Free Preview of Members-Only Content

The Chadian government has threatened to cut off oil production unless its demands are met. Any danger to the oil, however, would come from the aftermath of a likely government overthrow -- not...

On April 15 the Chadian government announced that unless the World Bank released oil revenues destined for the government the Bank had frozen, or unless the consortium of oil majors developing the country’s Doba oil project supplied the government with cash of equivalent value, N’Djamena would halt production.

As there are a multitude of factors involved in Chad’s current flirtation with failing as a state, it is difficult to know where to begin. Here it goes.

Chad, like many African states, has borders arbitrarily drawn by former colonial powers (France, in this case) who cared little for the geographic and cultural makeup of the region. Sporting more than 200 ethnic groups and even more subgroups, the concept of Chad as a unified entity is idealistic to say the least. As such the country has experienced little more than cycles of instability, beginning with despotic rule, followed by public disaffection with the government, moving to the overthrow of the government from a mix of internal and societal forces, the installation of a “new” government with mediocre popular support, and then that government’s descent back into despotism. The current government of Chadian President Idriss Deby is just past the “disaffection” phase and just before “overthrow.”

Adding to the mix is the fact that, until recently, Chad did not have much of anything of interest to the outside world. Its nearly 9 million people live in perpetual poverty with subsistence agriculture being the “economy’s” mainstay; it is one of the world’s poorest states with a per capita income of about 60 cents a day. The money that does flow into the country largely comes from smuggling — and as one might guess, in a country smushed between Libya, the Central African Republic, Nigeria and Sudan’s rebellious Darfur region, smuggling is a bit of national industry. And just like in Nigeria, smuggling has given rise to massive corruption on a level that only Bangladesh can compete with.

In theory, some of that was supposed to change in 2003 when a consortium made up of ExxonMobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Malaysian state oil firm Petronas opened the country’s first economic project of note: the Doba oil fields. The consortium built a $3.7 billion, 225,000 barrel-per-day pipeline to link the fields in southern Chad to an offshore loading port in the Cameroonian sector of the Gulf of Guinea.