Nigeria’s top military and security officials met on Monday with oil company executives and parliamentarians to try to thrash out a solution to the worsening security situation in the Niger Delta, which has slashed Nigeria’s oil output.
House Committee on Petroleum Upstream chairman Tom Brisibe, who convened the meeting, said: “We asked the international oil companies about their internal security arrangements and the arrangements they have with the Nigerian security forces. We asked the companies what they feel should be done.”
“One solution that some are thinking about is increased active participation from local host communities — that is active ownership of the assets in the oil industry as much as practicable,” Bisibe said.
Ann Pickard, Shell’s most senior executive in Nigeria, said the company would like “to get back to production as soon as possible at Bonga.”
The big question is how.
It was Thursday’s attack on Bonga, the deep-sea field operated by Shell 120km off the coast of Nigeria that sparked the panic. Until Thursday such fields had been seen as being safe from militant attacks.
When he came to power just over a year ago, Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua appeared more willing than his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, to hold talks with the armed groups in the Delta.
The attack on Bonga has cast doubts on whether talks work any better than the more strong-arm tactics Obasanjo tended to favor. Observers warn that Yar’Adua’s entourage still counts a number of hawks.
“The government needs to crack down hard,” an executive with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation said shortly after the Bonga attack.
Yar’Adua himself responded to the Bonga attack by ordering the military and security forces to “take all necessary measures” to arrest those responsible and bring them to justice.
He then deployed two small warships in the waters around Bonga on Saturday.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS