The Gulf of Guinea, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean off west central Africa, reportedly holds as much as 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Washington imports 15 percent of its crude oil from the region and is expected to increase this figure to 25 percent in the next 15 years.

Washington’s military buildup in the region positions it to better compete with other imperialists powers, especially Paris, for Africa’s mineral wealth. At the same time, the penetration of U.S. capital in West Africa is bringing workers and farmers into sharper conflicts with the imperialist oil monopolies.

The UK-based Jane’s Defense Weekly reports that the U.S. government is moving ahead on a proposal for a revived African Coastal Security Program in the Gulf of Guinea and around Africa. The journal indicated that U.S. involvement could include naval vessels, communications equipment and training, as well as a counterterrorism base in the Gulf of Guinea.

Charles Snyder, the U.S. deputy secretary of state for African affairs, said in a speech in April that “the United States has real interests in Africa. We ignore the continent at our own peril. Africa will provide up to 30 percent of U.S. oil in the next 10 years.”

Much of the recent foreign investments in the region are in offshore oil drilling installations along the Gulf. A key objective of the militarization program is to safeguard offshore drilling rigs or other oil operations along the coast run to an increasing degree by the “seven sisters”—the dominant oil companies around the world.

At an earlier meeting at EUCOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, Wald said that U.S. military forces deployed in the region would be similar in mobility as those currently occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. “The areas (in Africa) are large,” he said. “You have to be able to respond fast as intelligence becomes actionable…and that forces us to think of more mobile, smaller, lighter, nimble forces.”

This growing U.S. intervention in Africa includes the “show of force” by a U.S. Navy battle group off the waters of Nigeria, São Tomé, Equatorial Guinea, and other African oil producing countries that began in June. U.S. officials in Lagos, Nigeria, said the military foray is part of “Operation Summer Pulse ’04,” whose aim is to show the world that “even with all of its current responsibilities, [Washington] can still position half-a-dozen aircraft carriers with all the necessary support ships in the four corners of the world, at the same time.”

The U.S. military’s European Command, which covers 93 countries from Russia to Syria, and all of Africa except the continent’s northeast horn, is shifting focus to pay closer attention to Africa and the Gulf of Guinea. Speaking in March on the tasks of the EUCOM in Africa, Wald told Associated Press that “some people compare it to draining a swamp. We need to drain the swamp.” The three nations listed as U.S. “security concerns” in Africa were Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan.

As the U.S. military build-up takes place, labor and other struggles continue in Nigeria. A five-day strike by oil workers at Elf Petroleum Nigeria, a subsidiary of the Paris-based oil monopoly Total, and a fuel price strike affected major cities across the country.

Oil workers at Elf Petroleum Nigeria Limited forced the company to shut down its entire crude oil production in early July in face of their demands for the placement of more Nigerians in technical and other senior level jobs, and “positions and pay comparable” to European and North American employees, according to AP.

Members of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) have also demanded that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation fix and revamp antiquated and abandoned oil refineries and put thousands of the unemployed back to work. Government plans to privatize refineries have also stirred up oil workers.

Oil workers at Mobil Producing Nigeria, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil Corp, threatened to strike if their demands for “improved welfare package, a major review in employee compensation, benefits and a halt to the influx of expatriates” were not met by next month, according to This Day, a Nigerian daily.

In June, a fuel price strike called by Nigeria’s Labor Congress closed banks, schools, and retail stores in major cities throughout the country to protest the sharp rise in gasoline prices after the government cut subsidies to fuel imports. Nigeria, the seventh-largest oil exporter and source of one-fifth of oil shipped to the United States, imports 80 percent of the total finished petroleum products distributed in the country because it has little refining capacity. Gasoline prices increased from 42 naira ($0.30) per gallon to about 55 naira per gallon.

According to CNN, 70 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day.  
 
 
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