Oil promises - how oil changed a country

 

Interesting documentary on how an oil discovery changed a country or rather did bring no change at all. 

This is a 85 minute DW documentary which spans a period of 10 years from 2007 when oil was discovered off the Ghana coast and it was felt that oil would bring in the riches and dramatically improve the lives of people living in a fishing village on the coast. 

Oil did come, big companies did come in with their investments and their gigantic machines and did give some work to the locals for a couple of years, but then it all dried up. People were left in the lurch. A lot was promised by the government, but nothing happened, well almost nothing. 

Well some change did take place, electricity did come in, some paved roads but fishing died completely because the algae from the oil slick that polluted the beaches and destroyed the fishing nets. The government was apparently making money from the oil but where was the money going. 

Contracts were awarded to Chinese and they brought in their own labour. That's probably symptomatic of Africa, big projects are awarded, but major chunk of the jobs go to foreign workers especially the skilled jobs. The locals are left with crumbs. 

Its also a subtle dig at globalisation, is globalisation helping the local communities from which it takes it resources, who benefits in the end - the big companies with their shareholders who get massive dividends, or the governments which pocket the taxes or the local villages who are equal stakeholders in the project. Do project affected persons get the real advantage from big infrastructure projects. Verdict is still out. 

Its a nice documentary, very languid pace, with some commentary, and lot of interviews with sub titles in English and the animations by Ebele Okoye was quite delightful. You can watch this documentary here 

A Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash

 Absorbing documentary about Oil - its history, its development through the ages, its role in the society, including Oil as War, Oil as Politics, oil developing the world, so much of petro products being consumed by people all over the world. It talks of the oil fields that were there in Baku, Texas, Venezuala - all finished, all ghost towns over there. Oil as war tool when Saddan Hussain invaded Kuwait but even otherwise almost all wars have been about oil. US goes into war with Iraq over the so called weapons of mass destruction when it was all about securing oil assets and securing oil contracts for George Bush's Republican friends. The conflict in Darfur in South Sudan was all about oil discoveries with the military using force to clear families staying there.  There are some lovely live footages including one of a smiling Adolf Hitler (which is rare, indeed). Baku produced all that oil that was used by the German army. The film gives a realistic picture of the forthcoming shortage of oil in the world, with the world running out of oil reserves. Alternate sources of energy like wind power, solar, bio diesel, are all too puny in quantity and too much expensive to be affordable. Same applies to electric energy one expert says that even if you hybridised all the automobile vehicles in the world today, still we will be requiring as much oil as we are consuming today. Oil is virtually ruling the world which is why we see so much influence in the middle east. Then there are problems with OPEC and the production in Saudi Arabia is not growing that much to be of comfort to the world.  Very feeble or practically nil attempt being made to enforce democracy in the middle east - reason - oil. Very rich documentary with lots of expert voices, lots of live footages and material. Well made documentary. 

Available on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odCZpBPfFQk

Picture taken from internet, not with a view to violating copyright.