1Africa, oil and poverty. Michael Watts is a geographer who has spent most of his professional life working in Africa. He has written and edited 15 books, and has published widely on African development, social movements and oil over the past three decades. Oil has brought poverty, violence and ecological disaster, especially in the Niger Delta, in Nigeria.
2Michael Bendall is a law and commerce student at the University of Canterbury, president of Te Putairiki: M?ori Law Students' Association at the University of Canterbury School of Law, and the M?ori liaison officer at Community Law Canterbury. He has just returned from London, where he represented New Zealand at the Fourth Commonwealth Youth Parliament.