[New post] PHOTOS: Inside Patience Jonathan’s Hotel In Bayelsa

The Aridolf hotel in Yenagoa is an unlikely monument to kitsch on a reclaimed swamp in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger delta. In the lobby, Louis XIV furniture is accompanied by bowls of plastic fruit, faux Dutch landscapes and a grotesquely gaudy chandelier. The hotel is redolent of the riches on display in a region that for half a century has generated the bulk of Nigeria’s wealth.

Only a decade and-a-half ago there was just one petrol pump in Bayelsa state, which produced a quarter of Nigeria’s 2m barrels per day of oil, and Yenagoa, the state capital, was a string of tin-roofed shacks. Resentment at the region’s under-development erupted in violence, with militants blowing up pipelines and kidnapping oil workers.

See photos below: