Yesterday I had the great pleasure of visiting the Petroleum Club of Houston to give a short presentation on the comparative investment environments of Venezuela and Nigeria for the World Affairs Council. It turned out to be a fortuitous day to be talking about the latter country, as the Financial Times just published a very important interview with Nigeria’s President Umaru Yar’Adua (I include some excerpts below). Nigeria has played an important and continuous role in my life ever since my first visit in the 1970s. Having been gratefully taken in by a friend’s family in Lagos, I had never felt like a stranger there. Further, in those difficult years, I witnessed firsthand the immense suffering of the Nigerian people through the paradoxical deprivations brought about by the resource curse, and lack of rights under the tribalist-dominated system. Yet despite my enthusiasm for comparative approaches to seemingly unrelated regions, I have always kept my work experience in Nigeria segregated from my work and experience in Russia, which began around the same time. However in reading this Yar’Adua interview and discussing the difficult polemics of his leadership of a petro-state, I was struck by several resonant similarities experienced in Russia.