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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

These middle eastern countries may be scum, but I have some admiration for them. At least, they achieved something with their oil resources and built wealth, unlike let's say, Venezuela and my country Nigeria that are so rich in resources yet poor in money, intellect and morals.

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My understanding is that foreign oil companies make the vast amount of the profits and that most Nigerians don't much of any of the bounty.

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-nigeria-oil.html

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Nigerian-Oil-Swin...

This is different in many middle eastern companies where the state is the oil company or is in firm control.

We have a state-owned oil company called the Nigerian National Petroleum Commission (NNPC), but it is led by corrupt dunces that have no clue of what they're doing, so they've missed out on the recent oil boom that would have brought a lot of foreign exchange and strengthened our economy.

Picture this; we are Africa's largest oil exporter but have no local refinery. In other words, we get foreign exchange for selling oil then turn back and use those dollars to acquire end products instead of manufacturing those products by ourselves. We are corrupt and useless just like every other African country.

I agree with you to some extent concerning Nigeria. But Nigeria oil reserve and output is not in the same league as Saudi. This is very fundamental. Another one is population. Nigeria is 9 times more populated than Saudi.

and unlike Saudi which is a Sunni monarchy with classes while Nigeria is a very large heterogeneous country with many groups

Nigeria has 200 million people and only a fraction of the oil industry of Saudi Arabia.

Qatar and UAE have vastly different demographics.

Venezuela is so useless. Won’t even allow the US to coup them.

How is that 'useless'?

I suspect the poster saying "useless" meant to be ironic.

I suspected that but I needed to be sure.

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