In War on Poverty, Pipeline In Chad Plays Unusual Role:
Massive trucks and drilling rigs deployed by an Exxon Mobil-led consortium rumble through the sand and bush of Kome, Chad, rushing to complete one of largest private-sector investments — $3.5 billion — in sub-Saharan Africa. In a few weeks, the Miandoum I well, pumping in the shade of an ancient fig tree, is expected to tap the first drops of a one-billion-barrel oil reservoir. The crude is set to flow 663 miles through a pipeline that slithers under hippo-filled rivers, parched savannahs, tropical rain forests and the hunting grounds of the Bakola pygmies, before emptying into storage tanks anchored in the Atlantic surf off the coast of Cameroon.
Pardon my cynicism, but my first thought was: how long until this all gets nationalized? Or, how much of this oil money will “the people” ever see?
That’s the simple part. More audacious is the route along which Chad’s oil money will flow. For the first time, a nation has agreed to surrender part of its sovereignty over how to spend the money earned by unlocking its oil wealth. Proceeds from Chad’s sale of oil from the first three fields — expected to exceed $100 million a year, nearly doubling the nation’s fiscal revenue — will travel a financial pipeline designed, and insisted upon, by the World Bank and other outsiders and monitored by a Chadian committee that includes Muslim and Christian religious figures and other community leaders. Their job is to ensure the money is spent on development projects such as schools, clinics and rural roads, and isn’t siphoned into secret overseas bank accounts, as happened in neighboring Nigeria, or funneled into civil wars, as in Angola and Sudan.
So, is this Western Imperialism or not?