By Tom O'Neill
National Geographic staff
February 2007
PART ONE
VOCABULARY CLOZE and COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
Helping words
taints self-sufficient get importing fire poor possible wrong slums smoke potholes beggars huts better poorer surviving sabotage kidnap shacks outside nothing grievances poisoning without scarce stains siphon children adults earnings populous recent report twist lives ruin scarce
Oil fouls everything in southern Nigeria. It spills from the pipelines, 1. ________ soil and water. It 2. _________ the hands of politicians and generals, who 3. ________ off its profits. It 4. __________ the ambitions of the young, who will try anything to scoop up a share of the liquid riches—fi 5. __________ a gun, 6. _________ a pipeline, 7. __________ a foreigner.
Nigeria had all the makings of an uplifting tale: 8. __________ African nation 9. _________ with enormous sudden wealth. Visions of prosperity rose with the same force as the oil that first gushed from the Niger Delta's marshy ground in 1956. The world market craved delta crude, a "sweet," low-sulfur liquid called Bonny Light, easily refined into gasoline and diesel. By the mid-1970s, Nigeria had joined OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), and the government's budget bulged with petrodollars.
Everything looked 9. __________—but everything went 10. _________.
Dense, garbage-heaped 11. ___________stretch for miles. Choking black 12. ___________ from an open-air slaughterhouse rolls over housetops. Streets are cratered with 13. __________ and ruts. Vicious gangs roam school grounds. Peddlers and 14. __________ rush up to vehicles stalled in gas lines. This is Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil hub, capital of Rivers state, smack-dab in the middle of oil reserves bigger than the United States' and Mexico's combined. Port Harcourt should gleam; instead, it rots.
Beyond the city, within the labyrinth of creeks, rivers, and pipeline channels that vein the delta—one of the world's largest wetlands—exists a netherworld. Villages and towns cling to the banks, little more than heaps of mud-walled 15. ____________ and rusty 16. __________. Groups of hungry, half-naked 17. __________ and sullen, idle 18. __________ wander dirt paths. There is no electricity, no clean water, no medicine, no schools. Fishing nets hang dry; dugout canoes sit unused on muddy banks. Decades of oil spills, acid rain from gas flares, and the stripping away of mangroves for pipelines have killed off fish.
Nigeria has been subverted by the very thing that gave it promise—oil, which accounts for 95 percent of the country's export 19. __________ and 80 percent of its 20. _________. In 1960, agricultural products such as palm oil and cacao beans made up nearly all Nigeria's exports; today, they barely register as trade items, and Africa's most 21. ___________ country, with 130 million people, has gone from being 22. ___________ in food to 23. ____________ more than it produces. Because its refineries are constantly breaking down, oil-rich Nigeria must also import the bulk of its fuel. But even then, gas stations are often closed for want of supply. A 24. ___________ United Nations 25. _________ shows that in quality of life, Nigeria rates below all other major oil nations, from Libya to Indonesia. Its annual per capita income of $1,400 is less than that of Senegal, which exports mainly fish and nuts. The World Bank categorizes Nigeria as a "fragile state," beset by risk of armed conflict, epidemic disease, and failed governance.
From a potential model nation, Nigeria has become a dangerous country, addicted to oil money, with people increasingly willing to turn to corruption, sabotage, and murder to get a fix of the wealth. The cruelest 26. ________ is that half a century of oil extraction in the delta has failed to make the 27. ___________ of the people 28. __________. Instead, they are 29. _________ still, and hopeless.
"It's not fair," Felix James Harry muttered in a meetinghouse in the village of Finima on the western end of the island, close to the oil and gas complex. "We can hardly catch fish anymore. 30. ______________ is very hard." Harry, a 30-year-old father of two children, should have been in his canoe this afternoon, throwing out nets to snare crayfish and sardines. But he was sitting in an airless concrete-block shelter with half a dozen other fishermen, none of whom had much to do.
Houses in the new village are tightly packed, leaving little room for gardens. Windows look out on walls. In this claustrophobic setting, the men talked about nature. "The forest where the gas plant is protected us from the east wind," Solomon David, the community chairman, said. "Now, the rain and wind 31. ___________ our thatched roofs every three months. They lasted more than twice as long before." Another fisherman mentioned how construction and increased ship traffic changed local wave patterns, causing shore erosion and forcing fish into deeper water. "We would need a 55-horsepower engine to get to those places." No one in the room could afford such an engine.
The meetinghouse had no electricity, but a battery-powered wall clock, the only decoration, showed that another day was ebbing away. Forced to give up fishing, the young men of the village put their hope in landing a job with the oil industry. But offers are 32. _________. "People from the 33. __________ get all the jobs," Harry said, alluding to members of Nigeria's majority ethnic groups—the Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, and Fulani—who are the country's political and economic elite. "We have diploma holders, but they have 34. ___________ to do."
35. __________ crowded the dim room. Bernard Cosmos, a strapping young man in a striped polo shirt, spoke out: "I have a degree in petrochemical engineering from Rivers State University in Port Harcourt. I've applied many times with the oil companies for a good job. It's always no. They tell me that I can work in an oil field as an unskilled laborer but not as an engineer. I have no money to get other training."
"I can say this," Osuoka said firmly. "Nigeria was a much better place 36. __________ oil."
Optimism is as 37. __________ as blue sky in the sodden delta. "Everyone was sure they would be blessed with the coming of the black gold and live as well as people in other parts of the world," said Patrick Amaopusanibo, a retired businessman who now farms near the village of Oloama. He had to speak loudly to compete with the "black noise," the hissing and roaring of a gas flare near his cassava field. "But we have nothing. I feel cheated."
Nigeria's oil money won't keep coming, of course—perhaps another 40 years, the experts say. Natural gas is a fallback. Nigeria's reserves are estimated at 184 trillion cubic feet (five trillion cubic meters), good for an estimated 240 years of production at current levels. In the meantime, Antony Goldman says, "The government is following a simple plan for oil extraction - get everything out, as much as possible.”
FISH
Isaac Osuoka remembers the first time he saw frozen fish. It was the late 1970s, and he was five. A peddler caused a stir as he entered Osuoka's delta town of Oeliabi (now Akinima) with a carton of what he called ice fish. "We never had fish brought in from outside," said Osuoka, who now lives in Port Harcourt. "We had no idea what frozen fish meant. There were rumors that this fish was kept in a mortuary."
Frozen fish was a harbinger of the changes that would traumatize Osuoka's community. "As a boy, I could stroll to the rivers or back swamps with a rod and a net and come back with enough fish to feed my family," he recalled. "There was usually enough left over to sell, providing income for us to go to school." This bounty would not survive the coming of oil. Leaks from pipelines and wells, and the building of roads and canals, have disrupted the wetlands. "The degree and rate of degradation," the UN report warns, "are pushing the delta towards ecological disaster."
"Today, there is not a single person in my community you could describe as a fisherman. We depend almost totally on frozen fish." At market stalls, a piece of frozen croaker or mackerel, most of it imported, goes for almost a dollar, unaffordable for most villagers.
Comprehension Questions
1. What does “this bounty” refers to?
2. “The degree and rate of degradation” What does this refer to?
3. Explain why the people depend on frozen fish for food?
4. Explain why fish is unaffordable in the village?
5. What is “ice fish” ?
Vocabulary
Rank the following words according to its degree of seriousness on the line scale below:.
WORDS related to disaster
Disaster degradation traumatize ebbing blessed bounty claustrophobic corruption sabotage hopeless murder
Scale:
Positive average very negative
_________________________________________________
WORDS related to Sound
Groan hissed thundered roared mumbled spoke
Scale:
Positive average very negative
____________________________________________________
ANSWERS
1.poisoning 2. stains 3.siphon 4. taints 5.fire 6. sabotage 7. kidnap 8. poor 9.possible 10.wrong 11. slums 12.smoke 13. potholes 14. beggars 15.huts 16. shacks 17. children 18. adults 19. earnings 20. populous 21. self-sufficient 22.importing 23. recent 24. report 25. twist 26. lives 27. better 28. poorer 29. surviving 30. ruin 31. scarce 32. outside 33. nothing 34. grievances 36. without 37. scarce 38. get
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