by Jacques LhuillerySun Dec 31, 4:56 PM ET
For Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and one of its richest, 2006 will be a year to remember for the wrong reasons: road accidents, plane crashes, pipeline explosions, blamed by many on a deficient and corrupt government.
Oil is the source of the nation's wealth but it is also at the root of some of its grimmest disasters.
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Among the worst was that earlier this month when the explosion of an oil pipeline in the commercial capital Lagos left at least 284 people dead. In the past eight years a total of some 15 pipeline explosions have killed more than 2,000 people.
Every time, after the nightmare scenes of charred bodies and the official messages of sympathy, the government says those who sabotaged the pipeline got what they deserved.
The political opposition blames the blast on the government and the company owning the pipelines promises an inquiry, which somehow either never gets off the ground or never produces any results.
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After the December 26 explosion a Nigerian oil expert explained on television that many of the country's pipelines are old and in a poor state of repair.
Moreover, he said, they lack protective fencing even though they cross densely populated poor areas, often either at ground level or above the ground when they should be buried deep below the surface.
"It's a national disgrace for this country, one of the world's biggest oil producers," Lagos State governor Bola Tinubu said after the latest blast.
"I have asked, I don't know how many times, that these pipelines no longer be accessible. Nothing was done. We should be more concerned with saving lives and less concerned with making money."
For many Nigerian editorialists the latest explosion was an example of a tragedy of abject poverty in a state sapped by corruption.
A recent official report put the total amount of state money stolen by Nigeria's leaders since independence in 1960 at 384 billion dollars.
"What saddens me about this tragedy is that we will learn nothing from it", the editorialist at This Day wrote 48 hours after the explosion.
"Greed. Inepitude. Mismanagement. Corruption. Those were the factors that combined to lead many Nigerians to their death in the pipelines inferno at Abule Egba on Tuesday. That is why, as unfortunate as it is to say, it will happen again. To our collective shame as a nation," he concluded.
"If we don't take fuel from pipelines it's hunger that we die of," a survivor told reporters minutes after the explosion.
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that three quarters of his fellow countrymen live on less than one dollar a day, President Olusegun Obasanjo, after saying he was "shocked and saddened" by the tragedy, then lectured his people on the virtues of seeking "paid employment rather than resorting to such acts of vandalism".
According to all the indicators, notably those of the United Nations Development Programme, per capita Gross Domestic Product and life expectancy have both declined since 1960, they year Nigeria gained independence from Britain.
And, according to the United Nations Children's Fund resident representative Ayalew Abai, Nigeria ranks among the 15 countries in the world where infant mortality is highest.
Air travel has not been spared the consequences of large-scale negligence and corruption.
Nigeria's erstwhile national carrier went under years ago, the victim of poor management and a series of fatal accidents, leaving the country with a plethora of small companies and their "flying coffins".
In the past 15 years Nigeria has seen no fewer than 40 air crashes that have killed some 1,200 people. The most recent, at the end of October, killed around 100 people, including the Sultan of Sokoto, the country's highest Muslim authority.
"The main problem in the aviation industry is corruption", Obasanjo said in December 2005, announcing emergency measures aimed at stopping the most dubious carriers from flying.
As for the country's roads, they are no safer. In the space of two days in the past week, 23 people died in two crashes, 12 burned alive when a bus hit a car in the south-west of the country and 11 others when a crowded minibus missed a bend on a road in the north.
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