This years Vancouver International Film Festival showed a documentary about the journey of Ghana becoming an oil-producing nation: BIG MEN directed by Rachel Boynton. I was highly interested due to the fact that I was living in Ghana when the drill for oil started. How would this film portray the situation?
The film introduces Kosmos Energy, a Texan oil company that discovered the oil reservoirs and initiated the “oil mission”. The film does a good job on portraying the complexity of interests: investors in USA who want to see profit, Kosmos Energy being overwhelmed as a small company , other oil companies gaining interest causing increasing competition and pressure, Ghanaian officials and government debating on the concept of neocolonialism and the benefit for the Ghanaian people, environmental organizations emphasizing on risks and many other aspects. The film also touches on how a country’s sovereignty may be undermined by corporate interests. Further on it documents some of the consequences of the oil business in Nigeria that has not fulfilled the promise of general prosperity, but even worse sparked uprising by armed militia. One may draw possible parallels. Alliances and collaborations are made and former friends betrayed in quick succession all for flowing black gold – who is benefiting?
The documentary is more like a thriller with a bitter, bitter aftertaste..
I recommend this film to anybody interested in the extraction of finite resources, and neo-colonialism – a term that was significantly influenced by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of the independent Ghana and a strong panafricanist enforcing the liberation of Africa. Ironically, the commercial oil field just off the coast of Ghana is called Jubilee Field and the vessel’s name that transports the oil is Kwame Nkrumah…
Visit : http://www.bigmenthemovie.com/
A quote from the introduction of Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah:
“The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed.”