PESD releases study of Nigeria's national oil company NNPC
Abstract
Nigeria depends heavily on oil and gas, with hydrocarbon activities providing around 65 percent of total government revenue and 95 percent of export revenues. While Nigeria supplies some LNG to world markets and is starting to export a small amount of gas to Ghana via pipeline, the great majority of the country's hydrocarbon earnings come from oil. In 2008, Nigeria was the 5th largest oil exporter and 10th largest holder of proved oil reserves in the world according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The country's national oil company NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) sits at the nexus between the many interests in Nigeria that seek a stake in the country's oil riches, the government, and the private companies that actually operate the vast majority of oil and gas projects.
Through its many divisions and subsidiaries, NNPC serves as an oil sector regulator, a buyer and seller of oil and petroleum products, a technical operator of hydrocarbon activities on a limited basis, and a service provider to the Nigerian oil sector. With isolated exceptions, NNPC is not very effective at performing its various oil sector jobs. It is neither a competent oil company nor an efficient regulator for the sector. Managers of NNPC's constituent units, lacking the ability to reliably fund themselves, are robbed of business autonomy and the chance to develop capability. There are few incentives for NNPC employees to be entrepreneurial for the company's benefit and many incentives for private action and corruption. It is no accident that NNPC operations are disproportionately concentrated on oil marketing and downstream functions, which offer the best opportunities for private benefit. The few parts of NNPC that actually add value, like engineering design subsidiary NETCO, tend to be removed from large financial flows and the patronage opportunities they bring.
Although NNPC performs poorly as an instrument for maximizing long-term oil revenue for the state, it actually functions well as an instrument of patronage, which helps to explain its durability. Each additional transaction generated by its profuse bureaucracy provides an opportunity for well-connected individuals to profit by being the gatekeepers whose approval must be secured, especially in contracting processes. NNPC's role as distributor of licenses for export of crude oil and import of refined products also helps make it a locus for patronage activities. Corruption, bureaucracy, and non-market pricing regimes for oil sales all reinforce each other in a dysfunctional equilibrium that has proved difficult to dislodge despite repeated efforts at oil sector reform.
Film: "War Photographer"
War Photographer is director Christian Frei's 2001 film that followed photojournalist James Nachtwey.
Natchtwey started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico in
1976 and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance
magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil
strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since
then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and
critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays
in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza,
Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the
Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia,
Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.
The film received an Academy Award Nomination for "Best Documentary Feature" and won twelve International Filmfestivals.
Annenberg Auditorium
Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way
Steve Radelet is Senior Advisor for Development in the Office of the Secretary of State. From 2002 to 2010 he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where his work focused on economic growth, poverty reduction, foreign aid, debt, and trade. He served as an economic advisor to the Government of Liberia from 2005-2009, and was founding co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia from 2000 to 2002. From 1990 to 2000, he was on the faculty of Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and a lecturer on economics and public policy. He is the author of Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way and Challenging Foreign Aid: A Policymaker's Guide to the Millennium Challenge Account, and co-author of Economics of Development, a leading undergraduate textbook. He served as resident advisor to the Ministry of Finance in Indonesia (1991-95) and The Gambia (1986-88), and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Western Samoa.
CISAC Conference Room
Civilians in War Zones
Richard Goldstone served on South Africa's Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court from 1990 to 1994. During the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy, Goldstone headed the Goldstone Commission investigations into political violence in South Africa. He was credited with playing an indispensable role in the transition and became a household name in South Africa, attracting widespread international support and interest. Goldstone's work investigating violence led to him being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. On his return to South Africa he took up a seat on the newly-established Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2009, Goldstone led an independent fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the Gaza War.
James Campbell's research focuses on African American history and the wider history of the black Atlantic. He is particularly interested in the long history of interconnections and exchange between Africa and America, a history that began in the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade and continues into our own time. In recent years, his research has moved in the direction of so-called “public history," the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts, not only in textbooks and academic monographs but also in historic sites, museums, memorials, movies, and political movements.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics. His scholarship focuses on the interplay of law, ethics, and politics in modern society. His current research is concerned with the material and moral preconditions of liberal democracy in America and abroad.
CISAC Conference Room
African Human Rights at the Subregional Level
Hon. Beatrice Kiraso, MPA is Deputy Secretary General in charge of Political Federation of the East African Community, the regional intergovernmental organisation of Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi with its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania. Prior to her appointment in 2006, Hon. Kiraso was a Member of Parliament of the Uganda National Assembly for two terms from 1996-2005. During her tenure, she was Chairperson of the Budget Committee (2001-2005), Chairperson of the Committee on Finance, Planning and Economic Development (1988-2001) and participated in the review of Uganda’s Poverty Eradication Action Plan.
Encina West 208
Second and Third Generation Human Rights in Africa: Ethics of Healthcare Workforce Maldistribution -- Zimbabwe as a Case Study
Building on the foundation of 2009-10 workshop Legalizing Human Rights in Africa, the 2010-11 interdisciplinary research workshop will extend the examination of human rights discourse and institutions in Africa to broader questions around second and third generation rights. The workshop will canvas human rights insights from a broad sweep of disciplinary expertise, such as history, science, engineering anthropology, sociology, philosophy, law and political science. The goal of the workshop is to broaden human rights scholarship beyond single disciplinary domains.
Because the field of second and third generation human rights is broad, we have narrowed the discussion topics to the most urgent ones that are well suited to interdisciplinary analysis by anticipated workshop participants. Initial sessions will lay the foundation for the generational framework of human rights in Africa and the recent progression beyond civil and political rights. The workshop will proceed to discuss a wide range of the most significant and timely second and third generation human rights challenges in Africa.
Encina West 208
Second and Third Generation Human Rights in Africa: Workshop #5
Building on the foundation of 2009-10 workshop Legalizing Human Rights in Africa, the 2010-11 interdisciplinary research workshop will extend the examination of human rights discourse and institutions in Africa to broader questions around second and third generation rights. The workshop will canvas human rights insights from a broad sweep of disciplinary expertise, such as history, science, engineering anthropology, sociology, philosophy, law and political science. The goal of the workshop is to broaden human rights scholarship beyond single disciplinary domains.
Because the field of second and third generation human rights is broad, we have narrowed the discussion topics to the most urgent ones that are well suited to interdisciplinary analysis by anticipated workshop participants. Initial sessions will lay the foundation for the generational framework of human rights in Africa and the recent progression beyond civil and political rights. The workshop will proceed to discuss a wide range of the most significant and timely second and third generation human rights challenges in Africa.
Co-sponsored by the Center on African Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center.
Board Room, Humanities Center
Second and Third Generation Human Rights in Africa: Health equity and AIDS treatment in Africa
Dr. Katzenstein completed his undergraduate and medical degrees as well as a residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship training in Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Diego. He continued fellowship training in virology and Infectious Diseases with Dr. Colin Jordan at U.C. Davis, moving to the University of Minnesota to a faculty position in Infectious Disease in 1984. He was a visiting lecturer for two years in the Departments of Medical Microbiology and Medicine at the University University of Zimbabwe as the AIDS epidemic was first recognized in Southern Africa. In 1987, he returned to the U.S. to take up a senior research fellowship at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the Food and Drug Administration in the Vaccine Branch, evaluating early candidate HIV Vaccines and diagnostics. Dr. Katzenstein returned to California in 1989 to work with Dr. Thomas Merigan and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group. He continues an active collaboration with his colleagues in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa in prevention, perinatal transmission and vaccine research. At Stanford, Dr. Katzenstein participates in studies of multiple drugs and drug combinations in Clinical Trials in the U.S. and Europe and is the principal investigator for Stanford's Virology Service Laboratory in the center for AIDS Research. At Stanford he teaches an undergraduate course in Global AIDS, attends on the Infectious Disease service and supervises both laboratory and clinical fellows conducting AIDS Research. He remains actively involved in studies of HIV infection in Zimbabwe, spending 2-3 months a year in Southern Africa.
Professor Katzenstein's research interests include treatment and evaluation of HIV infection in the United States and Europe through the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). His international HIV pathogenesis work includes studies in Zimbabwe, South Africa. The lab currently is focused on drug resistance, envelope tropism and the pathogenesis of HIV.
Encina West 208