4.2 The Environmental Causes of the Niger Delta Conflict
4.2.3 The Net Effect of Shell‘s Activities in the Niger Delta
109 Douglas, 2003: 65).57 All available evidence seems to lend evidence to the fact that Shell‘s destruction of the Niger Delta is informed by a cavalier attitude to the welfare of the local people (Greenpeace Nederland, November 10, 1996). Why else would the same company go to great lengths to conduct rigorous and extensive EIAs for its operations in Europe and North America and refuse to replicate the same in the Niger Delta?
Consider with me, for a moment, the following report on seventeen different EIAs that Shell conducted for a pipeline project in Scotland before a single hole was dug:
A painstakingly detailed Environmental Impact Assessment covered every meter of the route, and each hedge, wall, and fence was catalogued and ultimately replaced or rebuilt exactly as it had been before Shell arrived. Elaborate measures were taken to avoid lasting disfiguration, and the route was diverted in several places to accommodate environmental concerns (Shell International, 1992: 5, quoted in Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 66).
Clearly, what is good for the people of Scotland is not considered good for the communities of the Niger Delta, from whose land Shell has extracted billions of dollars‘
worth of oil since 1958. This is a prime example of double-standards in Shell‘s operations.
110 otherwise discrete ecosystem to further degradation by hunters and loggers (Moffat and Linden, 1995: 531).
According to World Bank estimates, ―oil companies in Rivers and Delta states spill about 9 000 cubic feet of oil in three hundred major accidents annually. On its part, Shell says it spilled an average of 7, 350 barrels of oil a year between 1989 and 1994, and that a total of 221 spills occurred in the course of its operations during the period‖
(Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 66). However, as Greenpeace (1996: 24) has noted, these figures excludes the large number of supposedly ―minor‖ spills that takes place every day (but) which Shell usually did not take into account when making its estimation.
Quite aside, the light nature of Nigeria‘s crude, coupled with its ability to evaporate quickly, makes it intractable to assess the precise volume and spread of spills when they occur. The World Bank therefore argues that actual annual figures of oil spills in the Niger Delta are actually about ten times the officially released estimates (Moffat and Linden, 1995: 592; Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 66).
Now, the oil spills occur because the bulk of Shell‘s pipelines through which the oil leaks are rusty, obsolete, and poorly maintained. The truth of the matter is that some Shell pipelines and sundry installations in the Niger Delta have not been replaced since they were emplaced in the 1960s (Moffat and Linden, 1995: 592). The result has been an increase in the rate and volume of oil spills as Shell accelerates production activities, subjecting old and decrepit pipelines to pressure they are no longer able to handle.
They crack and buckle, spewing oil into the surroundings. The testimonies of Van Dessel, Shell Nigeria‘s former head of environmental studies, best sums up this ecological apocalypse: ―Wherever I went, I could see… that Shell‘s installations were not working cleanly. They didn‘t satisfy their own standards, and they didn‘t satisfy international standards. Every Shell terrain I saw was polluted, every terminal I saw was contaminated‖ (quoted in Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 67). Van Dessel was so outraged at Shell‘s official indifference to this shocking scenario that he submitted his resignation letter in December 1994, two years after he took up his post.
It is instructive to note that oil pollution clean-ups in the Niger Delta is frequently both slow and inadequate. By way of illustration, ―at Ogbodo, where a massive oil spill occurred in 2001, clean-up of the site was delayed for months, and even then was inadequate‖ (Amnesty International, 2009: 20). Similarly, ―the oil spill at Bodo was not stopped for more than two months. Eight months after the spill, no proper clean-up had been completed.... Fisheries have been devastated and the long-term impacts are probably incalculable‖ (Amnesty International, 2009: 20). Quite aside, the slowness or imperviousness on the part of the Nigerian government to ―contain, cleanup and remediate oil spills‖ can heighten the danger of fires breaking out and causing damage
111 to life and property (Amnesty International, 2009: 20). Perhaps, the worst incident (on record) of fire outbreak is the Jesse explosion and fire of 1998 which claimed roughly 1,000 lives (Amnesty International, 2009: 20).
Unenviably, Nigeria notoriously leads the world (including all OPEC countries) in flaring gas brought up with oil in the drilling and extraction process. As previously noted, ―the World Bank estimates, 87 per cent of all associated gas is flared into the Niger Delta atmosphere by oil companies operating in Nigeria, vis-à-vis 21 per cent in Libya and 0.6 per cent in the United States‖ (Greenpeace Nederland, 1994: 26). Shell officials claimed that the company flared an average 40 billion square feet of gas every year between 1991 and 1994, and according to these figures, the World Bank has estimated that 80 billion cubic feet of gas is flared in the Niger Delta yearly (Greenpeace Nederland, 1992: 27, quoted in Okonta and Douglas, 2003). According to Geoffrey Lean, the leading British environmental journalist, Shell‘s operation in Nigeria makes the company one of the biggest contributors to global warming. The company‘s gas flaring installations are like its pipelines—old, poorly constructed, and in some-cases ill- maintained—and as a result they emit ―far more pollution than Britain‘s twenty million homes combined‖ (Lean, 1995).58 Strikingly, the percentage of gas flared in the Netherlands, where Royal Dutch Shell has its international headquarters, is zero (Greenpeace Nederland, 1992: 27).
In response to entreaties from concerned Nigerian scientists and conservationists, the World Wide Fund of Nature (WWF) have lobbied Shell for eight years to clean up its operations in Nigeria and ensure that the amount of gas flared in the course of its operations is substantially reduced. However, Shell consistently rebuffed these pleas.
Faced with this obduracy, the WWF went public in December 1995, denouncing Shell‘s operations in the Niger Delta. Quite aside, the process by which crude oil is found and put to commercial use undergoes several stages, each of them a lethal blow to the Niger Delta environment (Amnesty International, 2009). The following Ogoni song, composed in 1970, sums up the Niger Delta community‘s experience with Shell:
The flames of Shell are flames of hell We bask below their light
Nought for us serve the blight
Of cursed neglect and cursed Shell (quoted in Saro-Wiwa, 1995: 79)
58According to Geoffrey Lean, quoting figures supplied by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
―Annually the flares emit 34 million tons of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, while the oil fields went about 12 million tons of methane, which has even more potent effect,‖ (Lean, 1995).
112 Having examined the environmental proximate causes of the Niger Delta crises, our attention now shifts to the social-security proximate causes of the crises. In addition to exploring the phenomenon of small arms proliferation, and the associated human security threat, the next section discusses the responses of the oil bearing communities to the failure of state and corporate responses to address the state of uneasy stasis in their oil-rich region.