Dog Days Come Early For ERHE

I'm just back from five long days in a small town in upstate New York, many of them spent with my brother in the hospital. I prayed the Rosary four or five times at his bedside and was able to talk with him and tell him how much he has meant to me and how much I love him. If the end comes soon for him, I know he will be in the company of angels.

The bright side of the trip was that it spared me the deadly boredom of watching ERHC Energy go nowhere, even though we enjoyed a momentary rally to $0.47 the other day and are now at the comfortable and familiar resistance bottom of $0.41.

The biggest surprise today was the volume, with more than 1.6 million shares trading as the price of oil faltered and yet another hurricane, this one dubbed Emily, formed in the Atlantic and headed towards the Caribbean. An oil rig called Thunder Horse fell partly into the Gulf during Hurrican Dennis, but its owners say the timing was just coincidence.

On the news front, I spotted an article in Nigeria Focus, the journal of Menas Associates, a publication which seems to me to be awfully expensive ($9,000 a year) for something that is so often wrong about ERHC Energy and so often out of date. The article is entitled "New Difficulties In The JDZ," and while I have no idea what that title regferences, it's likely to be of interest to ERHC investors.

Speculating, then, I guess that ther article concerns the realignment of the Block 3 partners, where Devon has dropped out and Pioneer and ERHE have stepped forward to
assume their acreage.

This must be distressing to the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Authority, which distressed all of us with its unconscionable delays and lack of communication. Personally, I am not inclined to believe much of the old news I read in the Menas Associates newsletter, but I imagine the changes have required some heavy head-scratching among the Nigerians and Sao Tomean figures who are hoping to profit from exploration in the Gulf of Guinea.

Whatever their misgivings, however, it is critical that they not derail their little ship of fuels as it steers towards exploration early next year. The one thing - the only thing - that will truly and instantly erase all the doubts large and small players alike have had about the JDA will be discovery of ubstantial deposits in any of the recently offered blocks. If and when that happens, they will be as rich as they can ever hope to be.
But they are a thieving, fractious, corrupt and violent bunch, so their capacity to unmake themselves rich is not to be underestimated.

For every thoughtful, profoundly gifted strategist like President Olusegun Obasanjo and Sir Emeka Offor, there are dozens of lesser lights whose lesser decision-making abilities will cause them untold suffering if together they undo the solid results of the second round. If politics and oil do mix - they certainly don't form a suspension in any glass I've seen - both are likely to be the poorer for it.

With no new coverage from UpstreamOnline of the supposed buyout offer - and I do think one will come - we await the filing of the quarterly 8-K with keen interest in seeing how many shares each of the present officers now controls. That will go to the issue of whether, as I've contended, our officers were forced to sell shares to pay addional, unexpected signature bonus fees.

Beyond that, I am not expecting much in the way of news or excitement but, of course, with ERHE, that's when it usually arives. Let's just hope the dog days of August are not as uneventful as the past month, though; by then, we should be moving once again, heat and hurricanes and all.