4.2 The Environmental Causes of the Niger Delta Conflict
4.2.2 Shell in the Niger Delta: A Symbol of Death
106 In the statement published as a lead up to the 1992 Ogoni Bill of Rights, Leton (1992: 6- 7) successfully confronts the world with the effects of environmental ruin. He states:
Lands, streams and creeks are totally and continually polluted; the atmosphere is forever charged with hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide; many villages experience the infernal quaking of the wrath of gas flares which have been burning 24 hours a day for 33 years; acid rain, oil spillages and blow-outs are common. The results of such unchecked environmental pollution and degradation are that: (i) the Ogoni can no longer farm successfully. Once the food basket of the eastern Niger Delta, the Ogoni now buy food (when they can afford it) (ii) Fish, once a common source of protein, is now rare. Owing to the constant and continual pollution of our streams and creeks, fish can only be caught in deeper and offshore waters for which the Ogoni are not equipped (iii) All wildlife is dead (iv) The ecology is changing fast. The mangrove tree, the aerial roots of which (sic) normally provide a natural and welcome habitat for many a sea food—crabs, periwinkles, mud skippers, cockles, mussels, shrimps and all—is now being gradually replaced by unknown and otherwise useless palms. (v) The health hazards generated by an atmosphere charged with hydrocarbon vapour, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are innumerable (Leton, prelude to the Ogoni Bill of Rights, 1990).
Box 2.
Oil Spills in the Niger Delta
107 the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company‘s dirty wars
against the Ogoni people will also be punished
Complete Statement by Ken Saro-Wiwa to Ogoni Civil Disturbances Tribunal, September 21, 1995.
Shell multinational oil company has been described as a major polluter of the environment on the one hand, and a busy propagator and purveyor of technical fixes for its transgressions on the other (Enzensberger, 1996). It is therefore not always easy to penetrate the elaborate ―environmental friendly‖ façade erected by the company‘s green lobbyists and spin doctors to the ogre that is polluting and despoiling the world‘s fragile ecosystems (Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 63). In the course of exploring for oil in the Niger Delta for over the past fifty years, Shell, contrary to what the propaganda that the company‘s public relations agencies have been feeding the international community, has not only radically altered the ecological equipoise of the Niger Delta, but through negligence has orchestrated a vicious ecological war—―one whose victims are a hapless people and the land on which they have lived and thrived for centuries‖ (Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 64).
Apter (1998: 127) has argued that ―What Shell brought to Ogoniland was not profit but pollution, contaminating the mangrove swamps and farmland with seepage and spills while fouling the air with black smoke and lethal gases from flare-offs that burned day and night.‖ Growing discontent erupted in July 1970, when a blow-out in one of Shell‘s oil fields wreaked havoc on the surrounding villages. An entire village ecosystem was destroyed, prompting petitions to the military governor and protests against Shell-BP‘s
‗I-do-not-care‘ attitude. One such letter from an Ogoni school teacher likens the horrors of the blow-out to the violence of the Biafran War:
We in Dere today are facing a situation which can only be compared with our experiences during the civil war... an ocean of crude oil has emerged, moving swiftly like a great river in flood, successfully swallowing up anything that comes on its way. These include cassava farms, yams, palms, streams, animals, etc.
for miles on end. There is no pipeborne water and yet the stream, the only source of drinking water, is coated with oil. You cannot collect a bucket of rain water for the roofs, trees and grass are all covered with oil. Anything spread outside in the neighbourhood is soaked with oil as the wind carries the oil miles away from the scene of the incident... Thrice during the Civil war the flow station was bombed setting the whole place on fire... Now a worse fire is blazing not quite a quarter of a mile from the village... men and women forced by hunger
‗steal‘ occasionally into the ‗ocean‘ [of oil], some have to dive deep in oil to uproot already rotten yams and cassava. I am not a scientist to analyze what effects the breathing of dangerous gases the crude oil contains would have on the people, but suffice it to say that the air is polluted and smells only of crude oil. We are thus faced with a situation where we have no food to eat, no water to drink, no homes to live and worst of it all, no air to breathe. We now live in what
108 Hobbes may describe as a STATE OF NATURE—a state where peace or
security does not exist ‗...and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short‘ (Reprinted in Saro-Wiwa, 1992: 58-59).
A disheartening account of the ecological war waged by Shell in the Delta is told by Kings, Chiefs and Community leaders of the Niger Delta during the report submitted to the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Environment and Development at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992:
Apart from air pollution from the oil industry‘s emissions and flares day and night, producing poisonous gases that are silently and systematically wiping out vulnerable airborne biota and otherwise endangering the life of plants, game, and man himself, we have widespread water pollution and soil and land pollution that respectively result in the death of most aquatic eggs and juvenile stages of life of finfish and shellfish and sensible animals (like oysters) on the one hand, whilst, on the other hand, agricultural lands contaminated with oil spills become dangerous for farming, even where they continue to produce any significant yields (quoted in Idoniboye-Obu, 1992: 59).
It is instructive to note that long before Shell‘s activities in the Niger Delta made international headlines, officials of the Inspectorate Division of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company had raised an alarm over what the oil exploration activities of Shell and the other foreign oil companies were doing to the delta environment. According to one NNPC report:
We witnessed the slow poisoning of the waters of this country and the destruction of vegetation and agricultural land by oil spills which occur during petroleum operations. But since the inception of the oil industry in Nigeria more than twenty-five years ago, there has been no concerned and effective effort on the part of the government, let alone the oil operators, to control the environmental problems associated with the industry (quoted in Okonta and Douglas, 2003: 64).
Seventeen years after this report was made little has changed. If anything, the spate of environmental pollution in the region has continued unabated. In fact, the oil exploration and exploitation of Shell has intensified, pushing up its production target to one million barrels of crude oil a day.56 In the process of extracting the oil, adequate consideration is not given to the over seven million people who live in the area, and the impact of the company‘s operations on their environment and their way of life. In fact, since Shell set up its first oil rig in Oloibiri in 1958, not a single satisfactory Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been conducted and made public in the Niger Delta before operations commence, to determine what potential harmful effects such activities are likely to have on the area and how to circumvent or at best minimize them (Okonta and
56 See, http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/seminars/papers/y673_spring_2003_pegg.pdf.
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.