Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-03-14-Speech-3-518-000"
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"en.20120314.27.3-518-000"2
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"Mr President, Nigeria is a country with more than 150 million people and it is the largest oil producer in Africa. When things do not go well for Nigeria, then the whole region becomes unstable.
And things are not going that well for Nigeria at the moment. Although the country could be earning good money from its oil, more than half the population is living in poverty. What lies at the root of this is large-scale corruption. The oil dollars are disappearing into the pockets of a lucky few. The gap between rich and poor is increasing, and Nigeria is just one example of the many countries in Africa whose wealth of raw materials ought to be a blessing and, yet, it has become a curse.
Poverty makes people vulnerable to extremist ideas. Religious groups step into the gap left by the government. You can blame your poverty on someone else, someone adhering to the wrong faith. Another variation of that is blaming your poverty on the fact that you are not following the doctrine of your religion strictly enough. ‘Join us in strictly adhering to doctrine’.
Communities in Nigeria are going after each other’s blood in the name of their God. We might as well call this by its proper name. It is therefore best that we look for the real causes of poverty and see whether anything can be done about them. One of its causes is corruption. In any case, in the short term, the EU can do something to combat the corruption there by applying its Transparency Directive to oil and to mining, because if we publicly declare how much European companies are paying the Nigerian Government, then the Nigerians will also be made aware of that and then the money will not be disappearing into really deep, dark pockets.
I am therefore disappointed to see that Shell, the Netherlands’ largest oil company and a major player in the Niger Delta, is putting pressure on the Dutch Government to try to kill off the Transparency Directive.
I ask my fellow Members and the European Commission not to allow this to happen."@en1
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