This month Nigeria celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence from Britain, but it was not a happy occasion...[F]ew locals have yet to gain the basic rights to private property and due process that would have let them benefit from the country's vast oil and gas wealth...Amnesty International estimates that more than nine million barrels of oil have been spilled across the vast delta over the past 50 years, an amount nearly double the oil leaked from BP's recently sealed well in the Gulf of Mexico...[T]he world's fixation on the delta's environmental troubles distracted them from…the root of the problem: terrible governance...While foreign oil companies make easy villains, probably most of Nigeria's oil pollution has been the result of deliberate sabotage. And oil companies' apparent support for Nigerian oppression, for instance their purchases of guns for the police, was simply the result of Abacha's policy that forebade companies from arming private security personnel to protect their pipelines...It's hard to be optimistic that the U.N. report will shed any light on the fundamental problem of Nigerian oil crimes, which is a lack of rights for local people....Instead, the report will likely dwell on the region's environmental disaster, and probably urge better controls of oil pipelines (no doubt by increasing government security, which in turn risks increasing violence against locals) [also refers to National Petroleum Corporation, Shell, Total LNG Nigeria, Eni]