NEO•GRIOT

Correspondent's diary: An oily mess

Jun 25th 2010, 15:59 by The Economist online | BODO

IT IS the wet season in the creeks of the Niger Delta. The air smells of warm rain, wet mud and leaking oil. We are in a rickety motorboat in Ogoniland, a rural Delta district roughly the size of Berlin. The scent of petrol is coming from an oil spill that happened last month. A wasteland of oil-soaked mud banks and dying mangroves has been left in its wake. The waves around us are black.

Locals say last month's leak sprang from a pipeline belonging to Shell, a European energy giant, which gets almost a tenth of its oil from the Delta. The pipe has since been fixed. But little effort seems to have been made to clean even its immediate surrounds.

This is just one of countless oil spills in the Delta, whose creeks contain most of Nigeria’s vast oil and gas reserves, which are the biggest in Africa. The country has seen around 2,400 fresh spills involving foreign energy companies in the last four years alone, according to official data. Some of the mess dates back to the 1970s.

When we dock at Bodo City, a small settlement nearby, men are idle and boats are tied up. Pollution has devastated the fishing industry. “I should be out fishing now but the oil kills everything. I have to row four miles to the next community to find fish,” says Barnabas Teete, a 60-year-old fisherman. The neighbouring village, keen to protect their resources, sometimes only lets him take home one fish a day. Another fisherman, now jobless, collects dead mangrove branches in the hope of selling them.

As BP faces continuing outrage in America over the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental campaigners here are crying double standards. Such activists have long argued that foreign groups in Nigeria, including America’s ExxonMobil and Chevron, fail to maintain old equipment or clean up spills. They feel that one bad spill in the West is getting more attention than half a century of irresponsible oil production in the Delta. “What happens there is on television. What happens here is out of sight,” says Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of the Nigerian branch of Friends of the Earth, an advocacy. 

At another Ogoni village, called K’dere, we find a Shell wellhead that also reportedly ruptured last month. Again, the leak has been stopped but thick yellow puddles and black lakes remain. A farmer shows us anaemic stubs of corn. She says her crops are failing. Hydrocarbons in the soil and drinking water are making the villagers ill, too, apparently causing anything from diarrohea to cancer.

But the Delta’s ravaged landscape tells more than a tale of corporate neglect. In a campaign to secure a greater share of oil revenues and better environmental standards for their communities, local militants have attacked pipelines in recent years. Gangs also break pipes in order to steal oil. Shell, the oldest and largest foreign oil company in Nigeria, says 98% of its spills in the country last year were caused by sabotage. Local officials say such attacks cause around 70% of spills in Rivers state, home to Ogoniland.

In Bodo, we see men ferrying beaten-up barrels of crude. They might be gathering oil from an operational spill. They might have done more. Our guide tells us to look away. Some say the energy companies started this downward spiral by destroying legitimate livelihoods. “People are just using what is at hand to make money,” argues Ledum Mitee, a senior Ogoni activist, though he does not condone such theft. “Bunkering is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.” 

Some days later, I ask Shell why the spills I visited had not been cleared. The company refuses to comment on individual spills. It simply says that clean-ups are often hindered by “access difficulties”. There are indeed many stories of villages that refuse to let in clean-up teams. Some say that residents fear the company will then claim the spill never happened and refuse compensation. Others say such people are trying to secure higher payouts as the spill worsens. The blame game goes on.

Nigerian campaigners hope to put pressure on oil companies for as long as BP's well in America keeps spurting oil. But in the Delta, only their own government can make a difference. Nigeria already has plenty of environmental laws; few are enforced. The state oil company has a stake in all foreign ventures in Nigeria, making it partly responsible for any neglect.

John Odey, Nigeria's environment minister, this month cautioned ExxonMobil over a series of operational offshore spill. But a big shift in policy is yet to be seen. Mr Teete may have to row four miles to catch a fish for some time.