Oil and Nigeria - Research Paper Example

This found it into formalizing its trade by joining organizations formed by the colleagues in the oil exporting field in 1977. This also led to the introduction and gazzetting of Nigerian petroleum Production Company in the same year which was owned and managed by the Nigerian government. The shell oil company commenced with the oil production I Aloibiri immediately after discovery leading to attainment of production levels of about 2 million barrels in a day of crude oil. The economic recession that was experienced world wide in the 80’s saw Nigeria income from oil to decline sharply but later on came to regain in the early 2000’s after the economic recovery up to 2.

5 million barrels. Nigerian governments have been having developmental programmes among them being raising the oil production to about 4 million barrels in a day. As a result of this trade dominating as a Nigerian only source of accounting to 90% of the gross earnings implying that the other economic factors that were initially regarded as the countries chief economic activities like farming were no longer paid attention for. Corruption in Nigeria oil There has been a series of corruption activities in the oil industry since the time Nigerians realized the monitorial strength the country has been having.

This was brought about mostly by the greed developed by the major stake holders to mass wealth by altering of information and hiding of others (Kurtz 123). Nigeria having being ranked as the eighth largest producing company and its level of corruption especially when it comes to oppressing the public and hence led to a loud outcry through out the country. This led to the current president to take the initiative to provide strategies for ending corruption on oil as a tool to win voted in the upcoming elections.

Nigerians oil content has an exemplary content of having a large gasoline content which made it to be a hot cake product especially by the American countries. This therefore attracted many foreign investors into this lucrative business whereby a lot of interests had to exchange hands for them to survive in the industry. Ironically, despite the quantities of money made daily in this field, Nigeria is one of the top countries in Africa to record extremely poor people in the rural areas having more than 100 million of its population surviving on less than 1$ in a day (Koehn 121).

It has been an embarrassing figure from the UN statistics when the percentage of the population living in abject poverty in such a nation exceeding 60 %. The major reason was known to be corruption which led to the amassing of wealth by the few greedy and also creating loop holes for the looting of the nation’s natural resources at the expense of the poor citizens. A research by Reuters has shown that despite promises by the government to eliminate corruption and sealing all the loop holes there has been disappearance of resources worth billions of dollars due the corrupt deals from both the Nigerian leaders and dubious foreign investors.

This led to the population going to the streets early this year and protests the countries over involvement in corruption deals. The major cry was the concerned of a prolonged increase in prices of oil in a producing country as a result of the subsidized graft disappearing into the pockets of few greedy leaders .This