03/06/2010

 Michael Peel is the Financial Times legal correspondent, covering among other things corporate corruption and other aspects of financial crime; he is also a traveller. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, he won a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust travelling scholarship in 2000, visiting Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and Eastern India. He was based in Lagos as the FT West African correspondent 2002-2005, and has returned there many times since. He is a former associate of Chatham House, for whom he has written reports on the crisis in Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta and on Nigeria-related crime and its links with Britain.

In his book, Michael sets out the relationship between Africa's most populous nation and the oil that supplies western cities. Since independence in 1960, he contends, the country has been compromised and modern Nigeria is synonymous with dysfunction. It is one of the world's most oil rich countries (no coincidence that Hillary Clinton visited Nigeria and Angola on her trip to Africa last year), but suffers occasional petrol shortages; it enjoys billions in oil revenues, but roughly 70% of its people live below the poverty line. He explores the oil economy's global ties between the affluent West and Nigeria's most downtrodden, and suggests that the problems may not remain as distant as they now seem. The West and the new fast-moving economies, such as China and India, view Nigeria's resources as an important hedge against the political uncertainties of the Middle East. His message is that Britain and the US have been the main beneficiaries up to the present, but the struggle of Nigeria's people to develop  must now be recognised.

A Swamp Full of Dollars was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. It does not compromise on illustrating the dark side of the global oil economy, and the unseen consequences of reckless resource extraction.

Michael's talk was interesting, informative and gave us all something to think about.

Further information about the author is available on his website, please click on this link: http://www.michaelpeel.co.uk/