Spills, Spies, and Lies: Shell’s Slick Exit from Nigeria

Wall Street is an invisible partner in Shell’s plunder: happy to enjoy the spoils, deaf to the spoils of war Shell waged on Nigeria’s environment

Cue the confetti: Shell is finally packing its bags after 87 years in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. But before anyone applauds, note that the oil giant is slipping out the back door largely to avoid cleaning up the monumental mess it created, all while still clinging to the profitable parts of the business. In a $2.8 billion “exit” deal announced in January, Shell agreed to sell its onshore Nigerian subsidiary to a local consortium called Renaissance. How noble—except Shell isn’t really riding off into the sunset. The company generously decided to loan the buyers $1.2 billion to help them purchase Shell’s assets and will pony up another $1.3 billion to fund future cleanup and gas projects. Why would an exiting company invest further? Perhaps because those projects conveniently benefit Shell’s remaining 25.6% stake in Nigeria’s gas enterprise. In other words, Shell is getting paid to “leave” while secretly keeping a foot in the door and a hand in the cookie jar.

Of course, Shell has made sure someone else will deal with the dirty aftermath. The new owners will “take over responsibility” for all the fun stuff – oil spills, pipeline theft, sabotage, and cleaning up decades of pollution – freeing Shell to wash its hands of the whole onshore nightmare. How convenient. Shell’s press release basically says: Not our problem anymore, blame the locals now. Environmental campaigners, however, aren’t buying this corporate vanishing act and insist Shell must not be allowed to escape culpability for the catastrophe it caused in the Delta. As one long-time Ogoni activist, Celestine Akpobari, put it: “Shell has to restore our environment and lost livelihoods before selling anything. Our environment should be restored to the level Shell met it.” – a level that was a heck of a lot cleaner than what Shell is leaving behind.

87 Years of Oil Spills and Suffering

Shell’s legacy in Nigeria can be measured in oil-soaked wetlands, poisoned rivers, and shattered communities. Over nearly nine decades, millions of barrels of oil have been spilled across the Niger Delta. In just the decade between 2011 and 2022, more than 10,000 oil spills were recorded – an ecological apocalypse that Shell consistently downplayed or blamed on “sabotage.” These spills, combined with Shell’s continuous gas flaring (giant open-air fires that save Shell money while pumping toxic fumes into local lungs ), have devastated livelihoods. In many villages, people who once lived by fishing and farming can no longer feed their families from the polluted land and water. “Our people enjoy their fishing and farming business but can’t do that anymore,” Akpobari laments. Now, he says, “we… watch our children and dependants die of hunger and sickness because of poverty.” This is the human cost of Shell’s operations: families driven into destitution by the destruction of their environment.

For decades, Niger Delta residents have protested and fought back. Starting in the early 1990s, civil society uprisings took aim at Shell’s rampant pollution and gas flaring (those toxic fire pits lighting up the Delta sky). None suffered more famously than the Ogoni people. In 1995, after years of speaking out against Shell’s destruction, nine Ogoni activists – including renowned writer Ken Saro-Wiwa – were hanged by Nigeria’s military regime. The trial that condemned them was such a sham that even then-UK Prime Minister John Major described it as “fraudulent.” And guess who had a front-row seat? Shell. The company had a “watching brief” at the trial, and later several witnesses revealed that Shell and government officials bribed them with cash, houses and jobs to testify against the activists. (Shell, of course, denies it did any such thing – it always denies, no matter how damning the evidence.) The blood of the Ogoni Nine has stained Shell’s reputation ever since, and Ogoni communities have spent decades seeking justice for the company’s role in their leaders’ deaths.

Shell’s response to these outrages has been equal parts PR spin and covert scheming. Publicly, the company tried to distance itself, painting its Nigerian subsidiary as a lone bad apple. In a classic piece of corporate excuse-making, Shell’s London HQ claimed in the ‘90s that it did “not operate using a top-down management approach” and that each subsidiary was responsible for its own operations. In other words: “Don’t blame us, it was those local guys.” (Right – as if a Nigerian subsidiary would flout Shell’s directives without approval from London.) Privately, Shell wasn’t above playing dirty to protect its interests. The company hired a sinister private intelligence outfit called Hakluyt – staffed by former MI6 spies – to infiltrate and spy on environmental groups. Hakluyt’s agents posed as activists and filmmakers to gather intel on Greenpeace, local Nigerian organizers, and anyone daring to challenge Shell. When this espionage came to light, Shell admitted it had indeed hired Hakluyt, mumbling that it only wanted to protect its employees from “possible attack”. Because nothing says employee safety like sending undercover spies after Greenpeace. In truth, Shell doesn’t just pollute – it also silences and sabotages those who expose its misdeeds. Spying on activists, colluding with military dictatorships, brushing off human rights – it’s all part of the Shell playbook in the Niger Delta.

BlackRock and Vanguard: Cashing In on Catastrophe

Through all of this, Shell’s biggest investors have sat comfortably in boardrooms an ocean away, making a killing off the killing (of the planet and arguably of people’s livelihoods). Financial giants BlackRock and Vanguard are Shell’s top shareholders, together owning roughly 13% of the company. BlackRock alone holds about an 8% stake and Vanguard about 5% – making them complicit stakeholders in Shell’s Niger Delta fiasco. These firms love to talk about sustainability in their marketing brochures, but they’ve been profiting from Shell’s dirty business with zero accountability. Every dividend check BlackRock and Vanguard cash comes greased with Niger Delta crude.

It’s no secret that activists have started calling out these enablers by name. After all, without massive investment from the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard, Shell might have felt more pressure to change its ways. Instead, the oil giant’s financiers have quietly bankrolled environmental destruction, content to rake in profits while communities in Nigeria choke on oil fumes and drink polluted water. Neither BlackRock nor Vanguard has seriously moved to divest from Shell or demand cleanup of the Delta – their complicity is passive but profound. As long as Shell’s stock delivers returns, the suffering of Nigerian villagers doesn’t show up on their balance sheets. In effect, Wall Street is an invisible partner in Shell’s plunder: happy to enjoy the spoils, deaf to the spoils of war Shell waged on Nigeria’s environment.

Dodging Accountability to the End

Shell’s escape from Nigeria looks like the grand finale of a long con – a bid to dodge the growing queue of lawsuits and liability coming its way. In recent years, the company has finally been dragged into court over its Niger Delta operations, and it hasn’t been pretty. Last November, London’s High Court ruled that 13,000 farmers and fishers from the Ogale and Bille communities can sue Shell in the UK over decades of oil spills that destroyed their water and way of life. Shell’s reaction? This isn’t our problem, it’s our subsidiary! The company flat-out denied that it directly owed the affected Nigerians anything, insisting that only its Nigerian subsidiary (SPDC) was responsible – and SPDC, Shell claimed, had already done what it could to compensate people. Classic Shell move: blame the subsidiary, and by extension blame the victims for suing the wrong entity.

But that legal dodginess is exactly why Shell wants to offload SPDC now. Once the Nigerian subsidiary is sold to a local buyer, those 13,000 villagers and others like them will have a much harder time hauling Shell into foreign courts. The new owner, Renaissance, will likely be immune from lawsuits in the UK or Netherlands, effectively shielding Shell Plc from accountability. It’s almost as if Shell’s board sat down and said, “Quick, ditch the Nigerian assets before the courts make us pay!” Activists see right through this plan. A coalition of Nigerian and international NGOs (including Amnesty International) wrote to regulators urging them to block Shell’s great escape, accusing the company of trying to use “legal gymnastics” to shirk its responsibility for a “widespread legacy of pollution.” They demanded that no sale be approved unless Shell cleans up its mess, consults local communities, and locks away sufficient funds to cover full remediation. In other words: no sneaking out of the crime scene in the dead of night.

Even lawyers representing affected communities are livid at Shell’s attempt to cut and run. As the law firm Leigh Day put it, “It would be unconscionable for Shell to pack up its onshore operations in Nigeria without cleaning up its mess and paying compensation… We consider that Shell, having made billions of pounds over decades from extracting oil resources from Nigeria, should fulfil its legal responsibilities and not leave behind an environmental catastrophe as it seeks to exit the Niger Delta.” Unconscionable indeed – but conscience has never been Shell’s strong suit.

Nearly 30 years after Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution, the Ogoni people (and many others in the Delta) are still in court, still demanding that Shell make amends. As activist Cindy Baxter bluntly said, “Nearly 30 years after Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were hung for protesting Shell’s pollution, the Ogoni people are still fighting it in the courts. Before this corporation leaves the country, it must clean up — and pay for its environmental crimes.”

In other words: Shell needs to clean up its damn mess. That’s not exactly the happy ending Shell’s PR team had in mind, but it’s the bare minimum that the people of the Niger Delta deserve after decades of the company’s profiteering and destruction. Shell can run from Nigeria, but it shouldn’t be allowed to hide from the consequences of what it did there. The Niger Delta will remember – and so should we.

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