Posts Tagged ‘Niger Delta’

Environmental groups claim the volume of the recent spill was larger than admitted by the oil company

January 1, 2012 – 8:30am | By Tony Tamuno

Contrary to claims by  Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) that the December 20 oil spill in its  Bonga offshore field involved “less than 40,000 barrels”, latest  satellite imaging by United States-based non-profit environmental awareness and protection group,  SkyTruth, reveals that the volume could have been as high as 60,000 barrels.

Environmental analysts say the thickness of the oil slick on the waters adjoining the spill area, estimated at about 120 kilometres offshore Nigeria in the 200,000 barrels per day capacity Bonga oil field, was inconsistent with what Shell claimed as the volume of oil pumped into the ocean.

Shell, which blamed the spill on a leak on the export line linking the Floating Production Storage and Off-take Vessel (FPSO) to a tanker during the process of transferring crude oil, had said that the oil slick following the spill was “less than a hundredth of a millimeter” thick in most areas.

However, the environmental group has pointed out that with an oil slick estimate of 1/100th of a millimeter (an equivalent of 10 microns) provided by Shell, the spill volume could not have been anything less than 58,000 barrels (about 2.4 million gallons) or more.

SkyTruth President,  John Amos, said: “We think the amount spilled is near the high end of Shell’s estimate of “up to” 1.68 million gallons (about 40,000 barrels), based on the size of the oil slick observed and the photos provided showing a rainbow sheen.

“The thickness of “rainbow sheen” is in the 5 to 10 micron range according to the CONCAWE guidelines, and 0.3 to 5 micron range according to the BONN convention. The 5 microns overlap would mean a spill of at least 1.2 million gallons (28,571 barrels).”

Shell, which claimed on Friday that the oil slick has successfully dissipated and dispersed at more than 7.5 kilometres offshore, following the use of chemical dispersants, insists that whatever discrepancy is established between the real size of the spill and what it reported could be other spills from the facilities of other oil companies operating in the area.

However, when contacted SPDC’s Manager, Communications and Media, Tony Okonedo, said he would not comment on claims by SkyTruth, as Shell was not aware of the basis upon which it based its estimates of the spill.

Also, contrary to claims by Shell, as well as a declaration by the Minister of Environment,  Hadiza Mailafia, that the spill has not impacted the environment in some Niger Delta communities, some environmental rights groups in the region have cried out to the government to call the oil company to order.

The National Coordinator, Ogoni Solidarity Forum,  Celestine AkpoBari said President Goodluck Jonathan should emulate his United States counterpart, Barack Obama, who decisively held  BP accountable following the explosion that involved the company’s deepwater oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Shell believes it came to Nigeria to do business and not cater for the interest of the people in the area of its operation. Claims that only 40,000 barrels was involved in the Bonga oil field could not be true, just as it has always told lies about oil spills in Ogoniland,” AkpoBari said.

“With a former staff of Shell as the current Minister of Petroleum Resources, no one should expect the company to say otherwise.”

Similarly, a representative of the Ogoni Advancement Organisation, has condemned Hajia Mailafia over her media comments that the oil spill did not impact coastal communities in the region, saying given the situation where the minister was flown to Bonga oil field with an helicopter provided by Shell, there was no way anyone would expect her not to be influenced to be biased in her observations.

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Sopuruchi Onwuka And Napoleon Ehiremen: 28 December 2011

Warri — The crude oil volumes that spilled from Bonga deepwater field has started arriving the coastal communities in Niger Delta, sparking off a spate of public outcry over the dreaded impact on the fragile environment.

Consequently, people of Delta state communities have called on the federal government and Shell to take immediate steps to halt the spill to avoid further damage to their land and sources of water.

The development came as officials of Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) arrived at the area yesterday to verify the claims and take samples of the sludgy surge to the coasts.

Shell had reported spill of 40, 000 barrels or 6.5 million liters of crude oil from operated Bonga oilfield located 120 kilometers offshore Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

While government and all the operators in the petroleum industry battle the spill to minimize its impact on the environment, National Oil spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) said the crude oil would hit the Niger Delta coasts as from last weekend.

Some inhabitants of some communities in Burutu local government area of delta state had complained of a heavy flow of substance suspected to be crude oil into their territory.

A team from the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, who arrived at Warri from Lagos yesterday, went straight to the creeks of Delta State to ascertain the impact of the Bonga oil spill had taken samples of the substance for laboratory analysis.

Deputy Director of NMASA, Captain Warredi Enisuoh, who led the delegation to Beniboye, one of the alleged affected communities in Burutu local government area of Delta State, urged Shell to rush to the area to contain the spill.

He said: “At this particular point in time, we definitely know that there is a spill in the area, but however, Shell did do what they can to contain that particular spill, we do have some more spills offshore area around the Beniboye community of Burutu Local Government Area of Delta State and we have taken samples of that oil, but we cannot at this particular point in time confirm whether it is from the Bonga Oil Spill or not, only a scientific analysis will determine this case.

“But from what our team has just seen, it is appalling, it is not very good to see and as you can see, we are here and the Director General of Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, Mr. Patrick Akpobolokemi was very concerned hence he sent this particular team to go out there and see things for ourselves and probably at some points, bring pressure on the people responsible and possibly we all join our efforts to do something so that the communities in the area do not suffer beyond what they are likely to face at the moment,” he stated.

Responding to a question, Captain Enisuoh who was also accompanied by Marine Environment Team said: “My report is that, we have to do something as soon and as quick as possible before it goes beyond what we have found because the oil in the area we are not going to under estimate the ecological and economic damage it will cause and so we will use this medium to appeal that something is done immediately.

“Shell knows the situation on ground at the moment. I was with the Managing Director of Shell few days ago and he was quick to instruct his officials to clean up any oil in the area irrespective of whether it was from Shell or not which was a very good move and I must commend him for that.

“Like I have said, this one that we have found which is currently threatening the Coast at the moment has to be dealt with immediately and it will not be right to go for or blame somebody. I think the effort should concentrate on fixing the situation as soon as possible.”

Copyright © 2011 Daily Champion. All rights reserved.

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By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press 26 December 2011

ABOARD THE BONGA FLOATING OIL VESSEL (AP) — The worst Nigeria offshore oil spill in more than a decade has been contained before reaching the West African nation’s coast, officials with Royal Dutch Shell PLC said Monday, less than a week after one of its lines bled crude into the Atlantic Ocean.

An investigation into how the spill of less than 40,000 barrels — or 1.68 million gallons — happened remains ongoing, though company officials acknowledged workers only discovered the leak after seeing a sheen of crude in water surrounding its Bonga offshore oil field.

Meanwhile, Shell officials say the company will clean up another spill it discovered while containing its own — highlighting how prevalent pollution remains in oil-stained Nigeria after more than 50 years of production.

“We can undeniably say we traced our oil … and stopped it,” said Cliff Pain, who manages the Bonga operation for a Shell subsidiary.

Shell organized a helicopter flight Monday for journalists to see the Bonga field — controlled from a large ship as opposed to a stationary rig — about 75 miles (120 kilometers) off Nigeria’s coast. There, waters appeared free of the oil sheen as ships continued to patrol along the underwater lines linking the vessel to oil fields and transfer buoys for filling tankers.

The leak discovered Dec. 20 came from a break in a flexible line about 360 meters out from the vessel that sends oil to tankers, Pain said. While the vessel has a variety of gauges to check pressure on the line, it wasn’t until daylight broke that workers noticed a sheen surrounding the Bonga vessel, he said.

It takes about 25 hours to fill a waiting tanker with 1 million barrels of oil from the vessel, Pain said. That means the leak could have spewed for hours before being noticed.

At its height, Shell statistics show the sheen spread across about 350 square miles (900 square kilometers), matching an estimate earlier issued by an independent watchdog group called SkyTruth. Nigerian government officials previously said the spill only affected an area a third that size

Using ships and aircraft, workers spread chemical dispersants to break up the oil, which also evaporated in the region’s warm water and air, said Steve Keedwell, a Shell employee who helped oversee the cleanup operation. Shell ultimately stopped the sheen about 11 miles (18 kilometers) before it made landfall, Pain said.

However, workers then discovered a separate oil spill around the mouth of a river in Delta state, said Mutiu Sunmonu, Shell’s Nigeria country chairman. Sunmonu said samples of the oil showed it came from a different source, though the company would clean it up as well.

“When I sighted it myself, my initial reaction was anger, but I told myself: ‘You know, you just cannot afford to be angry, just deal with it,’” Sunmonu said.

The Nigerian group Environmental Rights Action, which monitors spills around Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta, has blamed Shell for the new spill. Nnimmo Bassey, the group’s executive director, could not be immediately reached for comment Monday night.

Shell operates the Bonga field in partnership with Italy’s Eni SpA, Exxon Mobil Corp., France’s Total SA and the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. It produces about 200,000 barrels of oil a day — around 10 percent of production in Africa’s most populous nation. The field remains shut down and Shell officials offered no estimate Monday of when production could resume at a field vital to Nigeria’s government finances.

Nigeria, an OPEC member nation producing about 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, is a top supplier to the United States. However, pollution from spilled oil stains its Niger Delta region, with crude lapping against beaches and leaving a black ring around creeks in an area about the size of Portugal.

Some environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil poured into the delta during Shell’s roughly 50 years of production in Nigeria — a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. Many blame Shell and foreign companies working in Nigeria for the pollution. However, Shell in recent years has blamed most of its spills on militant attacks or thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up sold on the black market or cooked into a crude diesel or kerosene.

Talking with journalists, Sunmonu acknowledged that the limited spill, open ocean and favorable weather had helped Shell quickly contain the spill. If it had been on land, the oil could have sunk into the soil, remaining there for years, he said.

It also would have pushed Shell into negotiations with village elders to clean up the spill, something it often contracts other companies to handle. Many view the company with hostility after its years in the delta, and its employees remain targets of kidnap gangs and militants.

“You don’t have communities to contend with” on the ocean, Sunmonu said.

• Royal Dutch Shell PLC: http://www.shell.com
• Shell’s Nigeria spill website: http://bit.ly/rqfnxi

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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By Alex Lawler

LONDON | Fri Dec 23, 2011 1:41pm EST

(Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell’s Nigerian oil spill, the largest in the African nation since 1998, highlights the different world responses to oil spills.

Nigerian authorities on Thursday put emergency measures in place to prevent the spill of less than 40,000 barrels from the Shell facility, the biggest leak in Nigeria for more than 13 years, washing up on its coast.

The spill is small compared to last year’s much documented rupture of BP’s Macondo well off the United States but critics say the fact it happened in Nigeria means little attention has been paid to it.

In comparison, BP’s Macondo disaster spilled nearly 5 million barrels in the Gulf of Mexico, sparked criticism of the company by politicians, a media frenzy and wiped billions off its market value.

“There are double standards operating. With the Deepwater Horizon spill last year there was a massive amount of interest,” said Paul Horsman, a spokesman for Greenpeace, the environmental group. “The reality is, where ever the oil industry operates, it creates havoc.”

Shell’s shares briefly declined on Wednesday when news of the spill from the Bonga oilfield 120 kilometers off Nigeria’s coast emerged, but have since risen as investors saw little reputational risk for Shell.

An oil analyst at a bank said Shell’s latest Nigerian spill was unlikely to have much of an impact on the company.

“They are cleaning it up and the authorities seem very supportive of what’s happening,” he said. “This is not the worst incident.”

Shell’s pipelines in Nigeria’s onshore Niger Delta spill often, and the company usually blames this on sabotage attacks and oil theft, though it did not in this case.

On its website, Shell says almost 30,000 barrels spilled from the operations of its Nigerian venture in 2010 and there were more than 150 separate spills.

It said “less than 40,000 barrels of oil” had leaked into the ocean in the latest spill, equal to almost 6.4 million liters.

Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency put the spill at 20,000 barrels on Thursday and said it was the biggest in Nigeria since 1998, when some 40,000 barrels leaked from a ruptured Mobil pipeline off the coast.

POLLUTION IN THE NIGER DELTA

The latest spill comes four months after a U.N. report criticized Shell and the Nigerian government for contributing to 50 years of pollution in a region of the Niger Delta which it says needs the world’s largest ever oil clean-up, costing an initial $1 billion and taking up to 30 years.

Shell’s global website includes a prominent link to updates on the spill and photographs taken at the site, including of a damaged export line at Bonga identified as the source of the leak.

In an update on Thursday, Shell said an oil sheen on the ocean’s surface had thinned due to a combination of natural factors and the use of dispersant. Five ships were applying dispersant and more equipment and vessels are being mobilized.

“Since Tuesday, when we became aware of this regrettable leak at our Bonga offshore facility, substantial progress has been made in mitigating the consequences,” Shell’s chairman in Nigeria, Mutiu Sunmonu, said.

(Editing by James Jukwey)

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By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, December 23, 4:20 PM

By Sophie Mongalvy (AFP) 22 December 2011

LAGOS — Authorities rushed to prevent one of Nigeria’s worst recent oil spills from reaching the West African nation’s shoreline on Thursday, with production from a major Shell field also shut due to the leak.

Shell, which said the leak has been stopped, has estimated that less than 40,000 barrels of crude have spilled into the sea and was deploying ships with dispersants to attack the slick. Planes were also being mobilised.

It was Nigeria’s worst offshore spill since a 1998 Mobil incident, officials said, though onshore leaks have been estimated at levels far worse since that time in the oil-producing Niger Delta.

“It’s about the same level with what happened in 1998 with the Mobil oil spill,” said Peter Idabor, head of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency.

“The oil slicks went down the whole coast line and beyond Nigeria’s borders.”

He said, however, that Nigeria was better prepared this time, with some 210 tonnes of dispersant being prepared to attack the spill, which has spread to an area between 35 and 45 miles (about 55 to 70 kilometres) in size.

He said it was unclear when the oil slick could reach the shore. London-based Oil Spill Response Limited was to be involved in the clean up, Idabor said.

The slick was moving in the direction of Forcados, which is located along the coast of Nigeria’s Delta state, he said.

Nnimmo Bassey, the Nigeria-based head of Friends of the Earth International who has closely monitored spills in the country, called it a major incident and pressed for an independent analysis of the amount of oil leaked.

“We can see a real threat to livelihood to fishermen and local communites onshore,” he said.

The leak occurred Tuesday at Shell’s Bonga field some 120 kilometres off Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and an OPEC member. Production has halted at the field, which has a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day.

The company claimed Thursday that “up to 50 percent of the leaked oil has already dissipated due to natural dispersion and evaporation,” but that figure was impossible to verify independently.

Bassey cast doubt on the figure, saying “I don’t believe that 50 percent would disperse over just less than two days.”

Shell said it was deploying vessels and mobilising planes to fight the spill.

“To accelerate the clean-up at sea, we are deploying vessels with dispersants to break up the oil sheen at sea,” Shell Nigeria head Mutiu Sunmonu said.

“We are mobilising airplanes that will support the vessels in this operation … We are currently working with the Nigerian government to inform local communities and fishermen about the situation.”

Shell said the leak occurred during a transfer of crude to a waiting tanker. The likely source was an export line linking a production vessel to the tanker, it said.

Nigeria has been producing between 2.0 and 2.4 million barrels per day in recent months.

Scores of oil spills have occurred in the country, but most have been onshore, particularly due to pipeline sabotage aimed at stealing crude to sell on the black market as well as militant attacks.

Activists say Shell and other companies have not done enough to prevent oil leaks at their facilities.

The UN released a report in August saying decades of oil spills in the Nigerian area of Ogoniland may require the biggest cleanup ever undertaken, with communities dependent upon farmers and fishermen left ravaged.

Activists say two spills in the Ogoni community of Bodo in 2008 amounted to hundreds of thousands of barrels, but Shell disputes that figure and says it was far lower.

Amnesty International has estimated that if all types of oil pollution in the vast Niger Delta — the country’s oil-producing region — are added up over the past half-century, it would be “on par with the Exxon Valdez every year over the last 50 years.”

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

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By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press 22 December 2011

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — An oil spill near the coast of Nigeria is likely the worst to hit those waters in a decade, a government official said Thursday, as slicks from the Royal Dutch Shell PLC spill approached the country’s southern shoreline.

The slick from Shell’s Bonga field has affected 115 miles (185 kilometers) of ocean near Nigeria’s coast, Peter Idabor, who leads the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, told The Associated Press. Idabor said officials expect the slick to reach beaches by Thursday afternoon.

Shell, the major oil producer in Nigeria, said Wednesday the spill likely occurred as workers tried to offload oil onto a waiting tanker. The company published photographs of the spill, showing a telltale rainbow sheen in the ocean, but said it believes that about 50 percent of the leaked oil has already evaporated.

The source of the leak has been plugged, Idabor said, but the spill still threatens the shoreline and wildlife. Idabor said experts from Britain were coming to help with the cleanup.

Shell announced Wednesday that the Bonga spill likely was less than 40,000 barrels, or 1.68 million gallons. That’s about the same amount of oil spilled offshore in 1998 at a Mobil field. The 1998 spill saw oil slicks extended for more than 100 miles (some 160 kilometers) to Lagos, the country’s commercial capital.

“Since the Mobil spill, this is just about the most major one,” Idabor said.

Nigerian authorities hope to use oil booms and chemicals to disperse or collect the spilled oil, Idabor said. In a statement, Shell said its Nigerian subsidiary already had sent ships out to the slick to use dispersant on the oil sheen. The company also said it would use infrared equipment to trace places where the sheen is the thickest.

Bonga sits about 75 miles (120 kilometers) off Nigeria’s coast. It can produce about 200,000 barrels of oil and 150 million cubic feet of gas a day, according to Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary. Production at the field, which Shell operates in partnership with the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., has been halted since the discovery of the spill.

Environmentalists blame Shell and other foreign oil firms for polluting the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta. Some environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil poured into the delta during Shell’s roughly 50 years of production in Nigeria — a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. An estimated 11 million gallons was released during the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Shell in recent years has said most of the spills in the delta are caused by thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up sold into the black market or cooked into a crude diesel or kerosene. Apparently predicting interest in the spill would grow, Shell already had taken out Internet advertising Thursday on search engines, directing those searching for the spill to their website.

Slicks from the Bonga spill likely will reach beaches near the Forcados River delta on Thursday, affecting wildlife there, Idabor said.

Nigeria, an OPEC member nation producing about 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, is a top supplier to the U.S.

• Royal Dutch Shell PLC: http://www.shell.com
• Shell’s Nigeria spill website: http://bit.ly/rqfnxi

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Attempts by Royal Dutch Shell, the parent company, to argue the charges should not be levelled at the ‘mother company’ but its Nigerian subsidiary prompted an 18 month delay to the proceedings. Royal Dutch lost that argument in December 2009.  But it hasn’t given up the fight – requests by prosecutors to access relevant information from the parent company have recently been blocked in the Dutch courts.

December 9th, 2011 | by Nick Mathiason

People living in the Niger Delta where land and rivers are indelibly polluted after decades of oil extraction have long suffered violations of several internationally recognised human rights.

These rights comprise the right of access to food, work, an adequate standard of living, health and a healthy environment.

Environmental degradation has wrecked farming and fishing livelihoods in the Delta on a massive scale. This was confirmed by the United Nations Environment Programme in August when it called for an initial $1bn fund to clean up oil related pollution.

Three years prior to the UN’s detailed study, in May 2008, four Nigerian fishermen and farmers from the Delta villages of Oruma, Goi and Ikot Ada Udo filed several lawsuits against Royal Dutch Shell in the district court of the Hague where the oil giant has its international headquarters.

The villagers alleged Shell was negligent in its clean-up of oil spills.  They claimed their health was adversely affected as a result. Shell argues that a recent preliminary court ruling stated that all the spills under the spotlight were caused by sabotage.

This keenly watched case, expected to be heard in the Hague next year, is a lesson in how corporate ownership structures can affect legal redress in alleged human rights violations.

Attempts by Royal Dutch Shell, the parent company, to argue the charges should not be levelled at the ‘mother company’ but its Nigerian subsidiary prompted an 18 month delay to the proceedings.

Royal Dutch lost that argument in December 2009.  But it hasn’t given up the fight – requests by prosecutors to access relevant information from the parent company have recently been blocked in the Dutch courts.

Corporate secrecy
For campaigners seeking greater economic transparency it seems the problems of corporate secrecy and difficulties establishing who owns what are now entering the human rights arena.

Human rights defenders say parent companies often try to counter cases against them by arguing that claims should be brought against the operating company. They say that it is the subsidiary – where the alleged violation took place – that is at fault, not them.

‘This is not about avoidance,’ stated a Shell spokesman. ‘It is about who is legally responsible. Like most corporate groups, Shell’s corporate structure is determined by normal business considerations.’

For those seeking redress against alleged wrong-doing, prosecuting a subsidiary company though is problematic.

Potential claimants in developing countries are often unable to hold that company to account for three reasons.

Firstly, legal systems in developing countries often find it hard to manage lengthy and complicated cases. Secondly the subsidiary in the developing country may not have enough cash to meet the size of financial claims. And finally, developing countries may be unwilling to hold a corporation to account due to complicity or corruption.

That said, developed countries also have a history in preventing sensitive cases from being heard. Witness the UK government’s decision in 2006 to end an investigation into alleged bribery and false accounting in BAE’s arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

The challenge of human rights defenders is best summed up in one phrase: piercing the corporate veil.

The corporate veil is a term given by human rights lawyers in their attempt to pin liability on the parent companies of major corporations.

Andie Lambe, head of the international justice at Global Witness, said: ‘Very few of the alleged abuses committed or facilitated by companies ever make it to court for a variety of reasons. One of these is that the structure of the corporation protects it from liability.’

Professor Sheldon Leader, director of the Essex University Business and Human Rights Project, added: ‘What Shell has said to the Netherlands’ judiciary – and it will be important to see how far other major companies argue the same – is that they do have high standards but they do not give orders to subsidiaries. Therefore, they argue, they are not responsible for damage to local populations due to the shortcomings in their subsidiaries’ performance.’

Take profits, not responsibility
Companies may not admit to legal responsibility of their subsidiaries when difficulties arise but they certainly take responsibility for the cash they generate. When companies publish financial reports, subsidiaries are inextricably linked to the parent. Consolidated accounts, by definition, embrace the thousands, if not millions of transactions conducted by all subsidiaries in which the owner has a beneficial interest.

What’s more, quoted companies in the US and UK stock exchanges are obliged to reveal all the subsidiaries they either own outright or have substantial stakes in which are considered to be materially important.

Clearly in financial reporting, a link between the parent and subsidiary is manifest. Yet company law treats every business entity as legally separate, even within the same ‘business family’. And this is where difficulties arise in seeking to hold a parent company accountable even in instances where it knew of or supported the conduct of its subsidiary.

To remedy this, a corporate ‘duty of care’ principle needs to be established which states that in the event of a parent financially benefitting from a subsidiary, it has a responsibility to ensure the subsidiary carries out duties in line with established laws. When the subsidiary fails to live up to required standards, the parent has to face legal liability – and not  hide behind a corporate veil.

This article is also published in the Guardian.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Graphic from the Guardian article Unloveable Shell, the Goddess of Oil

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT GOODLUCK EBELE JONATHAN ON THE PROPOSED ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANING OF OGONILAND BASED ON THE UNEP REPORT/ RECOMMENDATIONS.

December 5, 2011, 2011

Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GCFR)
President and Commander-In-Chief,
Armed Forces of the
Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Aso Rock, Abuja.

His Excellency,

We the Ogoni students in diaspora, whose parents, siblings, friends and homeland are seriously threatened from  human and  cooperate environmental policies to extinction by Shell for over five decades in Ogoniland, are greatly honored to write  you and the people of Nigeria on the need to urgently address the environmental pollution and concerns of the Ogoni people. We still repose our confidence in you, especially in solving the monumental environmental tragedy that the people of Ogoni, Niger Delta and this great nation are faced with. We urge you therefore to use your leadership in providing credible plan that will ultimately address the environmental cleaning, along with adequate compensation to the Ogoni people for social, health and economic damages.

Few months ago, the people of Ogoni, the people of Nigeria, and the world had a preview of Ogoni environmental nightmare as the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) presented its fourteen months impact assessment study on Oil and gas pollution in Ogoniland. The gravity of the report remains that oil pollution has permeated the length and breadth of Ogoniland beyond human imagination. It is a fate uncalled for and it has exacerbated further the environmental traumatization of the Ogoni people. Therefore, the report has made it clear that there is no cultural, social, economic, moral and legal justification to delay the implementation of the recommendations.

While the UNEP report has validated the Ogoni environmental degradation as a serious ecological war Shell perpetrates daily in Ogoniland, our fears for delaying implementation of the professional-brilliant job of the UNEP is profound and heightened by your duplicated committees and non actions on the report. As a people whose livelihood, history, wealth, and environment have been tied to long chain of discrimination and persecution demonstrated in endless imbalance of socio- political and economic policies towards Ogoni people, we still have hope in you and cannot believe that your caliber of person is employing delay, or other subtle means to deny our people justice even with this credible UNEP report as it has been the manner of most of your predecessors.

We believe your plans in addressing the Ogoni environmental problems should include the use of the UNEP as the On-Scene Remediation Authority in the remediation phase of Ogoniland, and a provision of Comprehensive Environmental Corrective Action Plans that will pre-inform the Ogonis, Nigerians and the world responsible parties, and actions to be taken. We consider that the integration of these two plans, among others, will inject confidence into the entire process, and detect immediately any act of sabotage during the Ogoniland Remediation Project. Our suggestion is based on the fact that the Ogoni pollution has attracted international attention; particularly with the newly validated report by the UNEP, and any approach or plan that is not transparent enough will call to question the intention of the Federal Government of Nigeria under your leadership.

Sir, as a fellow Niger Deltan, we would like to avoid delay in the implementation or any future insinuation that point to failure of the UNEP report/recommendations. Our prayer is that God forbid any Ogonland remediation/bioremediation failure.

We also want to add that in one of your  recent trips abroad the issue of state creation gave you a tremendous challenge as your remark was mostly  driven by great sense of indifference and politic rather than the honest way to address the growing frustration of unequal equation of social justice in our great nation. We implore you to reconsider your decision and limit your cultural distance on issues of common interest by submitting a bill to the National Assembly for state creation, particularly Bori State. State creation is a common and possible way of solving our political and economic problems of perpetual political marginalization by the government while improving quality of life for its inhabitants.

Mr. President, as you read this letter, we hope that it will touch and remind you of the sacrifice Ogoni people have invested in the campaign for restoring their environment to pristine or near pristine condition. Our efforts have equally sensitized the entire Niger Delta of the danger of oil and gas pollution, yet Ogoni has nothing to show for it while other parts are benefiting. The abandonment of Ogoni and the non-integration of Ogoni in any government meaningful development has made us to hold tenaciously unto the fundamental fact that our wealth are stolen, and we as Ogoni people are made to struggle with poverty, misery, death and pollution. How can something that is so wrong and an injustice to humanity be right because it affects Ogoniland?   It is our fervent hope that as you read this letter, it will prompt initiation of action oriented policies towards properly addressing Ogoni cause.

Thank you.

On behalf of the National Union of Ogoni students (NUOS INTL) USA, we are:

Pius Barikpoa Nwinee

President

Sampson Npimnee

Secretary

Baridaakara Sunday

Public Relations Officer.
–
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“We are going to demand our RIGHTS – Peacefully, Non-Violently, and we shall WIN” – Ken Saro-Wiwa  (1941-1995)
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NUOS Intl – Seeking solutions to the plight of indigenous students around the world.
(www.nuos-ogoni.org ~nuos.intl@gmail.com ~ friends@nuos-ogoni.org ~ phone/msg – 773.250.7004)