"Oil Industry Has Brought Poverty and Pollution to Niger Delta"

Amnesty International recently issued a damning report on the manner in which the oil industry has destroyed Nigeria's Niger Delta Region. The title says it all: "Oil Industry Has Brought Poverty and Pollution to Niger Delta."

The Amnesty report notes: The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) describes the region as suffering from “administrative neglect, crumbling social infrastructure and services, high unemployment, social deprivation, abject poverty, filth and squalor, and endemic conflict.” This poverty, and its contrast with the wealth generated by oil, has become one of the world’s starkest and most disturbing examples of the “resource curse”.

Oil has generated an estimated US$600 billion since the 1960s. Despite this, many people in the oil-producing areas have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water, and eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins.

“More than 60 per cent of people in the region depend on the natural environment for their livelihood,” said Audrey Gaughran “Yet, pollution by the oil industry is destroying the vital resource on which they depend.”

Oil pollution kills fish, their food sources and fish larvae, and damages the ability of fish to reproduce, causing both immediate damage and long-term harm to fish stocks. Oil pollution also damages fishing equipment.

Oil spills and waste dumping have also seriously damaged agricultural land. Long-term effects include damage to soil fertility and agricultural productivity, which in some cases can last for decades. In numerous cases, these long-term effects have undermined a family’s only source of livelihood.

The destruction of livelihoods and the lack of accountability and redress have led people to steal oil and vandalize oil infrastructure in an attempt to gain compensation or clean-up contracts.


Black Looks blog has written quite extensively on the catastrophe as well...

Shell pays blood money to Ogonis

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has agreed to pay $15.5 million in blood money to a group of Ogoni plaintiffs. The group had filed a lawsuit in US court alleging Shell's complicity with human rights abuses in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The multinational pretended that the agreement was a "humanitarian gesture," presumably thinking that someone might be fooled. If Shell is suddenly concerned with "humanitarianism," perhaps they could stop the toxic gas flaring and other environmental and resulting human devastation that they are causing in the Delta.


Other sources on the story...
-The Independent (UK daily)
-This Day (Nigeria daily)
-AllAfrica.com
-Essay by Ken Saro Wiwa Jr. (background)
-Shell Guilty (pressure group)
-Shell (corporate press release)

Niger's assault on freedom of the press

Radio Netherlands' very good Media Network blog reports that authorities in Niger have taken Radio France Internationale off the air for three months.

The suspension was provoked by a day of solidarity organized by the broadcaster in support of its Niamey correspondent Moussa Kaka. An RFI reporter in the country since 1993, Kaka has been imprisoned since September 2007 for having been in contact with Tuareg rebels in northern Niger. Contact that RFI rightly calls "a necessary part of his work as a journalist."

Amnesty International has called Kaka a political prisoner.

Note: You can sign a petition calling for Moussa Kaka's release by emailing liberezmoussa@rfi.fr

Another child kidnaped in the Niger Delta

Things just keep going downhill in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta. A few days after militants kidnaped a three-year old British girl, a two-year old son of a local chief has also been seized. The BBC reports that while adults have often been kidnaped for ransom, especially oil workers, the seizing of children is a troubling new phenomenon.

The newly-elected (sort of) president Umaru Musa Yar'adua needs to put this near the top of his priority list.

Yet This Day newspaper wonders if Yar'adua is really in charge.