A certain poet once said that if you were alive and young during the French Revolution of 1789, the feeling you got was a feeling akin to having gone straight to heaven without the trouble of having to die first. There was also a revolution in the Niger Delta in the early 1990s and that kind of French enthusiasm would have been our lot if things did not go as awry as they went eventually.
But a few months after the execution of Saro-Wiwa, Shell began to make overtures to the Ogoni with ‘A Plan of Action for Ogoni’. Shell offered to clean up all the oil spills in the Niger Delta and rehabilitate some of its community projects. But they had to abandon all such plans when a former Shell head of environmental studies, Bopp Van Dessel, revealed that Shell was not really interested in the so-called clean-up.
“They were not meeting their own standards. They were not meeting international standards. Any Shell site that I saw was polluted. Any terminal that I saw was polluted. It is clear to me that Shell was devastating the area,” Dessel said to a TV programme, World in Action, in the 90s. It became clear that the supposed ‘A Plan of Action for Ogoni’ was just a ruse and a diversionary tactic by Shell to rev its engine and go right ahead with its plan of a $3.8 billion liquid natural gas project in Nigeria.
So, if after 20 years after a broken revolution somebody suddenly wakes up without a thorough plan of what the proposed Ogoni Clean-up plan is all about, and I am not joining the bandwagon at the market square to cheer and clap, you may have to forgive me. Instead of being giddy, I am curious: why is it that the federal government is taking responsibility for the clean-up when Shell had in the past made an offer to clean up the polluted lands in the Niger Delta? What happened all these years to the ‘A Plan of Action for Ogoni’ by Shell in 1996 to clean up Ogoniland? Why are ‘stakeholders’ – the United Nations, states affected by the oil spills in the Niger Delta – involved in the contribution of N2 billion to the clean-up trust fund where Shell and other oil companies can foot the bill?
In 2010, an explosion took place off the coast of Mexico on an oil rig. It was known then as the worst environmental disaster in United States history. After the explosion took 11 lives, 4.2 million barrels of oil, together with a dangerous gas known as methane flowed fast and furious one mile below the surface of the sea for 87 days. Environmentalists told the world that the effect of that spill would last for generations and generations and that it would take only five years for the effect of that oil exploration disaster to begin to manifest. Five years after the explosion on that rig, Shell has spent over $26 billion cleaning up the areas directly affected. Shell has also spent some good money paying compensation to shrimp farmers whose source of livelihood that spill affected.
So why not ask Shell and the oil companies operating in the Niger Delta, and whose activities have messed up the rivers and farmlands, to take significant responsibility for the mess in the Niger Delta the way Shell BP did on the Gulf? Environmentalists like Phillippe Cousteau who have visited the scene of that oil spill say that they are amazed that all the predicted gloom and doom has not happened yet. Aquatic life has bounced back to life, and the population of sea life decimated by that disaster has maintained a regular growth rate. Despite this cheery bit of news, environmentalists are sceptical of assurances by Shell, and rightly so, that the 4.2 million barrels of oil has dispersed into the body of the sea and therefore no longer constitutes a hazard to marine life. In icy waters of the nature of the Gulf, oil will not disperse but agglutinate and seep into the ocean bed. And if the oil from that explosion has indeed seeped into the ocean bed the way oil seeps into the farms and rivers in the Niger Delta all these years, then God help us all.
Therefore, the Gulf Oil Spill and the mode of its clean-up became a metaphor for what should have happened in Ogoni. And rather than get giddy with excitement that at last something is going to be done to Ogoni land soon, we like to point out that damage already done after more than 30 years of oil seeping into rivers, lakes and farmlands will take more than a contribution of N2 billion each from ‘stakeholders’ to redress.
In 2012, after the Niger Delta was sacked by floods, a study carried by the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice (ANEEJ), and supported by the Norwegian government titled ‘Natural Disaster Management Strategies in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria’, recommended that the first thing to do is a declaration of Ogoni land as an ecological disaster zone. The report, published in 2013, also asked government to commission an assessment of the entire Niger Delta environment and indeed of areas affected with issues of desertification and erosion. According to the authors of the report, “Shell should be ordered to urgently dismantle whatever remains of their facilities in Ogoni land along with toxic wastes they dumped in the territory…”
These are valid recommendations, but in the light of the incident of 2010 in the Gulf, together with the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) warning to residents living around coastal cities in the Niger Delta to leave, it wouldn’t be out of place for our government to put strong pressure on Shell, the oil companies and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to begin to look at how to permanently solve lingering issues of flooding, degradation and pollution in the Niger Delta. Unless we do that, we may as well just find out that the motive behind this sudden interest in cleaning up Ogoniland is no different from the ‘Ogoni Plan of Action’ embarked upon by Shell in 1996.
• Etemiku is Communications Manager with ANEEJ.