An Opportunity for Wall Street in Nigeria

Wall Street has been getting a lot of slack in the past several weeks in the Occupy Wall Street Protests. Now it's back in the headlines for another profit-making venture that it wants to undertake.

This morning, the New York Times is reporting that Wall Street firms such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase are all trying to get into the Nigerian oil business. That is, these institutions are courting Nigerian government ministers and other officials with the ultimate aim of getting a piece of Nigeria's oil portfolio which could ultimately be worth billions of dollars. If they are successful, the Wall Street firms win because they will get another source of major, long-term profit and Nigeria wins because it gets even more money by investing their oil profits into stocks, bonds, and other global assets.

Well, at least that's how it's supposed to work out.

It's no secret that foreign companies don't exactly have the best interests of the people they work with at heart, especially when they work in the the third-world. Nigeria is no stranger to this. It discovered oil in the southeastern region of the country almost 50 years ago but the Niger Delta region, where most of the oil is located, is still rife with poverty, corruption, violence, and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, Western oil companies such as Shell take most of the profit and share it with their cronies in the Nigerian government to maintain the status quo.


In Nigeria, Wall Street has an opportunity to temper its reputation as being run by greedy lowlife capitalists and actually DO something for the most impoverished in the country. I do understand that these Wall Street firms exist to make profit. That's not going to change. But, does profit always have to mean taking away from someone else? Especially from those who can't afford it?

C'mon Wall Street, you have a chance here. Let's face it. At the very least, you're going to need the good PR for a while to come.