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Bonny Island Light

Apky

About once a year the Western Media reports oil spills in Nigeria with the usual diet

photos of The Evil Poor African tapping pipelines to steal oil. Nothing about The Baron of

Evil.

The truth is, ca. 14% of Shells global productio n currently (700,000-1,000,000 barrels

per day) is from Nigeria where Shell has 90 oil fields, 73 flow stations, 1,000 wells, 2 export

terminals in Bony Island and Forcados, and 6,000 km of old, rusty overland pipelines and

flowlines passing through villag es, causing more than 6,000 oil spills since 1976, squirting

black sludge into the soil and drinking water, polluting farmland and fisheries of the Niger

Delta, the home to ca 30 million people. Less than 25% of the spills are often remediated

simply by turning over the soil. Worse than the spills are the flares. Nigeria (after Russia),

with 24 billion cubic metres yearly, leads the world in gas flaring.

The first challenge is often to find or create a market for this gas, the oil multis claim.

Yet over 100 million Nigerians lack constant electricity. Till December 2008, a hundred

columns of flares, emitting toxic chemicals, tremendous heat and ear -splitting noise 24 hours

a day, continue to burn in communities with no power. From 1970 the multis have bu rned

over $72bn in gas, ca $2.5bn yearly. Nearly 60% of the fine imposed on the multis for flaring

by the government, estimated recently to be $150,000 -370,000 per annum, is paid by the

Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the local partner in the join t ventures with Shell/BP,

Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Total and Agip.

Remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989. Niger Delta has an equal

Exxon Valdez annual oil spill whose economical and ecological degradation stands at $5bn

per year. The income from oil for Nigeria is 80% of the revenue, of which 13% is allocated to

the Niger Delta where life is characterized by poverty, horrific child mortality, 80%

unemployment and ecological disasters. Huge tankers queue at Bonny Island to transport

millions of barrels of Bonny Light, the oil brand that is graded one of the worlds highest,

marked by its low sulphur content that makes it easy to refine.

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Between 1950 and 1993 Shell raked in $30bn extracting 900 million barrels from 400

square miles of Ogoniland, one of 9 provinces of the Niger Delta. The average daily yield

here is 2.4 million barrels of light crude.

Since the early 1600s, Bonny Island has been a Western -bound colonial trading port.

It still is. In 1963, three years after Nigerias independenc e, a British trade commissioner, in a

confidential memo to the Foreign Office wrote that Nigerian politicians ?A will probably be

among the last people in the world to realise that it is sometimes desirable not to exploit a

countrys natural resources. In the long run, Shell/BP is going to have to consider very

carefully how it should explain publicly the large outflow of capital ?A. It will no doubt come

as something of a shock to Nigerians when they find that the company is remitting large

sums of money to Europe.

Ken Saro-Wiwa did. He became an activist for human rights, refusing a ministerial

post offered him by the ex -president Abacha, in exchange for dropping the campaign against

Shell. Ken was finally executed in 1995 with other activists and with Shell collaborating. On

June 8 this year, after 13 years of the legal process started by 10 Ogoni plaintiffs including

Kens son and his brother Dr Wiwa in the USA (under the Alien Tort Claims Act), Shell made

a settlement of US$15.5 million to keep itsel f out of court. A good warning to other

companies that they can no longer violate human rights in Africa with impunity.