A persistent cloud of toxic exhaust emitted by buses and trucks burns your eyes and throat.

Though potable water for everyone is a supposed goal of the government, taps flow beige and reek of rotten eggs.

Electricity in Nigeria`s petroleum capital is unreliable at best, forcing businesses and homeowners who can afford them to switch on gas-powered generators that further blacken the city`s already toxic air.

Port Harcourt is an environmental disaster on par with the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, both plagued by chronic pollution and sanitation dilemmas that can turn even the strongest of stomachs.

Yet this city at the heart of the West African nation`s oil-rich Niger Delta is awash with money -- billions of dollars every year to be exact. Over the past 30 years or so, Nigeria has made more than $300 billion from the delta`s bounty of crude, though there are few visible signs that any of it has gone toward improving the plight of the city and region`s poor.

Although more than 70 percent of Nigerians make less than a dollar a day, earning them the earmark of 'severely impoverished' by U.N. standards, a sliver of Port Harcourt residents enjoy affluence on par with the American upper-class dream.

Multimillion-dollar mansions replete with private security and gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles in the driveway cast shadows on tin-roof shacks without running water. The divide between Nigeria`s haves and have-nots is so staggeringly apparent you can`t help but wonder how it came to be.

Armed with even the most basic knowledge about political corruption in Nigeria, the answer is simple: Government graft is the name of the game here, particularly in the Niger Delta, where petrodollars practically flow straight from foreign oil companies to the pockets of elected officials.

Though President Olusegun Obasanjo spent the past eight years promising a crackdown on corrupt politicians in the delta and elsewhere, there is little evidence of any real effort. The governor of Rivers State, home to Port Harcourt, is Peter Odili, considered by many here to be the worst perpetrator of theft from federal coffers despite hailing from Obasanjo`s ruling People`s Democratic Party.

The governor`s estate is a compound rivaling in size the White House lawn. Its two-story walls block from view the grim reality of life for poor working-class residents of the delta, whose fishing waters and farmland have been fouled by oil spills.

Loss of income and persistent joblessness in the delta help give rise to armed militant, criminal and even cult groups that attack oil installations and kidnap foreign oil workers, curtailing production by up to 25 percent.

The gunmen`s anger was born of their frustration with elected officials too greedy to spread the oil wealth by building adequate schools, hospitals, housing and infrastructure in Rivers State.

'There is visible evidence of corruption everywhere,' Muhammadu Buhari, a former military regime leader and presidential candidate, told United Press International in an interview ahead of elections scheduled for later this month.

Buhari and others blame Obasanjo allies like Odili for arming the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and other militant groups in order to intimidate political opponents. But that tactic, he says, has backfired against the administration now that the militants have apparently turned against their former benefactors.

According to one militant leader who spoke to UPI, the forces that once allegedly did the bidding of corrupt officials have now turned on their benefactors and are prepared to do whatever it takes to right some wrongs in the delta, even if it means dying in the process.

'If we all have to die, then we are prepared to die,' said the tall, burly militant leader known as Commander Akoko. 'It`s better to die trying to change things than leave them as they are.'

In a one-on-one interview, Akoko told UPI that thousands of militants from a half-dozen groups are intent on continuing their struggle in the region until conditions in the delta have improved. Armed with the latest weaponry like shoulder grenade launchers and assault rifles, the militants have taken on the Nigerian military and killed a number of soldiers in battles waged along the dizzying maze of backwater creeks they call home.

So in addition to being an environmental disaster where corruption goes unchecked, the Niger Delta is also quickly becoming a war zone, where escalating violence means more suffering for Nigerians caught in the middle and an inevitable price increase at gas pumps worldwide.

There`s an old saying that oil and gas deposits in developing countries are considered a 'resource curse.' If that`s the case, then the petroleum industry in the Niger Delta is a plague of biblical proportions.