Re-posted from AFP– Oct 24, 2011

YENAGOA, Nigeria — A Nigerian environmental group on Monday claimed an oil spill from a pipeline operated by Italian firm ENI had badly polluted an area in the south of Africa’s largest oil producer.

The spill which reportedly occurred on September 27 is said to have polluted the swamps of the Ikeinghenbiri area of Bayelsa state in the main oil-producing Niger Delta region.

“The volume of the spill is very high and in some cases it is difficult to separate the crude from the water,” Environmental Rights Action field monitor Morris Alagoa told AFP a day after he visited the village.

The group’s executive director, who is also chairman of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, said, “I understand it’s a very severe spill.”

Alagoa said he found that “in some places the whole length of the swamp is black (with oil).”

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Interview: Johannes Beck (stf)
Editor: Sarah Steffen

Re-posted from Deutsche Welle

 Nnimmo Bassey (right) with Johannes Beck, DW’s head of the Portuguese for Africa department

10/12/11

International head of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, is a special guest at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. The Nigerian campaigner spoke to DW about the link between literacy and environmental protection.

For years, Nnimmo Bassey has been fighting against the oil industry’s pollution in the Nile Delta. Broken pipelines, illegal small refineries and the burning of excess gas have caused an ecological disaster. According to Bassey’s organization “Environmental Rights Action,” the Nigerian chapter of Friends of the Earth, a proper cleanup would cost $100 million.

Bassey, a laureate of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize), spoke to the head of DW’s Portuguese for Africa department, Johannes Beck, at the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LitCam conference. This year’s focus is on how education can contribute to sustainable economic growth. To hear the full interview, click the link below.

Deutsche Welle: Today we’ve heard how literacy can contribute to climate protection. Yet if we look at industrialized countries, we see that many have a high literacy level – for example Germany – but we still cause a lot of carbon dioxide emissions. What do we need?

Nnimmo Bassey: The industrialized world has to a large extent – and I say this with due respect – lost the connection with nature. I mean, when was the last time you looked at a night sky to see the stars? If you are in a city with so much electric light everywhere you almost don’t know what a beautiful night sky looks like. And this is [just] a small thing.

We actually require taking this literacy to the popular level. Our scientists have to be retrained to communicate their work in a popular way, to speak the language that the people on the street can understand. Because when you keep on producing statistics and things that sound like flying above people’s heads, this is okay as a scientific finding, but is has nothing to do with me. People want what they can relate to, what they can understand.

You said industrialized countries have lost their connection to nature. But when I travel to Latin America, Africa or Asia, I feel that at least in the big cities of the developing world, people also have a very fragile connection to nature. Is it really only a problem for industrialized countries?

I would agree with this. We need a worldwide reconnection, but we must also not forget the historical basis of the conflict and challenge we are facing. When scientists tell us that 80 percent of the atmospheric space for carbon has been taken, this was not done by the developing countries.

We know some really rich polluting entities of the world, which have taken off and colonized the atmosphere by themselves. They don’t want to negotiate how the remaining 20 percent can be shared.

They don’t really care what happens the day after, because they have better resilience and better capability to withstand the storms of life that most inevitably will confront all of us.

But again, when we make some broad statements, we have to look at details. We have the global north in the south; we have the global south in the north. Because there are very rich people in poor countries who live very wasteful lives and who are creating as much damage as anybody else.

I’m personally engaged and committed to engage in joining people across the world to confront power, because corporate power has captured public structures across the world.

Full text interview

Full audio interview

Nigerians seek $1 billion from Shell for oil spills

By Mira Oberman | AFP – Thu, Oct 20, 2011

Re-posted from AFP

A Nigerian tribal king filed a lawsuit in a US court seeking $1 billion from Royal Dutch Shell to compensate for decades of pollution that sickened his people and damaged their lands, his lawyer said.

The suit was filed a day after the US Supreme Court said it will consider a lawsuit accusing Shell of human rights abuses in Nigeria in a landmark case that could make companies liable for torture or genocide committed overseas.

That case will assess the potential liability of corporations — including multinationals with a US presence — under the Alien Tort Statute, a US law dating back to 1789 that scholars say was meant to assure foreign governments that the United States would help prevent breaches of international law.

The latest case alleges that Shell’s Nigerian operations are “well below internationally recognized standards to prevent and control pipeline oil spills” because the Anglo-Dutch company “has not employed the best available technology and practices that they use elsewhere in the world.”

It cited a recent United Nations report that found that contamination was widespread in the Nigerian Delta after 50 years of oil extraction left groundwater badly contaminated and the soil soaked with hydrocarbons to depths of five meters.

The suit was brought on behalf of the people of Ogale in the Eleme local government area, where the UN team found the most serious groundwater contamination and people drinking water laced with cancer-causing benzene at 900 times World Health Organization guidelines.

Scientists found an eight centimeter layer of refined oil floating on the groundwater that served the wells. The oil was linked to a spill that had occurred six years earlier and was not properly cleaned up.

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photo credit: © Kadir van Lohuizen/NOOR

From the website of Amnesty International: http://blog.amnestyusa.org/business/shell-accused-over-misleading-figures-on-nigeria-oil-spills/

17 October 2011
Re-posted from AFP

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court said Monday it will consider a lawsuit accusing Royal Dutch Shell of human rights abuses, a case that could make companies liable for torture or genocide committed overseas.

The plaintiffs — relatives of seven Nigerians killed by the country’s former military regime — sued the Anglo-Dutch energy giant and other firms for apparently enlisting the government to suppress resistance to oil exploration in the Niger Delta in the 1990s.

The case will assess the potential liability of corporations — including multinationals with a US presence — under the Alien Tort Statute, a US law dating back to 1789 which scholars say was meant to assure foreign governments that the United States would help prevent breaches of international law.

The 12 Nigerian plaintiffs charge Shell with “complicity in human rights violations committed against them in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta in Nigeria between 1992 and 1995,” according to their complaint put before the court.

“These violations included torture, extra-judicial executions and crimes against humanity.”

It said Shell “aided and abetted the Nigerian government in committing human rights abuses,” and added: “For the victims of human rights violations such cases often provide the only opportunity to obtain any remedy for their suffering.”

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image credit: Sweet Crude

Read the Reuters piece on the same subject

Environmental Rights Action Field Report #276: Shell’s dredging of River Nun spurs coastal erosion in Peremabiri community

Tuesday, 04 October 20

Re-posted from Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria)

To tell you the truth no one is comfortable with the way the River Nun is expanding while the community land is shrinking by the day. It is like a story now when we tell strangers that this community has lost over fifty meters of land in the last few years. And, if the trend should continue unchecked, we may join the monkeys in the swamps very soon. We are of the view that the dredging activities of Shell around us also have negative effect that is leading to the collapsing river banks and expansion of the River here. We are calling for assistance from government before we are wiped out from this location. What are we going to tell our children coming behind? – Maurice Jonathan

GPS Coordinate: Elev: -9m, N 04°38.395’, E006°04.910’

Peremabiri community is one among several Ijaw communities in Boma Clan of Southern Ijaw Local Government Area that settles along the Nun River. Farming and fishing are the major occupations of the people.  Apart from hosting the biggest rice farm [abandoned for several years now]in west Africa established by the moribund  Niger Delta Basin Development Authority [NDBDA], it is also host  to several oil wells including Shell’s Diebu Flow station, wellheads and pipelines.
Peremabiri has had its fair share of the negative impacts of oil exploration/exploitation activities: oil spills/fire and the effects of gas flaring that is still on-going at the flow station.
Information reached ERA/FoEN that the community was almost going into extinction due to river encroachment caused by dredging activities of Shell and because of this phenomenon it became necessary to visit the community and get an on-the-spot assessment of the situation.
ERA field monitors were led round the community by the current and past chairmen of Peremabiri Community Development Committee [CDC], Mr. Maurice Jonathan and Dickson Peresuote.

Read full report

photo:  Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria)

by Claire Thompson

Re-posted from Grist

28 Sep 2011 1:10 PM

Overnight, Nigeria went from being a British colony to being owned by Shell oil. Filmmaker Sandy Cioffi went to the Niger Delta — Nigeria’s oil-rich southern region — in 2005 intending to document the construction of a library in a small village there. But something about the effort smelled foul to her; it smacked of the type of empty philanthropy that’s carried out by well-intentioned but misguided volunteers and backed by controlling interests hoping to distract or make up for deeper, systemic exploitation. Fifty years of oil extraction in the delta has polluted the region’s ecosystem to the point where what should be a vibrant equatorial swampland humming with life is now a silent dead zone where human life expectancy hovers around 40.

As Cioffi took all of this in, she also earned the trust of a few local college students, politically savvy young men who, as Cioffi puts it, “were getting that I get it.” So she decided to take advantage of the rare press access she’d been granted as part of the library filmmaking team and return to the area, supposedly to follow up on the library’s progress. “I flat-out lied,” she said. “I felt I needed to film in that moment, because I had access. No one had made a documentary about the Niger Delta in years, and it’s not because they didn’t want to, it’s because nobody could get a visa or press passes to get in. I was the only person in the delta with a camera legally.”

Sweet Crude, the film that resulted from Cioffi’s stealth return, documents the effect the oil industry has had on the political and human destiny of the Niger Delta. Since its release in 2009, Sweet Crude has racked up dozens of selections and awards at festivals across the world. Now that it’s out on DVD, we got a chance to screen it here at the Grist office, before sitting down with Cioffi for some background.

Q. How did you come to realize that the film you needed to make was not about building a library?

A. It was pretty gross to me to see all of the outpouring of resources from oil companies, from the American embassy, from all the sort of high-and-mighty and, as it turns out, quite corrupt Nigerian officials, who all wanted a piece of looking like they were for this library effort. Why should we be bringing the books that children in a Nigerian village are going to be reading? I mean, billions of dollars of oil under your feet — all they need is for us to get out of the way of their political destiny. I tried very hard to make a film that, without being an anti-philanthropy film, would be clear that I wasn’t looking at the people there as victims or perpetrators; I was trying to look at them as complicated people, like any of us are.

Q. What role does the oil industry play in Nigerian politics?

If you look at the amount of untapped oil that’s still there, not only is it untapped, but it’s also sulfur-free, which makes it incredibly valuable because you don’t have to process it. That’s why it’s called sweet crude. To an oil company, it’s liquid gold.

It’s impossible to discuss situations like the Niger Delta in a context that isn’t also immediately about the 50-year history of colonialism being turned into corporatism. Nigeria’s probably the most perfect example of a place that never had a shot because they overnight went from being a British colony to being owned by Shell Oil. We always talk about [the Biafran War in the Niger Delta] in what I consider to be fairly racist terms — look at all those crazy Africans fighting each other because of their tribal issues — well, those were ethnic tensions that were intentionally manipulated, first by the British and then by oil companies.

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Photo: Kendra E. Thornbury