Nigeria’s plan to boost delta drilling sparks anger

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Nigeria’s plan to resume oil production in one of the most environmentally devastated parts of the oil-rich Niger Delta after a three-decade halt has ignited criticism from campaign and community groups opposed to the move.

President Bola Tinubu last week told a meeting of select political and traditional leaders from Ogoniland, a cluster of towns and villages that are home to about 2mn people in Nigeria’s Rivers State, that the government wanted to open negotiations to restart production.

He urged people from the area, which became a notorious symbol of the environmental catastrophe, corruption and violence that accompanied Big Oil projects, to co-operate with his administration.

“We cannot in any way rewrite history, but we can correct some anomalies of the past going forward,” he told the gathering. “We cannot heal the wounds if we continue to be angry.”

Tinubu, who has pledged to lift Nigeria’s oil production to 2mn barrels a day, up from about 1.5mn currently, is eyeing Ogoniland as a key plank of his plan to boost the government’s coffers and economic growth.

But Celestine Akpobari, a civil society activist on the governing council of a Nigerian government clean-up operation in Ogoniland, said the authorities wanted to exploit the region’s resources without solving the underlying issues of environmental damage and the loss of livelihoods.

“The government is trying to put a clean bandage on a dirty wound,” Akpobari told the Financial Times. “They’re feasting on the dead bodies of Ogoni people and dancing on the grave of [executed environmentalist] Ken Saro-Wiwa. There is blood in the oil of Ogoniland.”

International oil companies, including Anglo-Dutch supermajor Shell, stopped drilling in Ogoniland in 1993 after years of tensions among companies, communities and the Nigerian government.

Nigeria’s then-military dictatorship two years later executed Saro-Wiwa, a prominent Ogoni campaigner, and eight others on trumped-up murder charges, adding to the unrest. Several attempts to restart production in the intervening years have failed.

International oil groups have in recent years exited Nigeria’s onshore and shallow-water oilfields, of the sort found in Ogoniland, for more abundant resources offshore in the Gulf of Guinea. Nigerian energy companies are buying up assets being disposed of by the international majors.

The efforts to clean up decades’ worth of oil spills in Ogoniland have been stymied by corruption and a lack of funds, leaving generations of people exposed to contaminated water and other hazards.

A coalition of Nigerian environmental groups criticised the proposal to restart production in a letter last week. They said unresolved issues included the lack of exoneration of Saro-Wiwa and others who were executed, the need for increased funding for the clean-up efforts and to make oil companies — “particularly Shell” — accountable for spills, among other demands.

“The attempt to resume oil extraction in a region already ravaged by environmental neglect further exacerbates the suffering of the people and is an affront on their right to a safe environment,” the letter said.

Olanrewaju Suraju, head of the human rights project at the Lagos-based Human and Environmental Development Agenda, one of the signatories, said the majority of Ogoni people were not opposed to oil production in theory, but were wary given the region’s painful history.

“Oil exploration has rarely been beneficial to the Ogoni people,” he said. “Instead, it has come at their expense. What is the government doing differently now to justify the resumption of exploration in Ogoniland?”

Akpobari, the Ogoniland activist, acknowledged there was not uniform opposition to the planned resumption of oil activity, but warned those minded to support the bid to take lessons from other oil-producing communities in the delta.

“This is divide and rule,” he said. “How many jobs have they created in the communities that have oil now?”

“All they have are loss of livelihoods, deaths and no education. They haven’t finished cleaning up the spills and are already talking up oil exploration . . . You cannot turn on the tap and mop the floor.”