Re-reporting editing by Carolyn Bennett
Deutsche Welle spoke with Ben Amunwa of the “Remember Saro-Wiwa” Project and Prince Chima Williams of the Environmental Rights Action group in the Niger Delta about Big Oil’s rape of a priceless ecological gem and its people.
SHELL, CHEVRON, EXXONMOBIL
In the Niger Delta capital, Shell Oil workers live in a gated community that offers schooling, medical treatment, shopping, sporting facilities, a choir, a library, cookery classes ─ even a book club.
Across the fence from local people’s “normal community” with no light or water or hospital or good roads, “you see Shell where there is light almost 24 hours a day, an uninterrupted water supply, fine buildings and green vegetation.”
Black gold was discovered [officially] in the Niger Delta in the middle 1950s: Oil. Crude. Shell Corporation came to the Niger Delta’s Ogoniland region.
House roofs started turning brown. Researchers discovered that the brownish tone on the roofs was caused by acid rain. People came to realize that their lives and land and water and way of life were in danger. “Non-violent campaigner, writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa rallied against Shell’s degradation of the Niger Delta’s Ogoniland region until his controversial judicial execution in 1995.”
Shell pulled out of Ogoniland in 1993 but stayed along with several other big oil companies among them ExxonMobil and Chevron in occupation and plunder of the delta and its people. Collectively the oil giants “are responsible for some 10,000 kilometers of pipeline, much of which is aged and rusty and extremely prone to leak. The number of spills increases by the year ─ some say to as many as one every day. Cleanups fail to keep pace with spills.
The Niger region is full of water and spills spread way beyond an immediate site. “Up to 42 communities” can be affected by contaminated water, “water the people depend on for drinking, cooking and other every-day purposes.”
The Niger Delta’s estimated 30 million people “are being left to foot the bill with their livelihoods and their lives.… (Right now, an oil company is permitted to pay the Nigerian government $7,000, 5,700 Euros, not to clean up). The average lifespan in the Niger Delta is 40 years so the people are living and counting the days.”
Local people are no longer able to survive on the fruits of the earth and the bounty of the ocean. Local communities have become dependent upon fish imported from other parts of Nigeria or abroad. Pollution has rendered recognized farming untenable. In some communities, people grow what they can just to keep their families from starving. In other communities the pollution is so bad residents are forced to move, often into urban slums.
Activists and the local population want to see regulations that outlaw bad business ethics that have coated the delta’s mangrove swamps with crude. Binding regulations “compelling corporations of European and American origin to behave the same way they do in Europe irrespective of the strength or weakness of government or how corrupt those governments” might offer people of the delta a chance for significant change in the land, the water, the air, their lives.
The world fixes its gaze on the plight of those affected by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill while millions of people at the far side of the Atlantic suffer the same fate and their stories are rarely heard.
BEAUTIFUL LAND AND PEOPLE DEVASTATED, DEVALUED, DISHONORED
“The Niger Delta has become a paradise lost.” From a dreamland of intricate creeks, rivers, estuaries, mangrove and fresh swamps and abundance of tree and fish species ─ 70,000-square kilometers (27,000 square miles) of wetland, one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity in the world ─ an area farmed and fished and otherwise left to nature’s devices has become a nightmare.
Sources and notes
“The oil disaster the world prefers to ignore” (Author: Tamsin Walker, Editor: Rob Mudge), July 26, 2010, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5724143,00.html
Ben Amunwa is an expert and campaigner with the London-based Platform’s ‘Remember Saro-Wiwa’ project; Prince Chima Williams is head of legal resources with the Environmental Rights Action group in the Niger Delta.
“Remember Saro-Wiwa” is a coalition of organizations and individuals whose aims are to create a Living Memorial to activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in London, using art and activism to raise awareness and campaign for environmental and social justice in the Niger Delta. Funding the Remember Saro-Wiwa project are individual donations, the Arts Council England, and the Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation, http://remembersarowiwa.com/about/
The London, UK-based PLATFORM works across disciplines for social and ecological justice. The Remember Saro-Wiwa Project Team includes Ben Amunwa, David A Bailey (Curator), Richard Howlett, http://www.platformlondon.org/
PLATFORM brings together environmentalists, artists, human rights campaigners, educationalists and community activists to create innovative projects driven by the need for social and environmental justice. Their interdisciplinary approach combines the transformational power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigor of in-depth research with the vision to promote alternative futures. Since 1996, PLATFORM’s work has focused on the impact of “the transnational corporation” on our minds, our bodies, our society and our environment. http://www.platformlondon.org/aboutplatform.asp
DELTA IN NIGERIA
The topography of Nigeria generally consists of plains in the north and south interrupted by plateaus and hills in the center of the country. The Sokoto Plains are in the northwestern corner of the country. The Borno Plains in the northeastern corner surround the Lake Chad region. The Lake Chad basin and the coastal areas ─ including the Niger River delta and the western parts of the Sokoto region in the far northwest ─ are underlain by soft, geologically young sedimentary rocks. Gently undulating plains waterlogged during the rainy season are in these areas.
The characteristic landforms of the plateaus are high plains with broad, shallow valleys dotted with numerous hills or isolated mountains; the underlying rocks are crystalline, although sandstones appear in river areas. The Jos Plateau rises almost in the center of the country; it consists of extensive lava surfaces dotted with numerous extinct volcanoes and contains the peak of Shere Hill, which rises to an elevation of 5,843 feet (1,781 meters). Other eroded surfaces, such as the Udi-Nsukka escarpment, rise abruptly above the plains at elevations of at least 1,000 feet (300 meters). The most mountainous area exists along the southeastern border with Cameroon where the Cameroon Highlands produce the highest point in the country, Mount Dimlang, at 6,695 feet (2,042 meters) [Britannica].
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