FEEDING THE DRAGON

NWO-NIGERIA

The Boko Haram is truly an evil organization, but who is really supporting them?

Are the recent events occurring in the Ukraine linked to what is happening in Nigeria?

Celebrities around the world have voiced their outrage over the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last month, flooding social media with posts using the hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls.

Michelle Obama, Malala Yousafzai, Hillary Clinton, and Amy Poehler are among those lending their support to the social media campaign, which encourages military intervention to recover the girls who were kidnapped from their school by Boko Haram rebels in north-east Nigeria.

A few months ago, the name Sambisa Forest meant nothing to many Nigerians. Not anymore. It has come to signify terror and home to the terrorist group Boko Haram. The forest is now almost mythical for so many people within the Lake Chad basin who have come to align the complex north-eastern vegetation with Boko Haram, instead of the game reserve the colonialists meant it for.

The colonial government had marked the forest out as a game reserve. Today, Sambisa has become one of the strongest bases of the Boko Haram insurgents who run back into its dark recesses anytime they have finished their slaughter of harmless citizens.

But, is the world really interested in the health and safety of these girls, or is the resources of Nigeria more concerning?

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) recently announced the discovery of crude oil in an area of about 3,350 square metres in the Lake Chad Basin with Vice President Namadi Sambo directing the commencement of steps towards engaging "willing and ready investors that will facilitate speedy and timely exploration in the second phase of the exercise".

Vice President Sambo said during a meeting with NNPC officials and other public-sector experts at the State House, Abuja, that the federal government was happy that surveys had indicated the presence of oil in the Chad Basin. The Lake Chad Basin, in the far North Eastern Borno State of Nigeria, is the hotbed of terror attacks and other forms of violence by the Islamic sect, Boko Haram.

Yakubu added that on the submission of the report of the investigation into the exploration of oil in the area, NNPC commissioned its subsidiary and consultants to start the exploration. The consultants include Chinese companies that had worked in similar ventures in Niger and Chad where crude oil has been found in commercial quantity. He noted that due to the high technology employed for the exploration, the area was divided into four phases and that work is currently ongoing on the fifth phase.

Yakubu further added that three major sub-basins in the Lake Chad area, namely Biu, Maiduguri and Barga, had been identified and marked as low risk while work is currently going on in that area. But he pointed out that lack of security and adequate funding are the major challenges being faced in the speedy execution of the project. Hopes of stepping up oil exploration in Nigeria’s Lake Chad Basin have been dashed by the brutal attacks of Islamic Boko Haram and the Ansaru sect terrorists in the country’s northeastern region.

Between 2011 and 2013 the Nigerian government provided $240 million to facilitate oil and gas exploration activities in the Lake Chad Basin and other northern hydrocarbon basins, including the Benue Trough, Bida Basin and the Sokoto-Rima Basin in northern Nigeria, said Jerry Gana, a former minister of information and chairman of the Northern Economic Summit.

Oil prospecting in the Lake Chad Basin was “yielding promising results and may lead to commercial exploration of oil and gas this year,” Nigeria’s Vice President Namadi Sambo said in a 2013 article in The Weekly Trust. Three blocks were identified for potential oil and gas exploration, and hopes were to begin exploration work by 4Q 2013 or 1Q 2014.

But the deadly activities of the Boko Haram insurgents halted plans.

The U.S. government designated the Boko Haram and Ansaru as foreign terrorist organizations on Nov. 13, 2013. The sect has effectively curtailed oil and gas E&P activities in the Lake Chad basin and other inland basin in northern Nigeria. Low performance in the region last year was the result of increased insurgent activities in the region, Andrew Yakubu, group managing director of the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC) said March 5 before the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Upstream) in Abuja.

Fear of being killed by Boko Haram insurgents have prompted technical personnel who provided support services for exploration activities to leave the northeast, while geologists in the NNPC also have avoided the area, according to news reports. In addition, oil workers in the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria in 2013 warned that its members would abandon the region because of Boko Haram.

Niger historically has not produced petroleum and has depended upon imports to meet its domestic requirements. Oil reserves have been known to exist in the east of the nation for some decades, but have never been commercially exploited. Government concessions are divided in two blocks which run from along the Termit-Ténéré Rift Basin just to the west of the Kaouar escarpment, south to the western side of lake Chad. The northern section, titled the "Ténéré Block" covers 71,155 km2 (17.3 million acres) of the northern end of this basin. The southern end of the depression, near the town of N'guigmi, is parceled out as the "Agadem Block".

In 1992, the Djado permit (at the northern tip of Termit-Ténéré Rift Basin) was awarded to Hunt Oil Company, and in 2003 the Tenere permit was awarded to a Chinese Canada joint venture. An ExxonMobil-Petronas joint venture was sold sole rights to the "Agadem block" at the south of the basin in the Diffa Region north of Lake Chad, but never went beyond exploration.

The "Ténéré Block" is leased in 2003 by a consortium of TG World Energy Corp. of Canada (20%) and CNPC International Ténéré (CNPCIT), a unit of the China National Petroleum Corporation (80%).[5] In October 2006, TG World Energy Corp. of Canada spudded the Saha-1 well, which was the first well in a three-well drilling program that the company planned to carry out through 2007. The well flowed uneconomic quantities of petroleum and was abandoned as noncommercial. the company’s next target, the Fachi West-1 exploration well, was drilled in 2007. TG World’s future plans included the drilling of a third exploration well at a location that was to be determined after the results of Fachi West-1 were known, and the acquisition of an additional 700 km of two-dimensional (2-d) seismic data for regional and prospect-specific coverage in the Ténéré Block.

A further "Bilma Block" (to the east of Ténéré Block) was leased by CNPC in 2003.

While test drilling continues in the Fachi / Tenere area, directly south towards Lake Chad, the so-called "Agadem Block" was leased to the China National Petroleum Corporation in 2003, as the An ExxonMobil-Petronas joint venture in Agadem was not pursued by the companies. Here the CNPC made six oil discoveries and one gas discovery amounting to approximately 400 million barrels of oil equivalent. The Chinese government agency has planned to drill oil reserves here, and in June 2008 signed a deal with the Nigerien government to build a 1 million-metric-ton a year refinery at Ganaram near Zinder. The company has also pledged to build a 2,000-kilometer (1,200 mi) pipeline to transport oil out of the country, and connect with its projects in neighboring Chad. In October 2008, the government and the CNPC broke ground on the Ganaram refinery, projecting a completion date of 2012. It was announced that the refinery and pipeline deal brought a $5 billion payment to the Nigerien government, and when fully operational, could produce 20,000 barrels of refined petroleum a day. In 2008, Niger consumed around 7,000 barrels a day domestically.

In the complex work of oil exploration, the company which has taken an exploration or a production licence must give back the part it no longer uses to the local government. Those surfaces are proposed to new companies which can expect interesting prospects as they are close to already successful areas.

In Chad, the areas given back by the Exxon led consortium have long been explored by junior companies, but since 2006 (and the diplomatic change of relations between Chad and People's Republic of China), China's CNPC is the main investor in new explorations (H permit).

Excerpts from the CNPC presentation at the CIOME 2008 conference - October 9th, 2008

CNPC is mainly drilling the Bongor oil block where it found interesting discoveries. CNPC has also an additional licence north of Lake Chad.

In the Bongor licence, CNPC has first developed the northern part where light oil is suitable for the local refinery built through another partnership (see below). Production started in April 2011 on the Ronier and Mimosa fields and oil is sent to Djermaya through a 311 km dedicated pipeline (capacity: 20 000 bbd). Other fields are right now in development (Cassia, Prosopis, Grand Baobab) but a solution will have to be found for the export of the oil because this heavy oil cannot be processed in the local refinery.

The contractual context is fairly different from the World Bank sponsored initial project. The Chinese company does not have to give detailed information like Exxon. But the Company website and annual reports show its policy in terms of production, local manpower, social and environmental responsability.

Petroleum exploration began in the 1970s. Oil was discovered in the Lake Chad basin and the Doba basin. Initially, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell collaborated in oil exploration in Chad. Since then, there have been numerous withdrawals, and today the consortium is made up of ExxonMobil, Petronas, and ChevronTexaco. Exploitation activities were delayed during the civil war, which began in 1979, and final preparations for extraction did not begin until the 1990s.

China joins US to rescue abducted Chibok school girls.

China has offered to assist Nigeria in the fight against terror, particularly in the effort to rescue the over 200 school girls of Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State abducted by the Boko Haram sect. President Goodluck Jonathan disclosed this during a joint press conference with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the end of bilateral talks at the Presidential Villa.

The United States had earlier offered to deploy troops and assets to the country towards the search and rescue operation of the abducted schoolgirls. He said that the Chinese Government also expressed firm support to efforts at safeguarding the sovereignty and securing the territorial integrity of Nigeria. British Special Forces have also been put on standby after Foreign Secretary William Hague described the abduction as 'disgusting and immoral'.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were initially involved in financing the project and monitoring how the Government of Chad handles profits. In essence, the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project consisted of extracting oil from fields at Doba (southern Chad), and transporting that oil to the Atlantic coast via a pipeline through Cameroon. Cameroon shares in the profits of the project. Although the World Bank website puts the number of wells at three hundred, 391 wells had been drilled by June 2006. An independent report by Robert Barclay and George Koppert claims that "after lower than projected oil flows from the initial wells following project inauguration in October 2003, it was decided to increase the size of the well field in the OFDA to about 450 wells."

IMF directors said in a statement that "Chad's temporary oil windfall should be used to promote the development of the non-oil sector so that it can support the continuation of the poverty reduction strategy when oil runs out." It seems that, to a certain degree, that happened.

Oil money has been diverted to increased military spending. In July of 2006, the World Bank and the Government of Chad signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that committed 70 percent of the government's budget to programs in the health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, environment, rural development, de-mining, and good governance. A multi-donor mission visited Chad in June of 2007 and found that "the 70 percent provision in the MoU may not be met in light of the security situation which led to high military spending over the past year."

Some NGOs and journalists claim that oil in Chad has fueled conflict and encouraged the lingering rebellion in the east. Only time will tell what portion of the oil funds will ultimately trickle down to Chad's mass poor, and whether or not further conflict will emerge stoked by those intending to inherit Chad's growing oil wealth.

Oil exploitation in Chad and the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project have progressed with little media attention.

When the World Bank agreed in 2000 to help finance a $4.2 billion pipeline to tap the undeveloped oil wealth of Chad, one of the world’s poorest and most unstable nations, the agreement was a novel response to a persistent African quandary: how to make the continent’s rich natural resources pay off for its people, not only for its powerful. The strategy was to use the World Bank’s money and credibility to persuade Chad to dedicate its earnings from oil to attacking its poverty by building schools, roads and hospitals. That experiment ended quietly this week. Chad repaid the $65.7 million it owed the World Bank out of national coffers swollen by more than $1 billion a year in oil revenues, but it had not honored its bargain, the bank said.

“Chad failed to comply with the key requirements of this agreement,” the World Bank said in a statement on Tuesday. “The government did not allocate adequate resources critical for poverty reduction.”

Thus, concluded one of the most ambitious efforts to escape Africa’s “resource curse,” wherein the wealth of mineral-rich nations gets siphoned by corrupt officials.

Moves towards the New World Order have been aided by the development of the current banking and economic system. The levels of corruption in the world’s financial system are so overwhelming that they have caused a bubble in the derivative market totaling quadrillions of dollars. The World Bank lends money to finance projects in the Third World to meet the needs of the multinationals. By financing projects which are totally irrelevant to the needs of the local people; the local economy is destroyed and rainforests are decimated. This conveniently adds to the environmental 'problem'. While President,  Bill Clinton nominated the president of the World Bank – James Wolfensohn from the Schroder Bank, Population Council, Bilderberg Steering Committee, CFR and business partner of  the Rothschilds.

When poor countries get into Elite-engineered financial trouble, the IMF intervenes to offer more loans (thereby increasing the debt) on the condition that the Elite's policies are followed e.g. giving up land, which should be used to grow crops to feed the country's population, to produce luxury cash crops instead, which are exported at cut down prices to the multinationals. Ever since the World Bank was established, the banksters (high level bankers who pull the strings of politicians) have been using it to launder trillions of dollars to finance their hidden global agendas.

Currently, Africa has several different monetary union initiatives, as well as some existing monetary unions within the continent. One initiative is the “monetary union project of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),” which is a “regional group of 15 countries in West Africa.” Among the members are those of an already-existing monetary union in the region, the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The ECOWAS consists of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Cape Verde, Liberia, Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria.

On March 2, 2009, it was reported that, “The African Union will sign a memorandum of understanding this month with Nigeria on the establishment of a continental central bank,” and that, “The institution will be based in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, African Union Commissioner for Economic Affairs Maxwell Mkwezalamba told reporters.” Further, “As an intermediate step to the creation of the bank, the pan- African body will establish an African Monetary Institute within the next three years, he said at a meeting of African economists in the city,” and he was quoted as saying, “We have agreed to work with the Association of African Central Bank Governors to set up a joint technical committee to look into the preparation of a joint strategy.”

In 1988, The Economist ran an article titled, Get Ready for the Phoenix, in which they wrote, “THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the late twentieth century.”

Further, the article stated that, “The phoenix zone would impose tight constraints on national governments. There would be no such thing, for instance, as a national monetary policy. The world phoenix supply would be fixed by a new central bank, descended perhaps from the IMF. The world inflation rate-and hence, within narrow margins, each national inflation rate-would be in its charge. Each country could use taxes and public spending to offset temporary falls in demand, but it would have to borrow rather than print money to finance its budget deficit.” The author admits that, “This means a big loss of economic sovereignty, but the trends that make the phoenix so appealing are taking that sovereignty away in any case. Even in a world of more-or-less floating exchange rates, individual governments have seen their policy independence checked by an unfriendly outside world.”

In 1998, the IMF Survey discussed a speech given by James Tobin, a prominent American economist, in which he argued that, “A single global currency might offer a viable alternative to the floating rate.” He further stated that, “there was still a great need” for “lenders of last resort.”

In 1999, economist Judy Shelton addressed the US House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Financial Services. In her testimony, she stated that, “The continued expansion of free trade, the increased integration of financial markets and the advent of electronic commerce are all working to bring about the need for an international monetary standard—a global unit of account.”

Paul Volcker, former Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, stated in 2000, that, “If we are to have a truly global economy, a single world currency makes sense.”

There can be no denying, what these comments suggest.

In March of 2008, following the collapse of Bear Stearns, Reuters reported on a document released by research firm CreditSights, which said that, “Financial firms face a ‘new world order’,” and that, “More industry consolidation and acquisitions may follow after JPMorgan Chase & Co.” Further, “In the event of future consolidation, potential acquirers identified by CreditSights include JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.”

In November of 2008, the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC), the US intelligence community’s “center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking,” released a report that it produced in collaboration with numerous think tanks, consulting firms, academic institutions and hundreds of other experts, among them are the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Wilson Center, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Texas A&M University, the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House in London.           

The report, titled, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, outlines the current global political and economic trends that the world may be going through by the year 2025. In terms of the financial crisis, it states that solving this “will require long-term efforts to establish a new international system.” It suggests that as the “China-model” for development becomes increasingly attractive, there may be a “decline in democratization” for emerging economies, authoritarian regimes, and “weak democracies frustrated by years of economic underperformance.” Further, the dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency, as there would likely be a “move away from the dollar.”

The report discusses the topic of regionalism, stating that, “Greater Asian integration, if it occurs, could fill the vacuum left by a weakening multilaterally based international order but could also further undermine that order. In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a remarkable series of pan-Asian ventures—the most significant being ASEAN + 3—began to take root.  Although few would argue that an Asian counterpart to the EU is a likely outcome even by 2025, if 1997 is taken as a starting point, Asia arguably has evolved more rapidly over the last decade than the European integration did in its first decade(s).” It further states that, “movement over the next 15 years toward an Asian basket of currencies—if not an Asian currency unit as a third reserve—is more than a theoretical possibility.”

Ultimately, what this implies is that the future of the global political economy is one of increasing moves toward a global system of governance, or a world government, with a world central bank and global currency; and that, concurrently, these developments are likely to materialize in the face of and as a result of a decline in democracy around the world, and thus, a rise in authoritarianism. What we are witnessing is the creation of a New World Order, composed of a totalitarian global government structure.