The oil companies worked at all hours, filling and floating barrels of oil to overseas markets that decided what they were worth: fifty dollars today, a hundred tomorrow, and the whole of Nigeria's fortunes rose and fell on what foreigners would pay for her sweet crude.
-- Narrator (chapter 1)

Importance: Chike can smell an oil company drilling near the army base, and the narrator notes that the stability of the Nigerian economy is extremely precarious, based as it is on the fluctuating price of oil. This is a key detail, as it establishes the fact that most of the money changing hands in the country is related to oil, and the reader later learns that the first lady is taking bribes from those who want a stake in the drilling while millions of Nigerians live in poverty, like the people Chike and the others encounter in Lagos under the bridge.

The article on the...
-- Ahmed (chapter 10)