Let them eat oil

Christian Century, March 22, 2003 by Paul Jeffrey

Payments made by oil companies to governments in most of the world are public knowledge. Yet Angola has included confidentiality clauses in most oil contracts, and the companies know they'll pay a price if they break the contracts by going public. When British Petroleum suggested it might voluntarily do so early last year, dos Santos told the company it would lose its Angolan investments. Angola's current seat on the UN Security Council makes it less likely that Washington and London, who are looking for votes and dependable fuel sources, will pressure Luanda to clean up its house.

So it's up to people in the rest of the world to press the oil companies, and the banks that finance the deals, into revealing what they're paying. In the U.S. that money is included in oil company financial reports required by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it's lumped collectively under "Rest of World." The SEC has the power, if it were pushed to do so by church leaders and rights activists, to order the companies to break out Angola from the pack.

Economic pressure from Europe and North America helped end the war in Angola. A campaign against conflict diamonds, those diamonds mined in rebel-held areas, helped cut into Savimbi's funding and made him vulnerable to the Angolan military's final campaign. Many churches joined the worldwide diamond boycott. Now it's time to turn the same moral pressure on the oil companies and their banking partners, both in Angola and in other resource-rich countries where wealthy elites skim off the profits and leave their people to starve.

In the United Kingdom, church groups like Christian Aid and the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development have joined with Global Witness to pressure their government to compel companies to make known what they pay. A similar effort is needed in the United States and Canada. Otherwise, wholesale state robbery will persist unabated in Angola, and we'll continue passing the plate to pay for feeding the victims.

Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America.