Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Hidden Article

This posting has been hidden because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines.

IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

Shell's role in the Nigerian Delta

. | 28.03.2006 15:09

On the 10 November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were hanged by the Nigerian authorities. This African fighting for the rights of the indigenous poor of his minority tribe as they were, so he claimed, raped by Shell, the Anglo-Dutch corporation, was the epitome of the Anglicised product of Empire.




The affable and savvy sitcom writer and campaigner was pipe-smoking and poshly-spoken; he owned a large house in Surrey and sent a son to Eton. He was either a naive hero indifferent to risk, or a flawed maverick who made fatal misjudgements. "Ken was no saint", says Donu Kogbara, a London-based Ogoni journalist friend of his. "He was tremendously charismatic and sometimes very nice", she remembers. But she believes he lost touch with reality as he was wooed by starry names in Europe and the US.

Ken Saro-Wiwa became a darling of the greener sections of London liberal society, but had been on the federal side during the Biafran civil war, and would thus have been reviled by liberals then. It has been argued that he was a federalist because he thought only a strong state would defend minorities like the Ogoni. Anyway, he is widely believed to have feathered his nest when managing the Niger delta oil port of Bonny during the civil war. Ken finally and fatally enraged his country's military regime by demanding greater autonomy for the people living in a patch of the swampy Niger delta. Given the politics of the country, the more strident of these voices were bound to be silenced. He seems to have been caught out by the military's haphazard alternations between permissiveness and oppression. And he did not help his cause by unleashing undisciplined and deeply disaffected young men on moderate former colleagues in the struggle, four of whom were murdered at a rally. Donu Kogbaru believes her own father, one of the moderate leaders, was lucky to escape with his life. "I'm accusing Ken of incitement to murder", Donu Kogbaru insists, when pressed.

The West was interested in his campaign because it was directed almost as much at the Shell oil giant as it was at Nigeria's regime. Shell was the obvious target for an ironic reason, as most of its Nigerian critics freely admit. The oil company is perhaps the most respectable institution in Nigeria.

"We've been here a long time and we expect to be here a long time", says Brian Anderson, the Nigerian-born white who runs Shell's operations there. Shell started producing oil from the Niger delta 40 years ago. It was in Nigeria when the place was one of the bright stars of the continent and expects to be there when and if hope returns. In the meantime, like any large firm there it funds armed police seconded from the state for the defence of its people, and necessarily deals with authorities of whom it strongly disapproves.

Ken realised Shell was amenable to pressure. It operates as a thirty percent, and the largest private, shareholder in a Nigerian joint venture company, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), alongside Elf and Agip, with the Nigerian state oil company owning 55 percent. In the delta, you see the Shell sign everywhere, but it stands over facilities substantially owned by the Nigerian state, which must put in 55 percent of the capital expenditure required to keep production flowing - and clean. Shell's biggest problem is in wringing that share from the state.

SPDC produces about a million barrels of oil a day, half the country's total which contributes in a good year around $9 billion dollars to the national exchequer, or three quarters of the total government revenue (and about a third of the country's GNP). Some of the money is salted away by the country's leadership and their friends. Little of it reaches the delta where all of it is produced, and where six million people live in a soggy region of farms, forests and swamp about the size of the Republic of Ireland. Even less than its fair share reaches Ogoniland, where half a million of Ken Saro-Wiwa's compatriots people live in an area of about 1000 sq kilometres.

The lively Nigerian economist Patrick Utomi once proposed that the oil ought to be given to the ruling elite once and for all - in return they might give Nigeria back to the people. The Economist Intelligence Unit's regional report notes that the country's economy collapsed during the oil boom: too many important players gave up conventional work and concentrated on trying to cream off a share of the bonanza.

Arguably, none of this is Shell's fault: as Brian Anderson never tires of stressing, three percent of the revenue SPDC pays the Government was supposed to come back to the producing areas. It's a sum close to Shell's 3.2 percent share of the oil dollar, and is a sliver of the country's average 75 percent share of the barrel's worth. If the arrangement had worked, the delta might have become a fine area in a fine country. "The money was not fully spent, and it wasn't wisely spent", Anderson insists, in a code which speaks of corruption and waste.

A meeting with local chiefs at Sapele township in the north west of the delta has the erudite community spokesman Vin Kariks Ekariko rattling off a list of health and environmental effects many of which probably aren't real or could not be caused by the oil industry. After the meeting, and in private, a local chief thanks the Shell people for the scholarships, the education schemes, the community hospitals and all the rest that the company has done locally - and much of it long before the disturbances of the early 90s. He wants more, and knows that in a better society politics, not begging, would sort things out. He does not say - but it's true - that community leaders are usually as keen to cream off their share of the booty as anyone else. Shell spends about $20m a year on community projects (and eight times more on environmentally-orientated equipment renewal). "Things are back to front here," says Anderson. "The Government's in the oil business and we're in local government". He believes privatisation is inevitable in the end, and looks forward to it.

Flying over the delta in a helicopter for hundreds of miles, and visiting several noted pollution hotspots as well as observing a dozen or so oil production facilities and, crucially, the water and ground around them - it is hard to see what the environmental fuss has been about. In the delta there are plenty of rivers and creeks where there is an oil sheen. They remain a tiny minority, and the spills may as well have been caused by careless local boatmen as by the oil giant. For the most part, the delta is a vast, watery, deeply verdant region lying under skies which are ordinarily tropical. Shell occupies one third of one percent of the delta: even if it had devastated that area and ten times more besides, and it hasn't, the damage would be a fraction of what is routinely claimed by campaigners.

What then of the famous flares? Firstly, there are none at all in Ogoniland, where there has been no oil production since 1993, following community disturbances. Elsewhere in the delta, about a hundred flares waste a resource equivalent to a quarter of France's gas demand.

The flares do very little useful work, and it has been castigated by green commentators. Because oil production facilities bring people with money, locals congregate wherever SPDC has kit. Some come to live near flares, which constitute free light and a means of drying crops such as cassava.

Rightly, SPDC is committed to putting out all the flares, if possible by 2008, and about a quarter of them within three years. The latest project to harness about a quarter of the wasted gas involves deals with customers in southern Europe and 5.5bn dollars worth of new plant whose financing was a nightmare, not least because the Nigerian government, already heavily in arrears in its payments to SPDC, had difficulty raising its share.

The scheme has been an on-and-off affair for twenty years, but is now under construction. The deal was agreed in the weeks following Ken's execution and seemed to some a symbol of Shell's venality. For Anderson the position is simple: if Shell pulled out of Nigeria someone less committed would go in. The gas scheme was a sign of progress, not failure. On the revenue-addicted economy he comments, "The 'curse of oil' is a real issue - but it has brought a lot of good things. I believe very strongly that by being here we offer something for them to choose from." Besides, he adds: "No country in the world has ever left oil in the ground". It is not the observation of an angel, but then there seem to be few angels in this story. One can see the physical presence of Shell in the delta and think it tolerably benign. What is harder to sense is whether Shell has been canny - still less, whether it has been at all noble - in its arm-twistings in the Nigerian corridors of power.



.

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech