Rivers and Delta are two of the nine oil-producing states in the Niger Delta. Like in many instances, oil exploration and the situation of refinery have unleashed environmental catastrophe on oil bearing communities. This investigation by Special Correspondent Gabriel Ogunjobi, digs into year of unresolved injustice of oil spills in the oil producing areas and what many observers see as the health impacts and economic sabotage resulting from oil exploitation.
THE AFFLICTED PEOPLE OF OGONI CLEAN-UP
Friday Kpeloi, seated with his arms folded, was quiet in the midst of his two colleagues as they narrated how their land, water and atmosphere were contaminated by oil pollution. The other two top activists of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) were Lazarus Tamana and Pastor Christian Lekova Kpandei. The movement’s pioneer, Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa was hanged by General Sani Abacha with eight other activists in 1995 despite international outcry. They had sought justice for their people who suffered the consequences of crude oil mining in Nigeria.
Described as the world’s second worst environmental catastrophe after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Ogoni communities split across Eleme, Gokana, Kana and Tia Local Government Areas of Rivers State were over flooded in 1970 by oil following the corrosion of the Trans-Niger pipelines owned by the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation (SPDC).
Although the clean-up of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster caused by the same international oil giant is a done deal Ogoniland remains saturated in sticky residue of oil;the aquatic habitat still polluted, vegetation dried up and human lives strangled by the effects of this unending depletion.
Successive spills between 2008 and 2009 from defective Shell pipelines led to another massive contamination in Bodo. The Ogoni people accused Shell of late responses to the developments, leaving oil to pump into the creeks for over two months.
While the legal battle instituted by the law firm Leigh Day, against Shell in a London court was still going on, the oil giant agreed to a compensation package of £55m for 15,600 Nigerian fishermen and Bodo community. It was the first time compensation would be paid over an oil spill in Nigeria.
PHOTO CAPTION: Sunset in Bodo
Kpeloi followed developments at home from the United States where he lived at the time; reading articles, including some written by Saro Wiwa himself, and phoning his kinsmen settled home. The news was not always pleasant. One particular triggering instance was when Saro Wiwa led the Ogoni people in a non-violent protest to demand clean-up of their indigenous land. They banished Shell activities across Ogoniland. In 1995 however, nine of these activists were charged with incitement and murder.They were subsequently sentenced to death by hanging.
The murder of the Ogoni Nine,as Saro-Wiwa and his comrades were called,sparked an undying resolve to tackle the government and oil giants both home and abroad.The United Nations soon took notice of the situation and joined in the crusade for the clean-up of Ogoni.
Ogoni in the diasporas felt the urge to return home. Tamana, for example, returned from the UK and Kpeloi from the US, to become frontline fighters.
“But I am not back home to finally settle” Kpeloi told me, insisting that he would return to the US once the struggle was over.
His hometown, Kegbara Dere, near Bodo, bears no sign of development, apart from the tarred road that leads to the oil manifold station. The locals are disconnected from the power grid because the transformer is non-functional.
But this is the least of their problems. After the manifold station was blown up during the 1967 civil war, floods brought the still-flowing oil beyond the manifold spill area to farms, acres of mangroves, and the creeks that sustained most of the riverine area of Kegbara Dere.
Also, when oil was spilled from Bodo pipelines – transporting crude through the sea into the edge of Bonny Island for offshore refining – their shared waterfront was contaminated. The creek water still clots with oil in some places even till now.
The two communities are like Siamese twins; same breath, same death. For more than six decades, the people of these two communities have been firsthand victims of the impacts of oil contamination.
•Friday Kpeloi
When some natives of Bodo were compensated, Kegbara Dere was exempted and Kpeloi vows he will fight the injustice.
Ironically,Kpeloi himself has become a victim of the story.
In late 2021, began to experience difficulty in breathing. “When the cough was getting severe, I decided to visit the hospital for a check-up in November last year,” says the activist, with a quaint English accent. He brought out a paper from his chest pocket, reading the doctor’s diagnosis: “Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.”
As if to prove that he was struck with the illness in Nigeria, he tried to look for another piece of paper. The paper, as he would later find, was a sheet from the 263-page report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) over Ogoniland pollution in 2011.
The report revealed that benzene, a known carcinogen, was detected in all air samples at concentrations ranging from 0.155 to 48.2 μg/m3. Approximately 10 per cent of detected benzene concentrations in Ogoniland were higher than the concentrations WHO and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) report as corresponding to a 1 in 10,000 cancer risk. Many of the benzene concentrations detected in Ogoniland were higher than those measured in more economically developed regions around the world.
PHOTO CAPTION: According to the UNEP report, Ogoni people should be placed on health monitoring but this is not happening yet, says Kpeloi.
Kegbara Dere, for instance, experienced a series of spills between 1990 and 2009 at the Bomu manifold area owned by Shell. In April 2009, there was a fire following an oil spill on the Trans-Niger Pipeline, which transports over 120,000 barrels per day through Ogoniland. Although Shell claimed to have completed two remediation projects in the Bomu manifold area in the past, most of the manifold area was still covered in oily residues, soot and ash.
UNEP’s findings confirmed that some 9,000 square metres of the manifold area are heavily polluted, the concentration of oil on the surface being above saturation, resulting in an oily sheen on pools of standing water and a strong oily smell.
The highest soil contaminations, at 63,600 mg/kg TPH, were found in the top 0.60 metres of a borehole in the most heavily contaminated area directly bordering the southernmost part of the manifold. This is extremely high and is far above the Environmental Guidelines and Standards for the Petroleum Industry in Nigeria (EGASPIN) intervention value of 5,000 mg/kg.
The 70-year-old Kpeloi is not only nursing a terminal illness, he is bereaved.His younger brother died at the age of 68 of an undisclosed illness early this year. Yet, Kpeloi is optimistic of pulling through to fight for justice.
“There are cases that went on for seven, eight years before justice,” Kpeloi.
Besides compensation in some quarters across Ogoniland, the agreement with the Shell companies included clean-up of all polluted areas. “But as far as I am concerned, clean-up has not started. What they are doing is crude and ridiculous,” Tamana declared.
In 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari announced a $1bn restoration fund for the pilot clean-up project.
Pastor Christian Lekova Kpandei, a decoder with Amnesty International, is at the frontline of monitoring oil spills. He holds the oil corporations accountable towards clean-up. In 2016, he had an experience that shook his conviction.
“Whilst I was tracking the patterns of the spills in the creeks, the Army arrested and detained me for two weeks,” he recalled.
“Since then, I told myself there is no point dying for nothing while some people are in the cities enjoying the wealth. The striking questions are these: How do these people know where to burst? How do they transport the contents when the entire Ogoniland is militarised? They are aided by the military.”
Christian benefited from the paltry N600,000 compensation but the remaining part of the bargain, which is restoring their farmlands remains untouched. The creek at Bodo is polluted by oil directly flowing into it, killing the mangroves where fishes used to lay eggs.
In January 2015, Shell admitted responsibility for the Bodo spills, pledging to compensate the people and clean up Bodo Creek. Whilst Bodo residents have since received the compensation, clean-up is haphazardly done, this investigation can confirm. Apart from residents’ allegation that the contractors were using simple tools such as shovels to sand-fill spill sites, satellite imagery views from 2006 till 2020 showed no signs of Bodo environmental restoration.
The Geographic Information System (GIS) analyses showed that the coastal fringes of Bodo were still occupied by mangrove vegetation and appeared healthy, resembling a community of short water plants on the river surfaces as of 2006.
But the continued oil spill in the community disrupted this ecosystem. After the 2009 oil spill disaster in the area, the contaminants progressively weakened the integrity of the swamp vegetation. Bodo swamp in 2013 became less vegetative, losing its appearance of dense shrub-like assemblage. The combination of oil spill and the mangrove vegetation forms a black, brown and green texture on the surfaces thereby compromising the health of the swap ecosystem.
By 2020, sparse plants and trees rising from dark coastal soil suggest that Bodo is still not completely rid of oil contaminants
Apart from Bodo and Kegbara Dere, this reporter confirmed that many other communities outside Nigeria’s Ogoniland are still battling the ripples of oil contamination. For example, all the pipe borne water plants in Bori, Khana LGA were shut down because of suspected contamination.
Not only that, the wide stretch of riverine area near an old oilfield in Goi is soaked in oil, with earth crust sinking in the blackish abyss. The oil residue renders the entire land useless.
STILLBIRTH, SOOT IN RIVERS
Despite the controversy dogging the Ogoniland clean-up, the environmental pollution in Rivers State is worsened by illegal oil bunkering in the state. The consequence of this is illegal artisanal refining of stolen oil, which in turn leads to the release of carbon black or ‘soot’ into the ecosystem. From one creek to the other, flares envelop many parts of the state which is about 60 per cent landmass and turns a bright morning day into evening. The cloud is misty as if rain is imminent. When it does rain, the water is not potable and often comes as acid rain.
In Port Harcourt especially, homes are rarely painted white these days because their walls are stained with the soot. The windows in urban settlements of Rumuodara and Rumuokoro in the capital city are coated by deposits of soot and the nostrils of the dwellers release black fluids whenever they sneeze.
Pius Dukor, a socio-political commentator based in the state’s capital, recalled how he lost his voice for more than seven days after inhaling the thick soot. The choking smoke, he said, seized his breath but luckily spared his life at the end.
Regina is one of the victims of the soot problem. The mid-40-years–old woman, who hailed from Bodo, a 30-minute drive from Port Harcourt, recounted her stillbirth experience in 2013. She sells periwinkles for a living in the oil-rich state but because Bodo shores have become toxic for aquatic creatures, Regina would paddle a canoe far to Bonny to pick periwinkles where the water is relatively fresh.
Pregnant women like Regina were advised to keep off from the shores to reduce the health risk on their babies. “But I was always going to the shores to pick periwinkles so I lost my baby,” she says. “I was feeling a sharp stomach pain that evening in 2013 and at the same time bleeding until I was rushed to the clinic.”
UN experts have opined that the environmental restoration of Ogoniland may take at least 25 years, adding that all sources of ongoing contamination, including the artisanal refining must be stopped before the clean-up of the creeks, sediments and mangroves can begin.
Lately, Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike made efforts to stop oil bunkering. He demanded a comprehensive list of illegal refineries and their operators across the 23 LGAs and also promised the disbursement of N20 million to each of the 23 local council chairmen ready to clampdown on the illegal refineries in their creeks.
OIL REFINING OR RENEWABLE ENERGY?
At various quarters, there are conversations that artisanal refining, though illegal, is bridging the gap for the demands of petroleum products. Government, on the other hand, is pushing for the establishment of modular refineries to halt illegal refineries, an alternative to keep the oil market afloat. But that is half of the story. From inception, refining oil in Nigeria has come at great cost with government losing billions of naira to rehabilitate ailing refineries. Also, oil production has far-reaching public health risks for the communities hosting the government-owned refineries or the pipelines.
For the first time in 43 years of operation, the NNPC published an audited financial report in 2020. In 2018 alone, the report revealed that the refineries incurred a total loss of N154 billion, with the Port Harcourt refineries alone losing N45.59 billion. But this huge loss was not even for rehabilitation but administrative maintenance including paying workers’ salaries.
In 2021 alone, the NNPC spent N100 billion on the rehabilitation of the nation’s four refineries in 2021, with nothing to show for it.. The PHRC is made up of two refineries, located at Alesa Eleme near Port Harcourt with a jetty (for product import and export). The jetty is located 7.5km away from the refinery complex.
For the communities on the fence lines of these Port Harcourt refineries, their consquences are the spilled oil cloaking farmlands and killing their farm yields. The wastewaters from the PHRC are often not properly disposed of, ultimately contaminating residents’ source of drinking water. For instance, at Ekerikana community where the Port Harcourt Refinery discharges effluents into their river, the people complain that the underground water emits oil odour and becomes harmful when used domestically. It is not exactly different from the spill from the NNPC product pipeline that runs through Nisisioken Ogale in Eleme around 2005. The groundwater was found contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen, and the presence of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). The benzene concentration was at levels over 900 times above the World Health Organization (WHO) standards. MTBE is not a part of crude oil but an additive added to refined products at the refinery. Its presence proved that the spill was not from the crude oil but that of a refined product, which the NNPC was directly responsible for.
DELTA, NIGERIA: A LOST HERITAGE
The Warri refinery is hosted in the sprawling neighbourhood of Ifiekporo and Ubeji communities. From the tank farm, international and local oil companies ferry the vessels on the Atlantic front in Delta offshore for refined oil.
Living on the fence line of a refinery in Nigeria is characterized by one thing in Delta: an untamed rage gravitating towards militancy. Apart from the greenery along the same paths with pipelines, what oil-rich Warri represents needs no telling. There is crude everywhere; the nose perceives its smells seeping from the nooks and crannies, as if the whole place would be in flames if there was any spark. There are traces of oil in the Ifiekporo creeks but it is difficult to trace the source on foot.
Where is the smell oozing from? Certainly, not from the tank farm. Whether or not the land was of tranquillity or militancy will manifest in a bit.
Flashback to the days of yore. Warri was the nerve of the state’s economy, dubbed as the oil city. Its prominence in Nigeria’s south is only surpassed by Ogoni’s Rivers state, bearing the same natural resource but in larger quantities. The thing about Nigeria’s crude oil is that the moment it came, it overrode the nation’s existing priority. The country’s economy and the citizens are yet to recover from the effect; Nigeria tarnished agriculture, especially cocoa and palm oil farming, which was the economic mainstay for the new bride (crude oil).
Warri had attracted the fortune of oil multinationals, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), and the Warri Refinery and Petrochemical Company (WRPC), the youths flourished and the city got boisterous. Alas, a dangerous trend hit the oil city many years later.
Before noon on March 30, I arrived at the tank farm, still looking for the source of the oil smell. A friendly soldier ushered me to the sight of the berthed ships waiting for the vessels to be loaded. There was a tailback of tankers clogging the vicinity.The soldier tells me “the traffic is still subtle this time”.
As I moved a few miles out of the tank farm, I caught the sight of some teenagers and young adults breezing in and out of the creeks that led to the waters. Their bodies were dripping black oil. Behind the shelters where they came from on canoes with blue plastic barrels on canoes were swamps. Away from the waterside, they loaded the heavy barrels onto the truck beds.
Such bunkerers litter the creeks around the oil refinery and the tank farms. Some other times, they tap directly into pipelines away from oil company facilities, and connect from the pipes to barges that are hidden in small creeks with mangrove forest cover. They pollute the water bodies while transporting stolen crude oil to the illegal refining sites where they ‘cook’ the oil and flare soots into the atmosphere in the process.
PHOTO CAPTION: Erhoike flow station of Kokori/Orogun oil bloc formerly under Shell’s OML 30
Soot is a threat to public health but no one in the community was willing to talk to me about the impacts of this oil theft.
Oil theft in Delta is an organized crime of sea pirates whose history hacks back to the Warri crisis of 1997 and 2003.. By 2003, the gun-toting non-state actors and the Nigerian navy clashed over illegal oil bunkering. They use the waterways to transport arms into the country, intimidating oil workers on the sea and also hijacking their vessels.
This was how Delta deteriorated over the years by prolonged violence. Because of oil.
Oil multinationals such as Shell, Chevron, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, and its subsidiaries, and other ancillaries and servicing companies, now lay supine. And in the mid-2000s, they fled the city in droves. Shell initially downsized in the mid-2000s through SoFu (Securing our Future) initiatives, and later shut down its operation in Warri, a development that threw the state into turmoil. Oil production was severed because flow stations were attacked by non-state gunmen.
Chevron also closed its onshore facilities, and then its main export terminal at Escravos. Both Shell and Chevron declared force majeure-an inability to fulfil their obligations due to events beyond their control on Nigerian exports.
Human Rights Watch concluded that the Warri crisis was a classic example of a “resource war”, connected to the oil bunkering around the Escravos River and other oil fields.
For Delta, the joy of oil was short lived. Oil activities shrank but the business of oil criminality grew rapidly and pollution exacerbated, owing to both unscrupulous activities of oil companies and oil theft such as I witnessed in Ifiekporo.
- This report was funded under Health of Mother Earth Foundation’s fossil politics programmea