Reading Soiled Palms Michael Peel’s ‘A Swamp Full of Dollars’

In A Swamp Full of Dollars Michael Peel connects the oil pollution rapidly devouring the livelihoods of the Niger Delta indigenes to the monstrosity of corruption spreading its tentacles throughout Nigeria’s systems.

If the Nigerian state were an oil well, Michael Peel provides a bold, deep dive through its crude content in A Swamp Full of Dollars. In the book spanning three parts across nine chapters, Peel set out with two key objectives in mind: first, to present Nigeria as a case study for any group of people hoping for fortune on finding oil; second, to distinguish, by way of trying to understand, the voices of the Niger Delta people, muffled over the years by prolonged violence, from the disorder of that violence itself.

In achieving both objectives, Peel draws from a series of interviews with many of the key players involved in the political economy of oil in the Niger Delta; a region, he explains, ‘whose fundamental problem was not precisely mass poverty, but the marginal richness that oil brings.’