Tag: oil spillage

Although the recent report by the Amnesty International, a human rights group, that Shell Petroleum is liable for the series of oil spillage in the oil-rich Niger Delta is being hotly contested by the oil major, analysts have argued that the report itself is a sad commentary on how oil exploration activities of most of the multinational oil companies have led to wholesale destruction of lives and properties in oil-producing communities across the country. In this report, Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf examines the issue.

Oil spillage is a recurring decimal in the oil-rich Niger Delta, where exploration activities in the downstream petroleum sub sector has often led to degradation of the environment in many ways than one, especially in the creeks and its environs.
Buck passing
However, past attempts to unravel the real culprits responsible for the despoliation of the environment, including the destruction of flora and fauna, has remained one jigsaw puzzle, as most of the multinationals operating in the region have always found it rather convenient to pass the buck elsewhere.
Road to discovery
It would be recalled that Amnesty International in late 2011 had slammed Shell for its failure to clean up two of spills in Bodo and Ogoniland in 2008, which the group said caused huge suffering and had wrecked the livelihoods of 69, 000 people.
The human rights group said local fisheries and farmland were poisoned, and that Shell and its partners should be held liable to pay $1billion needed to clean up the region.
“The prolonged failure of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria to clean up the oil that was spilled continues to have catastrophic consequences,” read the report.
A spokesman for Shell at the time said the company and its partners had acknowledged the spills and already started cleaning up the area, but that cleanup effort has been hampered by oil theft, which he said was responsible for most spills in the Delta.
But Amnesty said the community’s UK lawyers suggested the spill had leaked 4, 000 barrels a day for 10 weeks, which would make it bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.
Weight of fresh evidence
But all that is about to change as fresh evidence by Amnesty shows that oil super major, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, falsified and manipulated oil spill investigations and documents in Nigeria.
The rights group accused the oil company of wrongly reporting the cause and volume of pollution devastating the Niger Delta and made false claims about cleanup measures, according to a report by the Associated Press.
The future of farmers and fishermen, whose livelihoods are destroyed by such spills, depends on reports that can be “very subjective, misleading and downright false,” according to an independent United States industry expert hired by Amnesty International to review documents newly obtained under Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Act.
The report offers detailed analysis to back longstanding charges that oil companies blame sabotage for spills sometimes caused by corrosion and other faults in aging pipelines. Sabotage or oil theft means a community is not eligible for compensation.
Shell Nigeria said it “firmly rejects (the) unsubstantiated assertions” and seeks “greater transparency and independent oversight” in reporting oil spills.
“Solutions to the terrible tragedy of oil pollution in the Niger Delta need to be found,” said a statement provided in response to the report, according to the Associated Press.
Shell was the first company to start producing oil in the Delta, in 1958.
Shell repeated assertions that most spills were caused by growing theft that experts estimate at between 100,000 and 200,000 barrels of oil a day.
One questionable report claiming sabotage was accepted by a Netherlands court that ruled against compensation for a Niger Delta community, Amnesty noted.
The report, prepared in collaboration with the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development, sheds new light on one of the worst environmental disasters in Nigeria, a 2008 spill that affected about 30,000 people in the Delta’s Bodo creek area, and is the subject of a lawsuit in Britain.
Some experts say the spill caused the largest loss of mangrove habitat ever caused by an oil spill.
Shell documents say the leak started on October 5, 2008 and 1,640 barrels of oil were spilled. Government and community documents say the leak started on August 28. United States-based Accufacts, the industry expert hired by Amnesty, reviewed a video of the leak and estimated that up to 4,320 barrels of oil was flooding Bodo each day for at least 72 days.
When Amnesty challenged Shell with its evidence, the company for the first time said it had turned off supply to the affected pipe, and, therefore, the volume of the spill could not be that high. Yet, the video showed oil spurting out months later, on November 7.
Shell says it cleaned up the Bodo spill between October 30, 2008 and December 2009. But it also says it did not have access to the area to stop a second major spill that began on December 7, 2008.
Nigerian regulators have not certified the site as clean, as mandated by law.
Martyn Day of Leigh Day, the British law firm representing about 15,000 people from Bodo, said the Amnesty’s report “makes it now clear that Shell has a totally deficient system …that has led to a massive underestimate of how much oil has leaked out into that area.”
Emasculated laws
In Nigeria, the legal basis of oil pollution compensation can be found in the Nigerian Constitution and a few other enactments which are the Oil Pipelines Act Cap 338, LFN 1990, the Petroleum Act 1969 now Cap 350 LFN 1990, Mining Act No 24, 1999, the oil in Navigational water Act, Cap 337 LFN 1990, the Land Use Act Cap 202 1990, and others.
However, according to Ms Yetunde Ogunremi, a partner at O. J. Bamgbose Chambers, Ibadan, “Critical reviews of these statutes reveal that there is no comprehensive statutory provision for compensation in respect of oil pollution in the petroleum industry in Nigeria. As a result of this, there are lots of items that dispossessed claimants cannot be compensated. This leads to dissatisfaction among victims of oil pollution which, sometimes, results in crises and conflicts within the oil-producing communities.”
The Nigerian Constitution, she emphasised, “lacks an elaborate provision on environmental protection. Although these laws exist, they have failed to adequately protect the environment and the victims from the deleterious consequences of oil pollution. Some of their shortcomings include the out-dated penalty sections, the incapacitation of the enforcement officials, the attitude of prosecution lawyers with respect to environment pollution cases, the attitude of the courts, etc.”
In the contention of analysts, since the inception of the petroleum industry, people have not benefitted from any form of compensation because most communities don’t have money to hire lawyers.
Echoing similar sentiments, Director General, National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), Sir Peter Idabor, who spoke in a monitored television magazine programme last week, while acknowledging the fact that there has been a rising wave of oil spillage in the country, especially in the Niger Delta region, however, observed that it is attributable to human error, third party interference, among others.
Clear and present dangers
Curiously, experts have stressed that oil spill comes with a lot of baggage, especially health consequences.
The nation’s decreasing life expectancy has been attributed to the consumption of polluted foods due to increasing rate of oil spillage.
To the outsider, the ownership of a place near water with all the aquatic flora and fauna, out of sight of neighbours and far from the hustle and bustle of city life, is probably more pleasing than anything else in this world, but this is not so for the inhabitants of this fetid slum, who have suffered a lot of privations than they are willing to admit themselves.
In a telephone chat with The Nation, Madam Elohor Oritsejolomi, a resident of Warri South, in Delta, lamented what she described as the pitiable condition many indigenes are subjected to as a result of ravages of oil spill.
“We have lost count of number of deaths, especially our women and children, recorded in this place. If you look around, you will discover that our children are afflicted with one ailments or the other. Our women, children, male folks come down with polio, malaria, cholera because we eat and drink contaminated water,” she said.
In one often-quoted episode, the whole community was ravaged with epidemic leading to loss of lives.
“Most of our young men and women are dying in their primes today because of what they eat – polluted substances we collect through the food chains, through our vegetables we eat, snails, fishes and all others, are a mixture of oil and mud.”
Guilty as charged
Chief Frank Ovie Kokori, former Secretary General, NUPENG, while giving an insight into the activities of the oil major, lamented that the sheer scale of devastation wrought on the land by the oil major is unquantifiable.
Kokori said: “I think the fault lies with the oil companies and the government agencies that are expected to monitor the activities of these companies. In many parts of the world where oil exploration activities take place, monitoring is the primary role of government. But in Nigeria, it is an irony that the people the community relies upon to protect their interest at all times look the other way and that is why the oil majors can get away with the evil they are perpetuating in a place like the Niger Delta.”
Expatiating, he said: “Ordinarily, if the government reacts by putting punitive measures in place, most of the oil majors like Shell, Chevron, Mobil, won’t dare. But because the government is weak, these oil companies see themselves as government with the power to do and undo. They get away with crimes they cannot commit in the western hemisphere.
“They say people of Ogoni are asking for $1billion. It is only possible because the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni (MOSOP) led by the late Saro Wiwa and later Ledum Mitee. But even at that it is even a far cry. If you go into the creeks of Bayelsa and other parts of the Delta, the damage and devastation there you cannot quantify because it goes down to many generations yet unborn. There are many communities in the Niger Delta creeks that cannot farm on their soil, neither drink their water. What form of clean up will you do to reclaim such land? You cannot really quantify that.”
If the ill-feelings generated by the Amnesty report are anything to go by, it may be correct to say that the last has not been heard on this vexed issue of oil spillage as affected communities afflicted by the plague continue to count their losses.