Shell shells out

15,600 Ogoni farmers and fishermen whose lives were devastated by two large Shell oil spills in 2008 and 2009 will be celebrating as the company’s Nigerian subsidiary announces a £55m settlement. British banks will start to transfer 600,000 naira (about £2,100) into each of the local people’s accounts and the community will be given millions to build health clinics and refurbish its schools. Shell’s first offer to the Bodo community in 2011 is understood to have been £4,000. This was raised to £18m in 2013 but was also rejected. According to Shell, the villagers had demanded £300m for the damage done.

The settlement, split £35m for individuals and £20m for the Bodo community, avoids Shell having to defend a potentially embarrassing London high court case which was due to start shortly. It is thought to be the largest payout to any African community following environmental damage and the first time that compensation for an oil spill has been paid directly to affected individuals rather than to local chiefs.

“It’s several years’ earning. I don’t think I have ever seen a happier bunch of people. The minimum wage in Nigeria is 18,000 naira a month and 70% of the Bodo population live below the poverty line. Every single one of the 15,600 has said yes to the deal,” said London lawyer Martyn Day whose team of 20 has just returned from the delta after negotiating the settlement and helping to set up thousands of bank accounts for Ogoni people who did not have one.

In a separate development, the company’s Nigerian subsidiary Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) said it expected to start to clean up its pollution in the Bodo fishing grounds and swamps “within months”. Shell had initially estimated that around 4,000 barrels of oil were spilt in the two events, but oil experts calculated from film footage that it could have been 60 times as much. According to Amnesty International, Shell had intentionally underestimated the spills in an attempt to minimise compensation payments.

Amnesty International accused Shell of trying to evade its responsibilities and said thousands of other people living near its old pipelines were at risk from spills.

Audrey Gaughran, the charity’s director of global issues, said: “Oil pollution in the Niger Delta is one of the biggest corporate scandals of our time. Shell needs to provide proper compensation, clear up the mess and make the pipelines safer, rather than fighting a slick PR campaign to dodge all responsibility.”

Styvn Obodoekwe, a spokesman for the Nigerian centre for environment, human rights and development said: “Oil giant Shell’s long-overdue compensation payout to a community devastated by oil spills is an important victory for the victims of corporate negligence.”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/07/shell-announces-55m-payout-for-nigeria-oil-spills

The Ogoni Oil Protests

Oil and gas makes up 14% of Nigeria's GDP and Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil producer. Nigeria's oil production hit 2.3 million barrels per day in August 2014, the most since January 2006. An estimated $400 billion has gone missing from oil revenues in Nigeria over the last 50 years. 84% of Nigerians live on less than $2 a day.

The Ogoni ethnic group occupies about 1,000 square kilometres in the eastern Niger Delta region in southern Nigeria. Shell-BP, as it was then known, started oil extraction in Ogoniland in 1957, a year after it sunk its first Nigerian well in Ijawland.

In 2010 the Nigerian government asked the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to carry out an independent assessment of the oil-polluted Ogoni environment. In August 2011 UNEP presented its devastating report, which detailed high levels of contamination throughout the area: ‘The Ogoni community is exposed to hydrocarbons every day through multiple routes. While the impact of individual contaminated land sites tends to be localized, air pollution related to oil-industry operations is all-pervasive and affecting the quality of life of close to one million people.’ After 50 years of oil pollution, UNEP called for ‘the world’s most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken’. The $1-billion cost should be borne by the Nigerian government and the oil industry, UNEP declared. When the UNEP report was released in 2011 there was an international outcry. But the Ogoni people themselves were not surprised at its findings. As Rose Zaranen, an Ogoni leader, puts it: ‘The report only confirmed what we had always said. Now they have discovered for themselves that they have been poisoning our land and people. They should come and clean the land as UNEP has asked them to do. Since they don’t want to listen to us they should listen to UNEP.

 ‘Shell, in collusion with a succession of governments in Nigeria, is responsible for the human and environmental tragedy of the Ogoni people,’ says Bariara Kpalap, a leading Ogoni activist. “At the Human Rights Violation and Investigation Commission in 2000, Shell admitted that it was paying the military and sharing intelligence with them about Ogoniland and our people. With that false information, the military killed, maimed and raped in Ogoniland.”

A new wave of anger, manifesting in large protests, is sweeping through Nigeria’s Ogoni region over the refusal of the government to implement the UNEP report two years after it was released. The sense of frustration is articulated by Nnimmo Bassey, local NGO leader, prolific poet and writer, and former chair of Friends of the Earth International. ‘The UNEP report clearly attests to the decades of ecological aggression in Ogoniland. It is scandalous that no real action has been taken. Each passing day of delay places a death sentence on the people.’

‘The discovery that every part of Ogoni territory – water, land and air – is contaminated is terrifying,’ says Dr Nenibarini Zabbey, a hydro-biologist and co-ordinator of the local Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD). ‘It is alarming to have recorded levels that high of BTEX [benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes] in the groundwater people have been relying on over the years. The concentration is about 900 times above the permissible limit set by the World Health Organization.’ This may help explain why life expectancy in the Niger Delta is just 45 years.

In July 2012 the government half-heartedly responded, and set up the Hydrocarbon Pollution Restoration Project. Unfortunately, the project is part of the Petroleum Resources Ministry, not the Environment Ministry. Since its formation, its greatest achievement has been putting up warning billboards on polluted sites in Ogoniland, saying: ‘Public notice – prohibition! Contamination area – keep off.’

The clean-up is not just the government’s responsibility, however. Activists are also directing their calls for implementation at Shell, which is responsible for thousands of the spills that are still poisoning the Ogoni people’s land and water today. On 28 August 2008, a new tragedy struck. A fault in the pipeline resulted in a significant oil spill into Bodo Creek in Ogoniland. Shell – now known in Nigeria as Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) – repaired its facility the following November, but didn’t clean up the spill. Oil poured into the swamp and creek for weeks, covering the area in a thick slick and killing the fish that people depend on for their food and livelihood. 2009 saw a second spill. Faced with overwhelming evidence that the pipeline had not been adequately protected or repaired, Shell has been ruled liable for the impacts of the spill – a ground-breaking legal decision that could open the floodgates to other similar cases. The company has offered to pay $51 million to settle, which the Bodo lawyers described as ‘insulting’: it would not remotely cover the costs of what the community members have lost.

From here

SHELL: Business As Usual In Ogoniland

If there is one country where Shell’s broken promises ring hollower than anywhere else it is in Nigeria.
For decades, the company’s operations in the country have been mired by pollution and community protests which in turn have been met with endless cycles of violence against protestors.
The communities in the Niger Delta have been protesting for decades against this chronic pollution and grinding poverty. But year after year, promises from Shell of a better future for the local communities have been found to be as broken as brittle bones.

And the community in Nigeria where the wounds impacted by Shell probably go deepest is the Ogoni, once led by the charismatic Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was brutally murdered by the military junta in the mid-nineties. Shell has always denied complicity in his death, despite evidence to the contrary.
Ogoniland is where Shell has operated at the centre of this vortex of pollution and violence and where you would have thought the oil company would be most willing to try and make amends. A place where it would try to heal the deep and bitter wounds.
But you would be wrong.

For seasoned Shell-watchers, it is of no surprise that three years after the publication of a report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on oil pollution in Ogoniland, which urged Shell to clean up the area, the company has spectacularly failed to do so.
In fact its operations have been deemed “shameful” by a group of influential NGO’s such as Amnesty International, Environmental Rights Action, Friends of the Earth Europe, Human Rights and Development and Platform.
In a new report they argue that Shell and the Nigerian Government have failed to implement the recommendations in the UNEP report, which would “put an end to the abuse of the communities rights to food, water and a life free of pollution.”

Of the twenty seven recommendations in the report, none had been fully implemented by this month.
“The people of Ogoniland continue to suffer the effects of fifty years of an oil industry which has polluted their land, air and water,” the report argues. Shell for its part, “continues to use deeply flawed clean-up practices,” which were declared ineffective by UNEP.
A crucial recommendation by UNEP to set up a $1 billion fund to clean up contaminated land in the region has not been implemented. The report, entitled, ‘No progress’, also highlights Shell’s manipulation of information to avoid accountability for old and leaking pipes – pipes so old the company will not disclose their age or condition.

Godwin Ojo of Friends of the Earth Nigeria argues that “Three years on and the government and Shell have done little more than set up processes that look like action but are just fig leaves for business as usual. The lack of meaningful action in the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence is outrageous.
Ojo accused the Nigerian government and Shell of continuing to get away with environmental and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta.
Paul de Clerk of Friends of the Earth Europe adds that: “Three years after finding out that their operations have exposed almost every man, woman and child in Ogoniland – and almost certainly tens of thousands of people in others parts of the Niger Delta – to lifelong pollution, Shell is still more concerned with protecting itself.

He called on the Governments of Nigeria and the home countries of Shell, Netherlands and the UK, which have so far exerted no pressure on Shell, to make sure that the oil company starts a comprehensive clean up and pays due compensation for the pollution in the area.
But Shell’s shameful response continues. The company is trying to spin its web of greenwash and denial, arguing it “has made progress in addressing all the recommendations directed to it.”
After fifty years, it has failed to learn a simple lesson: that actions speak louder than empty words.

from here