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Niger Delta Black Gold Blues: Can Writers Bring About Environmental Justice Where Slow Violence Has Proven So Devastating? or A Cautionary Tale for Environmental Sacrifice Zones Worldwide

Post-colonial Nigeria: Civil War, Fragmentation, Neocolonial Corruption, and Environmental Exploitation

"Virtually every inch of the region has been touched by the industry directly through its operations or indirectly through neglect" - Michael Watts

Statistics of Post-Colonial Nigeria (Taken from Curse of the Black Gold by Michael Watts):
NOTE: This book was published in 20??, and the statistics are accurate to that time

In 2003, 70% of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted
In 2005, 40% of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted
There 13,329 settlements, 95% of which have less than 5,000 inhabitants
Between 1970 and 2000, the number of people living on less than $1 per day has gone from 19 million to 90 million
Literacy in core Nigerian states are barely 40%
There are only 39% of children enrolled in primary school
There are no desks, teaching materials, teachers, and in some cases roofs, available for primary schools
The ratio of doctors to population in the Delta State is 1:27,000

[This section still needs a lot of work. Decide how you are going to present your information. What you have is useful, but think of way to set it up that is more consistent with the pages that precede it and those that follow. The goal is to tell the slice of history from the post-independence civil war era up to the formation of MOSOP around 1990. This is the ugly time of war and division but also of when the oil industry secures its hold on oil extraction yet is rather negligent about oil spills (some data on the spills prior to the 1990s would be useful). Note that Tayler has already taken some of your history of civil war and the 1970s oil boom, so maybe you can negotiate with her to take some of this history back. Review Nixon's article as a model and resource for how to keep the focus on telling this history briefly with an emphasis on what people need to know in order to understand the context Saro-Wiwa was responding to that prompted the Niger Delta writers we are focusing on in the main section of our project. Include author's byline and references section. Laine Strutton's blog could be useful--especially his post on "A very brief chronology of the Nigerian oil economy" from 14 November 2012]

"Most Nigerians are poorer today than they were in the late colonial period" - Nwafejoku Uwadibie

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Long live the Republic of Biafra!