Breaking News: There's No News Today From Nigeria

Why have the incredible goings-on in Sao Tome and Principe over the nation's oil process been ignored in the Nigerian press?

Sao Tome and Principe President Fradique de Menezes has just removed himself from the chairmanship of the National Petroleum Council to avoid a conflict of interest his critics say has long been in existence; the President's special advisor on petroleum, Patrice Trovoada, himself the son of immediate past president Miguel Trovoada, has been fired by President de Menezes for holding stock in an oil company that bid unsuccessfully for oil blocks in the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone; and the former Foreign Minister and Secretary of State, now a member of the President's cabinet, was forced to resign from the Nigeria-DRSTP Joint Ministerial Council that decided the awards because he was a shareholder and former executive of another oil company, this one a successful bidder, seeking block awards.

Isn't that the kind of toll that made "Saturday Night Massacre" headlines back during Watergate when it happened here?

Yet day after day, the Guardian, ThisDay Online, The Punch, Vanguard, Daily Independent, Sun, Daily Champion, New Age, Financial Standard, Triumph, Daily Trust, Business Day, Observer, Telegraph and Newsday - all dailies with some following - are innocent of even the slightest mention of a governmental crisis that is delaying the delivery of hundreds of millions of dollars to Nigeria.

In Sao Tome, the Portuguese-language Jornal da St. Tome is just as bad, and while Tela Non and Vitrina, the country's main daily press outlets (and also in Portuguese), have each had several stories lately, they went weeks without any at all on events that are likely to shape their nation's future for centuries to come.

While Nigeria's press is known for its ultra-corruptibility, can someone have bought off 15 different newspapers, plus the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)?

When we talked recently with former US Ambassador to Nigeria Howard Jeter, himself now a member of the Board of Directors of ERHC Energy, one of the winning bidders that is awaiting an official awards announcement, Jeter said that the newspapers had to be taken with a grain of salt.

"I don't think you can rely on the newspapers" in Nigeria, he said, to keep you informed. In fact, it is sometimes rather the opposite: you can rely on them to misinform you.

The only real source of news on the powerful collisions of national and private interests that is taking such a toll on Sao Tome's leadership is the Portuguese-language global press agency, Lusa. Oil industry journals like UpstreamOnline suddenly pulled their reporters from the story, and the Dow Jones News Service and Reuters, too, have provided only skimpy coverage of the raging debate.

You can forget the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle and Washington Post, or CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, and whatever it is that used to be the financial news channel on cable; they apparently wish they had never heard of Sao Tome and Principe, which is going to be the lifeblood of their oil supply a few years from now, providing an estimated 25 percent of this nation's oil by 2020.

And that's after the L.A. Times, Houston Chronicle and the premium Dow Jones News Service did huge features on the tiny company, ERHC Energy, that is said to be the front-runner for the block awards with its mid-tier partners, Devon Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources and Noble Energy.

What's the problem? Well, time after time, newspapers and wire services and trade journals have taken the word of Sao Tomean and Nigerian officials that an awards nnouncement would be made "by the end of the month," "by the end of the week," and even "in the next few days." They have gotten burned on those dates, again and again, every single time. It's like a multibillion-dollar Nigerian 419 advance-fee fraud scheme on steroids - except that the underlying treaties, agreements, oil and dollars at stake are very, very real.

In both the first licensing round that was launched in April 2003 and now in the second, launched in November 2004, dates for the awards announcement were repeatedly pushed back, usually without any explanation whatsoever from the governments and officials involved.

Investors who had backed one or more of the 26 oil companies bidding for the Joint Development Zones blocks in the Gulf of Guinea that are rumored to hold between 10 and 14 billion barrels of oil, have seen the value of their shares repeatedly drop 15 percent to 25 percent or more in a day or several days, only to rise once again, as the cycle of news and no-news repeats itself.

These days, they find themselves having to rely on "Updates" offered by investors who have called the Joint Development Authority and relayed the upshot of their conversations with officials to the Raging Bull ERHE message board, where someone usually gets them bounced for spurious "violations" of the Raging Bull terms-of-service agreement, or on my blog, ERHC On The Move, where I try comb the world for news about the block awards and post it with my analysis, often earning myself scatological comments from frustrated - actually, "infuriated" is a better word - investors.

But I started the blog precisely because of the paucity of news, and if I now find myself arguing with readers over my translations from the Portuguese and my sometimes gloomy predictions of more delays, which usually hurt the share price, I've never been wrong when I predicted more delays. But the why and how of at least 15 local newspapers are ignoring the same huge story continues to mystify me.

I have no explanation; I just know it happens.