Sneak preview & California Premier of The Naked Option, a film about the Nigerian women’s movement

7PM Saturday May 21st
Victoria Street Theatre
2961 16th Street, San Francisco
Q&A with Naked Option Director Candace Schermerhorn and Emem Okon from the Niger Delta
Tickets $10

THE NAKED OPTION reveals the inspiring story of an organized group of Nigerian women who use the threat of stripping naked in public, a serious cultural taboo, in their deadly struggle to hold the oil companies accountable to the communities in which they operate. The women, at the risk of being raped, beaten or killed, are trained and armed, but not with anything you can see. Through the leadership of the courageous, charismatic, and inexhaustible Emem J. Okon, these women are taking over where men have failed, peacefully transforming their ‘naked power’ into 21st century political action and mobilization. THE NAKED OPTION celebrates the perseverance and power of an organized group of women! A Q&A will follow the screening with film director Candace Schermerhorn, women’s rights activist Emem J. Okon, and Laura Livoti founder and director of Justice in Nigeria Now (JINN).

Presenting Partners: Justice In Nigeria Now, CounterCorp; Partner and Funder: Global Greengrants; Fund Coalition Partner: Women’s Earth Alliance; Special thanks to Rainforest Action Network, The True Cost of Chevron Network and the Global Fund for Women.

Shell blamed for Nigeria oil spills, UPI, published May 2, 2011 at 11:36 AM

LONDON, May 2 (UPI) — A lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell says the company hasn’t responded adequately to rampant oil spills in parts of the country.

The Bodo community in Nigeria filed a class-action lawsuit in London for an oil spill in the Niger Delta. The community blames Shell for many of the oil spills in the region.

Oil companies aren’t moving into the region to address the spills because of frequent attacks from militant groups like the Movement of the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.

The Bodo suit involves a leak believed to be from an oil pipeline that dumped crude oil into the Bodo creek for about four months in summer 2008. Shell said it didn’t know of the problem for several months, The Telegraph newspaper in London reports.

Nenibarini Zabbey, a researcher at Nigeria’s Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development, told the newspaper Shell officials arrived in the area in 2009 with meager food aid that the Bodo community found “insulting.”

Shell and other oil companies working in Nigeria blame sabotage oil bandits like MEND for many spills.

The United Nations estimated that at least 6,800 oil spills occurred in the area from 1976-2001.

Next Problem for Oil: Nigerian Elections, by JERRY A. DICOLO, The Wall Street Journal, APRIL 4, 2011

NEW YORK—Elections in Nigeria this month are sneaking up on the oil market.
[NIGERIA]

The civil war raging in Libya and unrest across the Middle East pushed oil to triple digits in recent weeks. But the threat of disruptions to Nigeria’s 2.2 million barrels a day of crude output has barely factored into prices, despite a history of attacks on the West African nation’s oil infrastructure during election season.

Failed Parliamentary Elections Nigeria, Security men awaiting deployment as at 10 am in Eket, April 2 2011, photo credit: Sahara Reporters

“It’s not on the market’s radar,” said Barclays Capital oil analyst Amrita Sen.

Nigerians will vote for their president, representatives to their national assembly and governors of the country’s 36 states over the next four weeks, but there have already been problems. On Saturday, Nigeria postponed parliamentary elections due to failed logistics, and on Sunday pushed back all votes one week.

Police, military and other security agencies are being deployed nationwide after political rallies turned violent over the past month. And rebel groups have already acted.

More than 10% of U.S. oil imports come from Nigeria, according to Department of Energy, so any supply drops would be taxing for U.S. energy consumers data. In January, the U.S. imported 968,000 barrels a day from the country, making Nigeria the fourth-largest oil supplier after Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

Prices rose to 2½-year highs just below $108 a barrel Friday, following a 17% rise in oil prices in the first quarter amid worries about unrest in the Middle East.

In Nigeria, a blast on March 16 rocked an oil facility run by the subsidiary of Italian energy major Eni SpA. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a militant umbrella group, claimed responsibility and pledged
further action.

The attack is a reminder of the supply disruptions that came with Nigeria’s 2007 elections. Attacks on the country’s oil infrastructure stopped the flow of as much as one million barrels a day of oil, forcing customers to scramble for supplies and leaving oil consumers wary of buying Nigerian crude for fear of future disruptions.

Read full article

Lethal illegal refineries dot Nigeria’s oil delta, by Samuel Tife, Reuters
Africa, Sun Mar 6, 2011 8:21am GMT

ODIGBO, Nigeria (Reuters) – A Nigerian soldier opens fire into drums of gasoline stacked among the mangroves, then runs back to a safe distance.

His colleagues set light to rags on the end of a stick and fling them into the liquid seeping from the bullet holes. The heat forces them to look away as orange flames roar into the air, billowing thick, black smoke.

Smoke rises from an illegal crude oil refinery site in an Ogoni community in Nigeria's Niger Delta July 7, 2010. REUTERS/Akintunde Akinleye

Destroying illegal oil refineries dotted among the creeks of the Niger Delta is almost as dangerous for these soldiers as working here was for the young men who turned stolen crude oil into home-made gasoline.

Crude oil thieves — known locally as “bunkerers” — have been a fact of life for years in Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry, puncturing pipelines and costing Nigeria and foreign oil firms millions of dollars in lost revenues each year.

A government amnesty two years ago for gunmen in the Niger Delta, where
dirt-poor thatch-roofed villages sit among some of Africa’s biggest industry installations, brought some respite.

But rising world oil prices have pushed the cost of gasoline in Nigeria up by a third to 150 naira a litre over the past three months, increasing demand on the black market and making the illegal refineries as profitable as ever.

“The local communities raised the alarm because of the devastating effects on their waterways and farms, and complaints have also started coming from the oil majors,” said Timothy Antigha, military spokesman in the Niger Delta.

“We are winning the battle. The situation would have been worse if we were not around,” he said.

A hundred soldiers backed up by gunboats and two helicopters were involved in Saturday’s operation, which targeted three illegal refineries around Odigbo, a village near the border between Bayelsa and Rivers states.

By the time the soldiers arrived, abandoned barrels of gasoline, blackened earth pits and scorched foliage were all that remained — these are close-knit communities and the bunkerers knew the military were coming.

The army seized equipment including home-made pumps and welding machines, but no arrests were made.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nigeria: NNPC to Begin Production On Shell’s Ogoni Oil Wells, by Chika Amanze-Nwachuku, This Day, Allafrica.com, 28 January 2011

image credit: Ken Saro-Wiwa from remember saro-wiwa, http://remembersarowiwa.com

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said Thursday that the Nigeria Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), its producing arm, will soon commence production from the 30 oil fields belonging to Shell Petroleum Development and Production Company (SPDC) in Ogoniland.

Group Managing Director (GMD) of NNPC, Engr. Austen Oniwon, who confirmed the development in an interview with journalists in Abuja, said the move was in line with the Corporation’s mandate to produce 250,000 barrels of crude oil per day in 2015.

Oniwon said to achieve the set mandate, the NPDC has grown its asset base in three fold preparatory to becoming a big player in the upstream sector, while the enabling environment has been provided by the Federal Government

The SPDC was forced to abandon the prolific oil wells in 1995, following the crisis that greeted the murder of former President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Ken Saro-Wiwa.

However, in 2008, the Federal Government announced that the oil fields would be handed over to another operator acceptable by the Ogonis on grounds that there was a total loss of confidence between the Ogoni people and Shell. Government reasoned that the solution to the crisis was to allow an operator acceptable to Ogonis to take over exploration activities in the area.

The pronouncement had pitched Shell against the Federal Government, as the oil giant insisted that it would not hands off those blocks to any operator, other than a Joint Venture partner. Shell had faulted government’s decision and resisted initial plans to hand over the control of the Nigerian oil fields to Chinese oil companies.

After intense lobbying, government named the NPDC as the new operator of the oil blocks, a development, which received the commendation of Shell, which under the NPDC’s operatorship, would continue to be a shareholder in the Ogoniland operations.

The news of the NPDC’s planned commencement of exploration has elicited reactions from Ogoni people, who vowed last month to resist any such moves.

MOSOP President, Mr. Ledum Mitee, told THISDAY recently that the Federal Government was yet to contact the Ogoni people on the planned take-over, insisting that any company that would be allowed to explore oil in Ogoniland must be acceptable by the people of Ogoni.

“I have not been contacted about the plan by the NPDC to begin production, although the government was considering appointing a new operator. Our position as always is that Shell must be replaced. So it is important that government should first discuss whoever will be coming with us. I should expect government to contact us for discussion first and for us to know who is coming what the company stands for and what they are bringing to the table. We don’t want Shell or something like Shell or a company that will work for Shell,” he said.

Also, Ogoni people, under the umbrella of National Union of Ogoni Students, USA, recently cautioned Shell, NPDC and the NNPC against what it described as the danger of back door negotiations with acclaimed stakeholders, and vowed that neither Shell, NPDC nor NNPC would be allowed to operate in the area.

The students in a statement titled “Ogoni Allegations Against the Nigerian Government and Shell”, a copy of which was made available to THISDAY warned against using the security forces to terrorise the people of Ogoni in order to start oil production.

The statement read: “We also discovered that the Rivers State government, NPDC, Shell and the federal authority are making another calculated attempt to start oil production in Ogoni without meeting the demands of the people as stated in the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR). They planned to do this through the use of the already established security task forces (Abacha style) coupled with some help from the deceptive works of the UNEP. We strongly advise the Rivers State government to stop using the State security taskforce to terrorise the people of Ogoni in order to start oil production.

“We abhor a repeat of state and corporate sponsored violence that characterised the 1990s’ which was used by the Nigerian government as a pretext to kill prominent Ogoni leaders and over 4000 Ogoni indigenes for demanding their rights. Ogoni students viewed these secret attacks as a sponsored activity by Shell Oil and the authority to resume oil operations in Yorla Oil Fields. We shall be forced to take civil actions against Shell and all those behind these constant threats to the peace of Ogoni”.

The President’s budget proposes to cut more than $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry. We need your help to convince Congress to make these cuts.

It won’t be easy. Over the last two years, Congress received more than $12 million from the oil industry. And for every $1 that Big Oil invests in campaign contributions to Congress, they get a payback of at least $332 in the form of subsidies.

That’s an unbelievable bargain. It’s no wonder that Big Oil and their allies in Congress are doing everything they can to keep those subsidies. But it’s not their money, after all, it’s yours.

To make matters worse, these are the same politicians who say we need to stop spending and balance the budget. It’s time for them to stop talking out of both sides of their mouths. It’s time to pay back the American people, not the oil industry.

Please send a letter to your representatives in Congress to demand that our government stop supporting Big Oil and Coal.

The oil industry wants you to ignore the way they buy your government, remain ignorant of their massive profits, overlook your pain at the pump, and forget about the environmental consequences caused by this dirty industry.

But we won’t forget, and neither will you. It’s time to take action to eliminate the billions of taxpayers’ dollars going into the pockets of Big Oil.

That’s what Oil Change International is fighting for and here is how you can help: Tell your Senators and Representatives to stop using your tax dollars to support this dirty industry.

It’s time for some payback of our own, as we remind Congress who they should be working for.