On February 22, 1895, a British Naval Force under the command of Admiral Sir Frederick Bedford laid siege to Brass, the chief city of the Ijo people of Nembe in Nigeria's Niger Delta. After severe fighting, the city was razed to the ground. More than 2000 people, mostly women and children perished in that attack - launched at the behest of a British company in the name of Queen Victoria. writer, political activist and leader of the Niger Delta's Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Again, the people of Nembe were locked in a grim life-and-death struggle to safeguard their livelihood from two forces: a series of corrupt and repressive Nigerian governments and another British company, the giant multinational Royal Dutch Shell. the Nigerian military, demonstrating (in contrast to Shell's public profile) how irresponsible practices have degraded agricultural land and left a people destitute. Compelling and angry, it draws attention to a grave injustice. The plunder of the Niger Delta has turned full circle as crude oil has taken the place of palm oil, but the dramatis personae remain the same: a powerful multinational company bent on extracting the last drop of blood from the richly endowed Niger Delta and a courageous people determined to resist.

The Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), an ethnic militia, emerged in the Igbo-speaking region of Nigeria in 1999, shortly after military rule ended and Olusegun Obasanjo took office as elected President. MASSOB's stated goal is the struggle for Igbo self-determination and the re-emergence of a new sovereign state in the eastern part of the country to be known as the 'United States of Biafra', thereby raising the spectre of a possible break up of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This Discussion Paper examines the circumstances of MASSOB's emergence in a period of political transition and considerable uncertainty as the Nigerian armed forces began to prepare to relinquish their grip on power, and the specific ways the promoters of this ethnic militia movement have shaped Nigeria's still unfolding democratization process since 1999.

This book examines the standard scholarly explanations of the cause of Africa's underdevelopment and argues that the traditional scholarly explanations - colonial and neo-colonial expropriation, racial assumptions, nor geographical theory - are plausible as the main cause of Africa's underdevelopment. Rather, the book contends, the chief cause of the continent's underdevelopment is the failure of leadership in a long succession of Africa's traditional ruling classes. This failure of leadership, the book shows, was demonstrated most clearly in the historically traceable indifference of a long line of Africa's monarchs to scientific and technological progress. This indifference set the stage for the subsequent conquest, expropriation, and technological stagnation of Africa. The book concludes by recommending a blueprint for the continent's future development.