Some fifty-six years ago, Nigeria’s first barrel of crude oil made its uncertain entry into the global oil market. It was largely an event unnoticed. But with it, Nigeria put a knife to the string that bound it to the stake of poverty. It took a leap into that very desirable and rarefied realm of the dollar, petrodollar. The country’s vast forests of cocoa and palm trees, its pyramids of groundnuts rising like sculptured mountains into the sky and its extensive fields of cotton began their retreat as the wheels of fortune, oil fortune, rumbled on carrying Nigeria into the comity of nations blessed by God. Among the more than 40 countries on the face of the earth endowed with crude oil, there is none that does not have its refineries. Whereas Venezuela, a country the size of Lagos State in Nigeria and the ninth largest exporter of crude […]