Africa Fund (New York)
Michael Fleshman
17 June 1999
New York — In 1999, journalist and researcher Mike Fleshman, then the Human Rights Coordinator for The Africa Fund in New York, traveled to the Niger Delta oil fields in southern Nigeria to witness, at first hand, the impact of the petroleum industry on local communities and the environment. This personal account is an excerpt from Fleshman's report, published by The Africa Fund in June 1999. The full report can be found at http://africafund.prairienet.org/nigeria2.html
I had an opportunity to see the human and environmental consequences of oil production in the Niger Delta in June 1999 when I visited the site of a Shell oil spill with the director of the Niger Delta Human and Environmental Rescue Organization (ND-HERO), Azibaola Robert. The spill, in the Otuegwe 1 community, is in remote and difficult terrain and the visit itself was one of the remarkable experiences of my life.
We left Port Harcourt, in neighbouring Rivers State, early in the morning of Saturday June 12- the sixth anniversary of the election won by Moshood Abiola and then annulled by the military government - for the two hour drive to the Bayelsa State capital,Yenagoa.
Although Bayelsa had been quiet since the protests and repression that took dozens of lives in December 1998 and January 1999, the security presence was heavy and aggressive. At one point our vehicles were stopped by a truckload of heavily-armed Mobile Police - the feared "Kill and Go" unit responsible for many human rights abuses during the Abacha dictatorship.
After 20 minutes of arguing we were allowed to proceed to our destination, a small landing on a tributary of the river. With a rather nervous eye on the machine gun emplacement guarding approaches to the landing, and after yet another argument with a suspicious immigration officer, we boarded a small motor-boat for a half-hour journey upriver to the village of Otuegwe 1.
Like so many other Ijaw villages in this riverine portion of the Delta, Otuegwe 1 is without running water or electricity, paved roads, or a school or clinic. The community's 1,500 members depend on the marshy forest for livelihood and drinking water - fishing for mudfish and snails, tapping raffia palms and harvesting renewal foodstuffs from the forests. The army of ragged children with distended bellies that met our boat at the river's edge was sad evidence that life in Otuegwe 1 is hard. We were soon to see why.
After an hour of discussions with the chief and village elders we set off with three young men from the community to visit the site of the oil spill. It was an arduous two-hour walk through the rainforest along a slippery mud track, punctuated by deep ponds that had to be waded through, with water up to our chests, or - where the water was too deep - carefully (and sometimes unsuccessfully!) crossed on submerged log bridges.
We met local people along the trail, checking their fish traps, carrying newly-cut palm leaves or plastic jugs with fresh palm wine.
We also encountered oil-soaked young men from the area, hired - for five dollars a day - by a Shell contractor to clean up the spill. Their only equipment was cotton rags and plastic buckets.
Azibaola explained that in June 1998, a 20 year-old, 16-inch underground Shell pipeline burst, discharging an unknown amount of oil into the surrounding earth - and the economic and cultural heart of the community - until it was finally sealed. Without any investigation, Shell declared that the cause of the spill was sabotage and refused to pay compensation.
The impact of the spill was devastating, as the oil had poisoned the water supply and fishing ponds, and was steadily killing the raffia palms that were the community's economic mainstay. Lacking any other alternative, the people of the village had been forced to drink polluted water for more than a year, and the community leaders told us that many people had become ill in recent months and that some had died.
The sight that greeted us when we finally arrived at the spill was horrendous. A thick brownish film of crude oil stained the entire area, collecting in clumps along the shoreline and covering the surface of the still water. The humid air was thick with fumes, caused, Robert explained, by the sun's evaporation of the oil; I quickly began to feel nauseous.
We passed two men tending a fire, dumping sludge and oil-soaked rags from the clean-up into the flames and sending thick black smoke up through the dead palm trees into the sky. They had neither masks nor gloves, and told us that they had been burning the waste since early morning.
We passed a large dead tree whose trunk was stained with oil, fully ten feet over my head. Robert explained that this was the high water mark, as the area flooded several times a year, spreading the crude over many hundreds of square miles and devastating the entire region. By the time we reached the site of the pipe rupture, the fumes were so thick that it became difficult to breathe.
A sheet of oil covered the water in all directions, extending out into the creek and spreading beyond into the region's waterways. Two men from the village, wearing only shorts, stood waist deep in the oil-soaked water, skimming the surface of the water with stained cotton rags and wringing the oil into plastic buckets. From time to time they would empty the buckets into a 55-gallon drum. Later, they explained, they would carry the drum to the burn site and shovel the refuse into the flames.
That the cleanup effort - if, indeed, that is what it was - was inadequate and dangerous to the health of the workers was obvious. After less than 30 minutes at the site the thick fumes had given me a headache and I was very nauseous. As we made our slow and difficult way back to the village and the boat, I wondered how the men trying fruitlessly to sop up this vast spill must have felt after seven or eight hours without so much as gloves, masks or overalls.
The following day, I visited Ogoniland as the guest of Mosop, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. In contrast to the deep forests and marshlands of Otuegwe 1, Ogoni's 500,000 people live on a comparatively dry plain, farming and fishing the streams that crisscross this heavily populated area. In common with the Ijaw people of Otuegwe, the Ogoni people blame Shell for severe environmental devastation in their land.
When I visited, Shell's flow stations and gas flares sat silent and dark. Mosop was formed in 1990 to organize non-violent mass resistance to the oil industry's practices and succeeded in forcing Shell to halt production throughout Ogoni in 1993. That success brought with it terrible retribution. The Abacha military dictatorship - and press reports have also implicated Shell - unleashed a campaign of terror against the Ogoni people in an effort to break the resistance.
Campaign groups say thousands of people were killed, thousands more fled over the border to neighboring Benin and perhaps 10,000 people were forced from their homes into internal exile to escape the repression. Among the dead was Mosop leader Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in 1995 on murder charges widely considered to be trumped up.
Environmental disaster
We visited Ebubu-Eleme village, a densely populated community that was the site of one of the worst oil spills in Nigerian history. In the late 1960s, a high-pressure Shell pipeline ruptured, catching fire and burying a vast area under a rock-hard crust of burnt oil many feet thick. Shell refused to take responsibility for the spill, arguing that the pipeline had been damaged during the Biafran civil war. For decades, therefore, the untreated spill leached crude oil into the groundwater and the nearby stream, poisoning the community's drinking water and fishing areas, and polluting the entire downstream waterway system.
In 1995, after Mosop attracted international attention to the spill, the company spent thousands of dollars to fence in the area and posted armed Nigerian soldiers at the gate to keep journalists and international environmental and human rights activists away.
The soldiers were gone now, and I walked through Shell's gate onto an absolute wasteland. Years of rain had eroded some of the oil crust, causing sinkholes and ledges that indicated the depth of the seared crude, even as it washed more oil into the land and water.
According to Mosop, Shell received an estimate from a Western clean-up company of $100m to remove the oil, but chose to contract instead with a local company for a $5 million operation to bury the oil under top-soil, hiding the spill more effectively than the gate, but scarcely making good the damage to the environment or the community. Our guide, Mosop member Bari-ara Kpalap, dismissed the clean-up contract as a public relations stunt and showed us a pit cut into the crust by the local company that revealed burnt oil to a depth of over three feet, with no end in sight.
Kpalap, who operated underground in Ogoni through the Abacha era, noted that while Shell seemed to have plenty of money to fence in the spill, they had stubbornly refused all entreaties to dig the community a well to provide safe drinking water. In any event, he said, it might now be too late, as several privately-dug wells had to be abandoned after dangerously high levels of pollution were found in the ground water.
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