Nigeria - poverty amid plenty

While I heard the stories of relentless destruction I had expected, the level of the ecological impacts and spread of oil infrastructure was still surprising and it seemed that all the news was grim. And while many people will recall the spirited resistance of Saro Wiwa and the mass movement of the Ogoni and other indigenous peoples in the 1990s, the relentless impacts of the oil industry have worn communities down and eroded the ability to resist.

This, in turn, has moulded resistance into new and probably unavoidable directions, as armed militias have started to fill the political space as the long decades of non-violent struggle wanes. The result of this escalation of the conflict is just more grief for the communities. Caught between armed forces they just suffer more, but this time away from the eyes of the world.

The situation in Nigeria is complex and sometimes confusing, but there are things the outside world can and must do. Ultimately it is our companies who are running the operations and our lifestyles demanding the fuels. We do have the power to change what is happening.

Putting Shell back in the spotlight

Shell is certainly not the only player in the Niger Delta; ExxonMobil, Agip, Chevron Texaco, and other transnationals work in joint venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Yet Shell remains the perfect target because they are the largest operator, taking more than 50 per cent of the oil. They have also had the most pressure brought to bear on the question of their operations in the Delta and have worked harder than most to paint themselves as good corporate citizens, meaning they have concerns about how they are viewed by their shareholders and, more broadly, the public.

The situation in the Delta, of course, is not as Shell would have you believe. Operations continue at standards that would not be acceptable in Australia or the UK. A massive network of pipelines and facilities snake down like an enormous river from the north and into the two main ports at the coast.

Poorly kept pipelines constantly rupture and spill, and according to ERA not a single accident has ever been fully cleaned up. The people of the Delta are poor, beyond the imagination of most Australians. They rely on land and river for their food and other necessities of life. They live with such little leeway between having enough and going hungry.

The impacts of the industry are nothing less than devastating. Gas flares burn 24 hours-a-day, year on year, just hundreds of metres from homes. Pipelines that run right through settlements rupture and ruin farmland, kill rivers, and often people as well when they catch fire.

Fuel poverty is endemic, so when a pipeline does rupture, people try and collect the fuel, usually by hand. Almost routinely dozens of people are incinerated when the oil catches fire.

When people resist, the police and army are used: most of the worst massacres in living memory have happened since the death of Owens Wiwa and after the time of the military dictatorship. The worst was in November 1999 at Odi when more than 2,400 people were murdered by the Nigerian army.

The public explanation for the army attack which obliterated the township of Odi was that it had been a response to the murder of seven police officers. But in the words of ERA the attack was “just an excuse by the government of General Obasanjo, in cahoots with Shell and the other oil companies, to summarily resolve the Niger Delta question”.

Local people see massive profits flow from their communities while they suffer ever harder lives and their fields and rivers are destroyed. Resentment is a natural response. The police and army forces are routinely used to protect oil pipelines and other facilities and put down civil disobedience, such as hunger strikes and occupations of company facilities, often in a brutal and arbitary way.

There is an undeniable link between the way the oil industry has expanded through the region and the fact that many people die each year. According to a Shell report, “annual casualties from fighting already place the Niger Delta in the “high intensity conflict” category (of over 1,000 fatalities a year), alongside more known cases, such as Chechnya and Colombia”.