Swiss traders’ shenanigans on the buying of Nigeria and Africa’s crude oil without transparency and accountability In Nigeria, Swiss companies bought oil worth $37 billion over the three years, an amount equal to more than 18 percent of the national government’s revenues. Payments of this scale that affect the development prospects of poor countries require public oversight, which has been largely missing in most of the scenarios described in this report. Transparency provides citizens with a tool to hold their government to account for the management of their country’s most valuable asset. To achieve transparency, we recommend the following: •…

  Sometime in 2006, the celebrated Nigerian poet Odia Ofeimun applied for a visa to travel to Britain. The British consulate in Lagos rejected the application. The insult was compounded by a consulate official who wrote on the application: “He claims to be a writer.”   Ofeimun is a poet, dramatist, polemicist, public intellectual and iconoclast all rolled into one. Everyone knows him, except the good folks at the British consulate. He lives in Lagos in a spacious bungalow whose living room is stacked with piles of newspapers and magazines.   When I visited, there was a flat-screen TV at…