Post date: Aug 26, 2011 12:14:48 PM
Residents of Nigeria's oil-rich tainted Ogoniland -- which the UN recently said would need the world's biggest oil clean up, are fed up of a blame game over oil spills that have polluted their homeland for decades. Many remain sceptical that any significant long term changes will be made to improve things.
PORT-HARCOURT, NIGERIA REUTERS - Scooping water from beneath a black carpet of crude, a fisherman shows the magnitude of oil leaks that have been a common occurrence in Southern Nigeria for decades.
Many link the spills to Royal Dutch Shell, the largest operator in the country.
Fishermen like Pa Simeon Naku can no longer depend on their trade and he's had to stop casting his nets because of the oil pollution.
"Since the spills occurred I have never been able to fish with this net again and I still have five to ten of them like this one that are in the house and are not useful anymore," said Naku.
The delta is home to Africa's largest oil and gas industry and 95 percent of Nigeria's foreign exchange comes from crude oil.
A UN report released this month says residents of Ogoniland, a region within the vast, oil-rich Niger Delta are living in a dangerously polluted environment and Royal Dutch Shell and the government aren't doing enough to clean it up.
The report said Ogoniland required the biggest oil clean-up in history, which could take 30 years and cost an initial 1 billion US dollars. The paper, the most scientific and detailed report ever on Niger Delta spills, found levels of pollution that shocked the most pessimistic observers.
In one community, drinking water was contaminated with benzene, a substance known to cause cancer, at levels over 900 times above World Health Organisation guidelines.
Shell and Nigeria's state-owned oil firm NNPC were criticised in the paper for not meeting their own best practices.
In 10 out of 15 areas the U.N. visited where Shell said it had completed its clean-up, high levels of pollution were still found.
Shell was forced out of Ogoniland in 1993 by the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), led by poet and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, after they said the oil giant had destroyed their fishing environment. Saro-Wiwa was later hanged by the military government, prompting international outrage.
In the years since, Shell has stopped pumping oil from the region but its pipelines and other oil drilling infrastructure remain, largely unprotected, and are susceptible to leaks, sabotage attacks and theft.
In a region where most people live on less than 2 US dollars a day, despite around 240 million-a-day in oil export revenue flowing into Nigeria, residents are tired of decades of fighting and want a proper clean-up along the lines of what the United Nations has mapped out.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan last week constituted a committee to review the report and Shell and NNPC have both said they will look carefully at the findings.
Suanu Baridam, secretary of the Ogoni Council of Traditional Rulers, fears the needs of Ogoniland are not represented in the committee.
"Nobody from Ogoni is in that committee (cleanup committee set up by the Federal Government) and that committee I don't think we will even welcome them, except if Ogoni people are there, we will not welcome them," said Baridam.
Senator Magnus Abe is the representative in the upper house of parliament for Rivers South-East, one of the three states in the Niger Delta.
"If we compromise ourselves and we compromise our offices and allow people to do what they like, it doesn't make sense for us to turn around and start blaming anybody so I think that as a matter of priority the government ought to take a very serious look at the operations of the oil industry not just in Ogoni but across the country and at the enforcement of our regulations that has to do with the environment because this thing has been going on for years, it would have continued to go on its probably still going on as we speak, if it was not for UNEP that came in to actually point out these dangers to us," said Abe.
In some African delta regions, tourists enjoy the calm waterways and wildlife. The landscape of banana trees and a pineapple farm unlike the oil spills and dark smoke that fills the air from gas flares in the Niger Delta.