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Series in the Guardian (U.K.) on the Niger Delta
Shell fights fires as strife flares in delta Return to top
The Niger delta, which provides more than 80% of Nigeria's income, 8% of US oil imports and 22m tons of oil a year to the EU, faces a new crisis as violence flares and resentment builds up against Shell and other western oil companies, which extract oil worth an estimated £94bn a year from below the villages of some of the world's poorest people. The oil companies, rights activists and environmental organisations report a rapidly disintegrating society plagued by summary executions, shootouts, inter-ethnic violence, pollution, riots, occupations of oil facilities and demonstrations. The companies warn that unless the new civilian government acts quickly the industry will be hit hard, and some campaigners warn that chaos in the delta could lead to the break-up of Nigeria. President Olusegun Obasanjo admits that the unfair distribution of oil wealth has led to "grave injustice". He is sending troops to control hotspots, but this is only exacerbating the tension: the armed forces are accused of human rights abuses, extortion and torture. Shell, by far the largest oil operator in the region, says the situation is tense and the company is "firefighting in all directions". "What is happening is alarming," said a senior executive in Port Harcourt, Bobo Brown. "Social disintegration is taking place. "Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni [the author hanged by the military regime in 1996 for
opposing Shell, and his people] served a warning shot to the region and the rest of
Nigeria. They were the tracer bullet ahead of a night of battle which is starting to take
place now and is centred on environmental and human rights. The momentum is
building." Travelling through the delta is a depressing and eerie experience: in devastated communities with next to no work and no access to electricity or hospitals the tension is palpable. Oil spills, due to either sabotage or neglect, are being reported at least twice a week and giant flares light the night sky as oil company helicopters fly overhead. In Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa state, the army patrols the streets as gangs of youths congregate. The scale of the chaos is only now becoming clear. In the past year more than 200 people have been killed in oil-related riots or in largely unreported clashes with the state police and the military. Shell says there have been 50 kidnappings of its workers or contractors in the past six months, and its operations are disrupted at least once a day. In the same period 150 Shell installations, depots and pumping stations have been occupied, closed down or halted, mostly by youth movements demanding aid, compensation for oil spills, or work. Chevron, Mobil, Texaco and Agip are less affected by the civil commotion because they
work mainly off shore, but they all admit there has been an escalation of kidnappings and
disruptions. Much of the trouble centres on the 11m Ijaw, the largest ethnic group in the region. Inspired by the Ogoni, its youth groups are leading a non-violent struggle for the right to share their land's oil wealth. All the oil companies have been banned from operating in Ijaw territories. But several splinter groups have turned to extortion, hijacking, sabotage and kidnapping for private gain. "Many live in the maze of creeks in the delta, armed with everything from guns to machetes and bows and arrows. Others are disaffected university graduates," said Azibaola Robert of the Human and Environmental Rescue Organisation in Port Harcourt. After a lull this year when democracy was restored to Nigeria, the trouble is now spreading to all the minority ethnic groups in the delta. "The Ijaw, Itsekari, Ogba, Ikwerre, Urhobo and Andoni are now all opposed to the oil companies and demanding change," Mr Robert said. "They have had enough of pollution, grinding poverty and promises. They see they have no tomorrow. They are entering a new stage in their struggle for self-determination." Meanwhile the police and the security services, who are working with the oil companies to clamp down on the youth groups, fear that the unrest will continue to grow. A Rivers state police document obtained by the Guardian says the police are preparing for a big conflict. Calling rights activists and environmental and community groups "the enemy", it says the safety of oil workers cannot be guaranteed. State intelligence services, it says, report that Ijaw activists "intend to close down all oil installations and force all expatriate staff to leave and stop work at all flow stations". This is denied by the Ijaw youth council. An army brigade has been placed on red alert, the report says, and more than 2,500 police have been mobilised to join the guards employed by the companies. The oil companies and the campaigners agree that violence is growing rapidly. This week 50 young people from the Egbesu group based in Yenagoa were re ported killed by the security services. "It was genocide," said Isaac Osuoka of the youth council. "Nigerian soldiers are stripping, torturing and harassing innocent people. They have been rounding up people in the streets for identification. Those identified as Ijaw were then driven away in military trucks for summary execution." Human Rights Watch claims that there is some evidence of companies accepting human rights abuses as a cost of doing business in Nigeria. In January four people died when military forces used helicopters and other equipment belonging to Chevron to attack two communities in the western Niger delta after a peaceful occupation of an oil facility. Several thousand people died at Warri last October when fire broke out after a pipeline was ruptured. This summer seven helicopter gunships were moved to the delta and 500 soldiers were sent to one community at the invitation of Mobil after youths seized a helicopter and 14 rifles. Elsewhere Chevron was forced to shut down part of its operation after an occupation. "People eat, breathe and think poverty," said Anyakwee Nsirimovu of the Institute of Human Rights. "There is now a great yearning for self-determination across the delta. People are not ready to lose the momentum. They are willing to the point of dying to continue their struggle. What happens here will determine whether Nigeria continues to exist or not." Next: Shell, the problem or the answer? Return to top Return to top Wednesday September 15, 1999 The Shell flow station at Otuaseya is deserted, the gates open, the pumps and generators that usually send Nigeria's crude oil from remote wells in the delta to a refinery stand idle in the heavy rains. Last month 200 angry people from the village nearby hijacked it, demanding money and work. Shell staff turned the pumps off and fled. We wander in. The machinery is old, the pipes corroded. The empty security office has a list of emergency numbers pinned to the wall: 2347 for the intelligence services, 2175 the military, 2894 the police. But the phone is dead and the electricity disconnected. Enter, in a Shell Landcruiser, Mike Apera, Samuel Peace and Bobby Moses. They are jubilant. "We are from the Elimotu movement of the Ijaw youth," announces Bobby, their leader. "We represent three communities. Last month we came to Shell, demanded three generators for our villages to have electricity, three cars and [about £2,000] for our people. "But they refused, so we took the car and closed the place. So far we hear nothing from them. If they pay us, we will return the station." Samuel (dancing): "Yeah, give us guns, give us money. We take back our land." Bobby: "No, we don't want guns. We are peaceful." Mike: "We boys want employment, we want control of our resources. We are marginalised, our lands are polluted. We have no road, no money, no lights, no work. The oil belongs to us but we see nothing." Finally, the Bayelsa state police arrive with a Shell-paid guard. Both are unconcerned at the fate of the station. "We have no love of Shell," the policeman says. "They take our wealth and give the communities nothing. So why should we protect them?" Return to top Oil wealth buys health in country within a country Return to top Shell's staff clinic has crisp cotton sheets. A company-sponsored hospital 25 miles away has no mattresses. Our two-part series concludes with the tale of two Nigerian health centres John Vidal in Port Harcourt Take two hospitals. The first, at Gokana in Ogoniland, part of Nigeria's oil-rich Niger delta, serves at least 200,000 people. In the past 25 years it has been allowed to fall apart. There are birds' nests in the corridors and green mould grows on the walls. The men's wards have no windows; the kitchen is a one-ring stove and a blackened pot. Gokana hospital has fewer drugs than most people in Britain keep in their bathrooms. It has no electricity and no running or hot water. The beds have no mattresses, there are holes in the roof, the medical records are kept on the floor. Ants crawl everywhere and snakes are often found in the wards. There is no laboratory or diagnostic equipment and operations take place on a Wednesday if the patient can afford the diesel to get an old generator going. There are no anaesthetics, X-ray machines or incubators. A new sterilising machine lies unopened at the entrance but there is no money to pay people to install it, no electricity to power it and no one knows how to use it. Gokana hospital is part of Shell's 1996 "Ogoni Reconciliation" plan, drawn up
after the execution of the author and Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa to combat international
concern at the oil company's environmental and human rights record in the area. It is, the
company says, a symbol of its commitment to the social and economic well-being of local
communities. Shell trumpets that it has built the hospital a water tower, drilled a borehole, taken over responsibility for supplying drugs, and donated an ambulance, and is now topping up the pay of the hospital staff. But the reality is different. The new water tower looks good, but it doesn't work and there is no money to run the generator on which it depends. Besides, say the hospital staff, it would have been far cheaper to restore the old tank, which would have benefited hundreds of people in the nearby village. No one, they say, was consulted and no Shell representative has, to anyone's knowledge, been to Gokana. The donated ambulance is an old pickup truck. The drugs Shell supplies cost more than they would on the open market, the doctor says. He has not been paid for five months. Nor have the nurses, who have no living quarters and must commute up to 30 miles a day. But Gokana, said a man waiting surgery for a hernia, is the "best hospital in the region". Gleaming clinic Its drugs budget is nearly $500,000 a year; there are resuscitation and incubation units and air-conditioned maternity, casualty, emergency and isolation wards. The 40 beds have crisp cotton sheets bearing the Shell logo. There is no illness, says the matron, that the clinic cannot handle. The hospital has four new ambulances and access to helicopters. Consultants from London can be flown in, or patients flown to Europe in one of Shell's new company jets. On the day we visited, seven people were preparing food for 25 in-patients. It is, agrees the matron, who worked for years in the British health service, one of the best hospitals of its kind in the world. "This is another country, a country within a country," said Bobo Brown, Shell's public relations chief in Port Harcourt, as he pointed out the schools, gyms, houses, factories, office blocks and playing fields in the Shell compound. As the situation deteriorated beyond the fence, he said, it got harder than ever to operate. Shell recognised, Mr Brown said, that in many areas in the delta the school system had all but collapsed, the health system was in chaos, people were going without wages, and most communities were in turmoil. But Shell is in a virtual state of siege, the problems coming from all sides and the demands of communities spiralling as the social fabric disintegrates. "The problem is that we are so visible," Mr Brown said. "We are the object of their hopes, we are identified as government. Shell is both part of the problem and the solution. Our presence in their midst is a statement of hope that prosperity is possible. People have nothing to focus on except the present. They have no future." Shell was stepping up its contributions to communities in the region, from $32m last
year to $40m this year, and earmarking more for next year. But it was precisely because it
was investing in the communities that so many people were agitating. How the money is being spent is a cause of deep resentment. Villagers accuse the company of being parsimonious at best, incompetent at development work, neglecting consultation, and paternalistic. In Ogoniland the 10 other health, environment, education and farming projects supported by the company are dismissed by Ledum Mitee, acting president of the Movement of the Survival of Ogoni People, as "ineffective, unnecessary or just PR for the company". "They include re-roofing health centres which do not need new roofs and education awards that are disputable," he said. "There have been protests about some of the roads that Shell says it is building. No one knows anything about help with fertilisers or scholarships and no work has been done cleaning up the oil spills. "They decide what is good for us. They are just wasting resources. We have yet to see the impact of all this spending." One of the problems is that Shell is persona non grata in most communities and its workers fear being seen in the field. Most of its work in the villages is done through chiefs who may never pass the money down to their people, and contractors thought to be corrupt. "Perhaps the money is spent," said an EU-funded westerner working with a Nigerian NGO in Port Harcourt. "Where does it go? It never reaches the grassroots. People never see it. The waste
of resources is phenomenal. It seems to have resulted in corruption. They have wasted
millions of dollars dividing communities by paying some people and turning a blind eye to
what is happening around them." Shell does not deny that the money it pays in compensation or for development can go astray, but it denies that it is deliberately dividing communities or corrupting the economy. Mr Brown said: "Much of what we do can be seen as palliative. But the problem is structural. We need to rebuild the economy of the local communities; transfer economic capital to the communities. "But unless the government joins hands with us the problem will take much longer. We want joint development of a master plan to lift these communities. Everything else will just consign them to dependency." "It would have been better if oil had never come," an Ogoni leader replied "At least then we would not have the pollution, the destitution and the sorrow. "We have been denied everything and in return we have had our lands and sky, rivers and fields polluted. We have been repressed, killed and tortured and now we are told there is no hope for us to develop. Do you wonder why we are angry?" Return to top Spilled crude lays waste to forest John Vidal To reach the Shell oil spill near the village of Otuegwe 1, you must swim through swamp
forest after a five-mile tramp through cassava plantations. You smell it first, the stench
of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation. The flooded land above the oil pipeline is
the site of what may be one of the the worst spills in Hundreds of hectares of forest are dead. Pools of crude oil stretch in every direction. Chief Promise, who has swum with us, is appalled, and angrily rejects Shell's allegation that the spill was the result of sabotage. "People died, hundreds of people were ill," he says. "Nets, fishing pots, huts were lost. This is where we fish and farm. We have lost our forest." The chief says Shell was told of the spill within days but did nothing for six months. It then sent contractors who stopped the leak and employed locals to sponge up some of the mess. Shell says it did not respond immediately because it was not welcome in the affected villages, to which it gave cash and a water purification unit. Return to top
Letters in Response to Guardian Series on Niger Delta from: Shell still has much to do Return to top Saturday September 18, 1999 The old oil-spills remain, despoiling the land and soaking into the rivers and ponds that provide food and drink to the people. Only their fantastic courage, deep faith and inner pride in the battle they have fought sustain the Ogoni people. If no material benefits are forthcoming for the Ogonis, then other Niger Delta communities will draw their own conclusions and may reject the path of non-violence in favour of more radical tactics. The growing tensions in the delta could end in disaster. It does not have to be like that. But to avoid it Shell needs to act speedily. It must make a profound gesture of reconciliation to the Ogoni people by commissioning an independent assessment of Shell's social and environmental impact in Ogoniland and publicly commit to acting on its findings. We also urge them to work closely with Mosop to create sustainable local development programmes that are owned by the Ogoni rather than imposed upon them from outside. Anita and Gordon Roddick The Body Shop Return to top [Letter from Senior corporate adviser, Shell International] Return to top John Vidal makes uncomfortable reading. But we at Shell welcome this kind of report. It brings to wider attention the complex and difficult circumstances under which our Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), has to operate. The wider economic and social difficulties which the people of the Niger Delta face are extremely challenging and will be difficult to solve. It is, of course, not possible for Shell to solve them alone and nor would it be right to try to do so. But we are committed to being a part of the solution. John Vidal has criticised the Gokhana hospital. But this hospital is not typical of the 22 hospitals and health centres which we support in the Niger Delta. Part of the difficulty lies with the fact that Shell staff are still not welcome in Ogoniland, and so SPDC has not been able to look after this particular hospital as well as it would have liked - we are not ashamed to admit this. There are, nevertheless, many other SPDC-sponsored community projects and hospitals which bring great benefit to local people. A recent independent audit of our community development projects confirms that the majority are appreciated - and function effectively. And where they do not, like Gokhana, SPDC remains committed to putting them night. It is not always easy for industrial organisations to be successful in development issues. They simply do not have the expertise. That is why, over the last few years, we have spent much time and effort involving our host communities, development agencies and NGOs in ways to improve our development activity. We have great sympathy with the people of the Niger Delta. More needs to be done in that turbulent region by all of its stakeholders. Emeka Achebe Senior corporate adviser, Shell International Return to top |
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