Anger Seethes on Margins of Historic Oil Cleanup in Nigeria’s Delta

Oil companies and activists hope it will be a blueprint for wider rehabilitation, but other badly polluted communities are unhappy not to be included.

Earlier this month, crews of young men equipped with high-pressure hoses began to attack the crude oil that has blighted the creeks and mangrove swamps in the area where they live.

The workers from Bodo in Rivers State are beginning a three-year project that claims to mark a new approach to cleaning up the delta, the vast polluted swampland that pumps the oil vital to Africa’s largest economy.

Four hundred workers will clear dead foliage and spilled oil before planting new mangroves. The site where they are working is small, but organizers hope the anti-pollution drive can be repeated elsewhere in the delta.

Unlike cleanup operations run routinely by oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, this one is backed by local communities and teams of scientists who will take samples of water, mud and soil in each area to measure progress and determine the best cleaning method.

Funded by Shell and its joint venture partners, the cleanup is the culmination of years of legal wrangling and international pressure to overcome animosity and mutual suspicion that have divided locals, the government and oil companies.

Shell declined to say how much it was spending on the effort, whose leaders see it as a glimmer of hope in a benighted land where many wells are not safe to drink from and fishing and farming have been devastated.

“The Niger Delta is at a crossroads,” said Inemo Samiama, chairman of the Bodo Mediation Initiative (BMI), which is managing the cleanup. “We have a lot of polluted sites. We need something that we can refer to, some shining example.”

Hope and pollution

The work of the BMI covers 10 square kilometers, a tiny fraction of the 70,000-square-mile Delta.

As the workers walk through gnarled, dead mangrove roots in their protective gear and masks, oil seeps into their footprints — remnants of 2008 spills for which Royal Dutch Shell admitted responsibility.

Despite the optimism, environmentalists point out that at BMI’s work rate, it will take 21,000 years to clean the entire delta, and that’s not including the 10 years of legal battles it took to make it happen.

Communities in the other eight Delta states are also unhappy they have no cleanup plan, fueling the resentment that underpinned the militant movements that hit production last year and helped tip Nigeria into its first recession in 25 years.

Already one group, the Niger Delta Avengers, has threatened a return to violence. They say the government is not keeping its promises to clean up the delta and provide more jobs, money and infrastructure.

Other groups who do not advocate violence are also frustrated.

“No cleanup whatsoever has taken place,” said Deinbo Owanaemi Emmanuel, attorney for the Bille kingdom, also in Rivers but outside the cleanup area. “People are dying. People are being denied justice.”