A Fable Of Failure

The endless frustration that has characterized the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone's two licensing rounds entered a new, more intense phase in the first week of May, when most expected the awards to be announced. Following transmittal of the awards document to Nigeria, President Olusegun Obasanjo immediately signed it.

When it was sent to Sao Tome and Principe, however, a huge brouhaha developed that led to three high-level resignations and the firing of a former president's son. The President of Nigeria made a last-minute, desperate bid o save the process in a closed-door meeting with the government and leaders of Sao Tome, all to no avail.

Investors watched gains evaporate, watched officials make fools of themselves - and of journalists - as they predicted the time of awards again and again and were universally proved wrong - and watched themselves turning "slowly, slowly in the wind," hanged men and women powerless to alter the course of events half a world away, and as strange, exotic and unknowable in its political and economic culture as the landscape of Saturn might look to a resident of Earth.

At stake, clearly, are tens of billions of dollars in oil rights in which our own ERHC Energy has earned not only the preferential choices it made in December, but won additional exploration rights granted because we had partnered with financially sound and technically competent major players in the petroleum industry, Noble Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources and Devon Energy.

Our prize, however, like the golden ring that once glistened on a fantasy carousel, has proved just as elusive, and some would say as illusory as well.

The ring is not golden after all, but a tarnished piece of brass. We are invited to step off the carousel and let someone else ride and let them reach out and up with the joyful hope of seizing the precious rights that once belonged to us and seemed as guaranteed as a rainy day in Portland.

But in a triumph of bribery over law, of corruption over right, our company's sole asset has become a thing of loathing.

We are surrounded by giant corporations now charged before the United States Senate with bribing African leaders - among them ExxonMobil, the biggest player of all - who have used the vast power of their financial wealth to destroy us and take for themselves the priceless property we once, by right, had owned.

It has happened countless times in history, as big countries marched right over little ones, as a fiercer army of barbarians rampaged over the sophisticated soldiers of Rome, as the great Mongol hordes ranges across the thousands of miles of Asian landscape and laid waste to all of it. As in history, the larger take, and the smaller fall. Whether by war or bribery or political betrayal, the weak are vanquished and the strong contend.

Every confidence game known to man has precisely the same elements; the bait, and the switch. We lunge for the golden ring, and grab the brass one; we earn rights engraved in treaty stone, and the stone is crushed to sand. Our screams, our anguish, our pain are merely background noice to a century of outrage and lies; we are like static in the soundtrack of an ensemble film. No one hears us, no one cares.

We were small-time gamblers who took a bet and lost it; we played where all are warned not to play; we believed whatever we wanted to hear; we were seduced and betrayed by a promise that has become a prayer, one that is just as likely as our screams to go unheeded.

Yet in the darkest of nights, in the deepest of despair, some small, still light shines. That is God's promise to us. Whether we have lost our life's savings, our children's college tuition, or even our home, we remain only the victims, not the barbarians, not the bribe-payers or bribe-takers, not the corrupt, not the heedless giants who have stolen our wealth. We retain our character, our integrity, our dampened hope for the future, our imaginations and daring, and we soon will bet again. We will hit again.

And one day, one shining day when the blue sky and the bright sun and the singing, joyful birds of the sky bless us all at once, we will seize that golden ring, lift it triumphantly over our heads and cry, "Look! We have done at last what they said we could not do!"

But out in the crowd, they will nudge one another, grin, and point at us. Look, they will say: He's still thinks it is golden.