Cocoa production and that Malaysia is not doing too badly in cocoa production either. The Ivory Coast is still at the top, from the days when there was a marked French presence after independence – my first visit to certain sections of Abidjan was like visiting a Parisian suburb. Brazil is rapidly catching up in the cocoa sector, governed by world market prices. Remember the dramatic plummeting of the price of cocoa on the world market felled the Ghanaian economy in the latter days of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana….
Our joint question as if we could read each other's mind, was ”What’s wrong with Africa?
Since the commericial exploitation of Nigeria's vast oil reserves, the cultivation of Palm kernels has taken a back seat.
This book, published in 2002 by the author of the best seller,"The Biotech Century" should be read by the oil producers:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Jeremy+Rifkin.+The+Hydrogen+Economy&spell=1
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22The+Biotech+Century%22&btnG=Search&meta=
|
Edited by - Cornelius on 27 Dec 2006 10:30:01 |
 |
|
Topic Locked
