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Nigeria's Agony Dwarfs the Gulf Oil Spill. The US and Europe Ignore It
The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades
We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.
A ruptured pipeline burns in a Lagos suburb after an explosion in 2008 which killed at least 100 people. (Photograph: George Esiri/Reuters) The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.
Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."
That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.
On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.
Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.
This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."
With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.
"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."
"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different."
"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.
It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.
One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.
According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.
Last month Shell admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009. The majority, said the company, was lost through two incidents – one in which the company claims that thieves damaged a wellhead at its Odidi field and another where militants bombed the Trans Escravos pipeline.
Shell, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, says that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure. "We had 132 spills last year, as against 175 on average. Safety valves were vandalised; one pipe had 300 illegal taps. We found five explosive devices on one. Sometimes communities do not give us access to clean up the pollution because they can make more money from compensation," said a spokesman.
"We have a full-time oil spill response team. Last year we replaced 197 miles of pipeline and are using every known way to clean up pollution, including microbes. We are committed to cleaning up any spill as fast as possible as soon as and for whatever reason they occur."
These claims are hotly disputed by communities and environmental watchdog groups. They mostly blame the companies' vast network of rusting pipes and storage tanks, corroding pipelines, semi-derelict pumping stations and old wellheads, as well as tankers and vessels cleaning out tanks.
The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.
The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."
A spokesman for the Stakeholder Democracy Network in Lagos, which works to empower those in communities affected by the oil companies' activities, said: "The response to the spill in the United States should serve as a stiff reminder as to how far spill management in Nigeria has drifted from standards across the world."
Other voices of protest point out that the world has overlooked the scale of the environmental impact. Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, said: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."
Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."
Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."
There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.
"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."
- Posted in
36 Comments so far
Show All"...big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law ..."
Hello? They ARE beyond the law. They OWN the law, both in Nigeria and here in the US. And they are increasingly arrogant about not giving a shit what we think. We are becoming a new 'banana' republic. Welcome to living in Africa, my fellow Americans. Get used to it.
Indeed! Do you harbor any hope that America could get used to "living in Africa"? Seems to me it's high time we did.
I love to hear folks bitch and moan about BP and the oil industry, in general. Very few that I've heard or read (here on CD) say that they are willing to give up their 5000 square foot homes, their SUVs, their constant shuffling of too many kids to too many soccer games or practices, just their total investment in this priviledged life. Maybe it's time to put up, or shut up.
Face it: The problem isn't BP, the Oil industry or whatever demon you wish to conjure. The problem is YOU and your LIFESTYLE!!!
The chickens are coming home to roost and, if you don't want your spoiled, western life to be shat upon, better cover up!!! Awww---never mind. It's already too late!
There is enough solar energy and wind energy availble to power "our lifestyle" the world over...it is a false choice (probably fed by the oil industry and other globalized corporations) to pit the granola crowd against the conservatives....and keep the oil bankroll flowing...If we decentralized energy distribution and had an energy infrastructure program promoted by the government like we had the highway infrastructure program..our lifestyle wouldn't be that threatened...but the lifestyle of big energy would ... like everything else...follow the money... I'm really surprised that CHina and India aren't pursuing this model since they have a more centralized government and are just now creating their infrastructures????
Probably because the leaders, elites and corpora-fascists in China and India are just as greedy, arrogant and sociopathic as they are in most Western countries.
"There is enough solar energy and wind energy availble to power"
Completely false you know, every bit of solar energy and wind energy in the US approximates the power output of one coal mine.
my point being that if the infrastructure were built THEN solar and wind could provide enough energy to fuel the worlds economy...which is totally true...
Read the article in the NEW YORKER a couple of weeks back about the inventor working in the alt energy field. He outlines what it would take to replace the energy of coal and oil with alternatives. The conclusions?
1. It might be possible but ONLY if mankind dropped everything else right now to focus solely on it for the next 50 years or so. (ain't going to happen)
2. Most of the deficit would have to be made up with nuclear.
3. The transition would have to be accomplished using energy from oil and coal which would prevent us from reducing greenhouse gas emissions for the entire first half of this century.
The people doing the actual work with the new technologies understand that the answer isn't in new technologies. It's in human behavior. Anyone who thinks our current lifestyle could ever be sustainable is in serious denial.
"Face it: The problem isn't BP, the Oil industry or whatever demon you wish to conjure. The problem is YOU and your LIFESTYLE!!!"
Face it: the people who says this are nearly always apologists for the oil industry, taking money from the oil industry.
The problem IS the oil industry, AND people who drive SUVs from suburban home to office and back etc, AND politicians who take money from the oil industry in return for less scrutiny.
This article ignores the greatest impact of all: Burning fossil fuels creates global warming, a radical change that will ravage this planet.
It would be nice if the gulf disaster and those this article discusses would spur people to change their oil-guzzling ways. But it won't.
Our addiction to oil is dooming future generations to a planetary hell.
" The Oily Man Cometh"
from Stardust
Those terrorists dressed in sleek suits,
lips curl in gleeful greed.
Wrap themselves in oily profts,
Of LIFE,--- they have no need.
As the Earth grows ever weaker,
Nations, NOW! Take a stand!
Nature is our sovereign leader,
STOP! STOP the Oily Man!
In space, we're a Big Blue marble,
spinning from sun to black.
Oily man pollutes our Nature,
Time to take OUR planet back!
Well said!!!
Yep-you can't drink oil and you can't eat money.
Excellent!
Read the chapter on Nigeria in the book "Crude World," by Peter Maass. The entire Niger delta is befouled, and the people are sick and dying and fighting each other. In human terms, what is happening in Nigeria is worse (so far) than the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In ecological terms, the latter may turn out to be dramatically worse. Since I tend not to separate human impacts from ecological impacts, as bad as things are in Nigeria, the thought of the entire Gulf of Mexico as a dead zone has no comparison.
In Fact: Nobody has done shit to actually stop the eruption of the sweet crude and Corexit cocktail that has been dumped into the Gulf of Mexico--it is all half-ass posturing so as to make us think something is being done--no we are being treated as all the world's powerless people--they only care for the money and power that this black poison brings them.
It makes me sick that the main stream media does not, will not cover this, the Nigerian catastrophies...
I have been reading about this for over a year now, maybe two. I am at a loss to understand why we, including my self, are not raging in the streets to stop, just stop the madness. I say madness, because after this "spill" Obama allocated another 9 billion dollars for a type of alternative energy...two nuclear power plant... OMG
The stupidity the stupidity...
I have refrained from being critical or overly critical- but now, now I am flamming mad.
How many people are out having their memorial day weekend? How much longer do we have to be oblivious. Not much. I've been going on a new site, counter currents.org. There are a lot of good, peak oil articles. The fall is just around the corner and I don't mean the season...
That is because, Americans don't give a rats ass about
Africa.
Americans concern....NOT ON MY BEACHES.
Western powers have been raping, pillaging and plundering
Africa for their resources for five hundred years and pat
themselves on the back for throwing some pennys of their
money back in the form of AIDS relief, a disease that they
have blamed on Africa
This all got accelerated during the Carter Administration,
(yes, I know, he has turned a leaf and become our best ex-
president) when our government , through the CIA ,destabilized the entire Central African continent in
order to secure oil. They were overt and covert operations
that overthrew governments, led to many genocides that are
still going on today, it led Africa into starvation, a once
self-sufficient populace. About every genocide in Africa
since the seventies can be directly traced to oil exploration
and recovery, not to mention all the other natural resources
including labor.
NOT ON MY BEACHES will prevail in American Culture.
Only a small bit of this oil eruption is actually oil, most of it is natural gas, methane, which causes far worse Greenhouse Gas Problems than the tar balls. To Whit:
"Death toll expected to rise as India faces record temperatures of up to 122F in hottest summer on record"
This is more than just a North American disaster, this is going to be a Global Catastrophy!
Drill Baby, Drill - you're doing a Heckuva Job!
That the worst environmental damage due to oil has taken place in Africa, birthplace of humanity, should give us pause. That the biggest purveyor of economic violence, the USA, is now experiencing an ecological catastrophe in the gulf should also give us pause to take effective action .
"What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control"
Issues are framed in a very disjoint way, like in the quote above, creating mostly frustration in the observer. Oil companies are out of control because the whole capitalist system is out of control, with demand for materials/energy driven not by the needs of people but by elite greed, the people having become like cattle on the feedlot, consuming and producing much more than they would in a natural setting, and most of it garbage, for example 3/4 of those employed in healthcare admin in the USA produce nothing of true value. They're merely churning bucks which serves only to feed the world's fattest economy.
All true. Capitalism is about growth, not about people's well being. Defenders of capitalism are, whether they know it or not, simply advocates of the exploitation of people and resources by a wealthy few.
Come on, folks! Can no one think critically about what is written above? I stopped reading the article after the first several paragraphs because those paragraphs are obviously lies.
I swam competitively for two years, and I know that no one is going to swim very far while holding cameras and notebooks over their heads!!
And I know that no one in their right mind is going to swim in oil, and if they do they won't survive very long at all!
And it is a tremendous shame that John Vidal chose to open this piece with such a pack of lies, because it casts everything else he writes about in doubt. There almost certainly are and have been tremendous envrionmental catastrophes due to the oil industry in Nigeria. There are almost certtainly many more due to attacks by rebels and terrorists on oil facilities.
I'm not so concerned that Common Dreams prints such a pack of lies as I am concerned about the gullibility of people who don't have the critical thinking skills sufficient to spot them!
Look folks, the right wing nut cases do this type of lieing all the time and they are rightly condemned for it by the progressives. But the progressives, if they are to be any different from the right wing nuts need to be able to discern B.S. from their own when they see it and condemn it for what it is.
Well, I'm a trained lifeguard.
The first paragraphs are not lies. It certainly is possible to swim, and swim far, while holding something out of the water above your head. In fact, that is the fundamentals of lifeguard training. You hold something (heavy) above the water, to simulate holding someone's heavy head, clearly above the water, while swimming for a long time.
It is certainly feasible to put a camera and a notebook in a water resistant bag, and swim while holding the bag above the water.
In other words, you might consider that just because you swam competitively does not mean that you know all there is to know about swimming.
Men are armed shout who goes there
We have journeyed far from here
Armed with bibles make us swear
Candy and Taffy, hope we both are well
Please come see me in the citadel
Flags are flying, dollar bills
Round the heights of concrete hills
You can see the pinnacles
Candy and taffy, hope we both are well
Please come see me in the citadel
In the streets are many walls
Hear the peasants come and crawl
You can hear their lovers call
Candy and Taffy, hope we both are well
Please come see me in the citadel
Screaming people fly so fast
In their shiny metal cars
Through the woods of steel and glass
Candy and Taffy, hope we both are well
Please come see me in the citadel
--Rolling Stones [Citadel]
Yesterday I was out biking & training around my city of 6 million and you would never know there was any economic downturn from all the high-end gas guzzlers jamming the streets as the credit overextended remnant middle- and upper-middle-class went out to play at arts festivals and jazz festivals. There isn't much middle anymore between the haves and have-nots, but still the majority of Americans think their comfy lifestyle is going to last forever; that the environment is just something media people talk about that has little or nothing to do with them, and that oil and gasoline will always be plentiful--at least in their lifetime and that's all that matters.
In my Deep South state what you see at these gasoline frolics are 30-, 40- and 50-something conservative white yuppies, professionals and middle-management types and black middle- and upper-middle-class government workers and professionals. Most of them drive the absolute biggest most expensive SUVs and gas guzzling sports cars on the market. We have the largest black middle-class of any city in the nation and they are, to all outward indications, completely environmentally oblivious, just as they are oblivious to the social costs of militarism and completely support the oil/terror wars and any and all Police State jobs their less fortunate kin can get their hands on. Martin Luther King Jr. would hang his head in shame to see them now, especially because of situations like the one in Nigeria and elsewhere in America's and the EU's resource grabs in Africa.
You must be refering to Atlanta, and you are 100% correct in pointing out that the racial division is the false flag and the real dichotomy in amurikkka is the illusion of "class". It is an illusion in that when the rug gets yanked out from underneath their "middle class" feet, they will all wind up on their asses and blame it on the other race instead of the lizard class (aka "elites"), which afterall, is just how said elites want the chips to fall.
I don't know exactly why I had expected the recently arrived black bourgeois to be "better", more "fair", more socially concerned for the poor and still left behind, but I did. I know literally 100s of them and figured out rather early on that they were just as "white" as the whitey whites they claimed to have despised but were so quick to emulate. I guess it's just an "amurikkkan" thing; one becomes what they claim to hate.
It's not going to end well.
the oppressed become oppressors
it's an old story
violence breeds violence
And isn't it amazing that the very same people here that growl and rant about Americas involvement in other countries are calling for America to become involved in Nigeria? Double standard, a-what? (not speaking of you just in case you thought that)
That's a nice play on the word "involvement", Prometheus. People are NOT asking for America to further exploit other nations - they are asking for a change in conduct, a change that won't happen.
hey, metal!
I found myself shaking my head, again, this weekend around just what you describe:
this time, the catalyst was all of the homes we passed on the street that are for sale, and people we know trying to sell, and having homes just sit, and sit, and sit...
my comments were that this was inevitable, and will only worsen as the planet, and economies, fall further into decline...
the head-shaker was that my companions were still of the current mindset...school, career, home ownership, retirement...every member of a family striking out as independent home or apartment dwellers until absolute financial ruin prevents, then this is viewed as a failure of the preson, rather than the system...
all mixed in with casual participation in the regular social activities you mention...
you are right..the fact that the oil-dependent car exists is a huge psychological barrier...how can life be screwed up if I can still drive, and be cool and social, doing so? no connection, whatsoever...
meanwhile, the oil gushes, everywhere...we're watching our activities alter the very planet and atmosphere, we rely upon for our very survival, possibly sending them straight out of our living temperature and chemical parameters, yet no one can break their minds free of the treadmill we run daily...
go to work, buy stuff...do it again...head down, busy, unknowing, unseeing...
what is the point of it all? much trouble ahead...real bad trouble...
sorry to ramble, I'm just so frustrated and antsy...
let's take the land back and stop this insanity...I'm ready...
I did not know about this.
Joe
Thats two.
BABOON
Thanksfor the comments... Now, let's all talk about the beg bad sreamnin' elephont in the room... PEAK OIL...AND THE BIG CRASH THAT IS COMING...
Oh, and as for temps, here in the southerntier of New York, my estimation is that the average temp now in May is usually around 70-75 degrees. It's been 85 and 90 with Mondays projectred temp to be 91. I don't think it has rained for two weeks, except for a bit one night.
We had a really hot,dry May and June in 2007. The grass is usually really green in those months. But that year all the grass was really brown. I have been spending my days watering my veg garden.
Again peak oil freinds, peak oil
It's coming...
Very different from last year which was below normal -- beautifully below normal -- until August. On the other hand, we've been dry, yes, but the problem is that the rain is coming all at once. There's been a lot of flooding.
So the next time you pull into a gas station - whether it's BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron or whatever - let this be a constant reminder of your 'need' to own and drive a personal, private automobile. Gives the term "fill 'er up" a new meaning, doesn't it?
And speaking of Africa, if you're one of the millions of transhumans connected to an 'indispensable' high-tech device like a cellphone, laptop or playstation - you are contributing to the ongoing rape and slavery that is rampant in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Close to three million people have died there over the mining of coltan.
For those of you who are still unaware, 80% of this blood mineral comes from the Congo - and it's in your cell phone!
Happy motoring with your bluetooth connection ...and pleasant dreams.
This disaster confirms why I continue to support off-shore drilling on our coastline. For too long we've been perfectly satisfied to out-source our pollution to other countries (see Nigeria) while not changing our habits one bit.
I support banning all off-shore drilling as soon as we address the demand issue of oil. Until we do, drill away.
Perhaps if our electronics were being dismantled by women and children here rather than in China, creating entire toxic communities, we would buy a few less IPhone upgrades.
This oil geyser is heartbreaking. It is however exactly the type of incident that tends to move Americans toward action.
In the fairytale, King Midas got his wish granted: everything he touched turned into gold. As the facts in this article show, everything that these oil spill's touch are turning into "black gold". Water, vegetation, etc; what a sad and shameful process.
Great timing on the article. Very informative and I appreciate the journalism.