Sources and background reading

Whereas we can find out exactly how much oil has been pumped up every day through reading company reports and business news, it is hard to find  data on pollution in the Niger Delta.

We asked the Ministry of Environment in Bayelsa State but they have virtually no information. There is no register of oil spills or of how much gas is flared. The oil companies do not report to the state government since the oil belongs to the federal government, and the federal government is very secretive.  There is not a single laboratory in the Niger Delta that analyses water samples after a spill, not to mention air-borne pollution from gas flaring.
How much oil has been spilled?
In spite of the fact that there are hundreds of spills per year in Yenagoa, we failed to obtain a single oil spill report from either the environment ministry or the oil companies, although Shell claims that "joint investigation teams" determine that more than 90% of the spills are caused by sabotage. On which grounds? Where are these reports published? We don't know, and the Commissioner for Environment does not know either. The estimated 1.5 million tons of oil spilled in fifty years is from a 2006 report  by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and the Nigeria Conservation Foundation.

What happens to spilled oil?
It is difficult to remove thousands of tons of oil from a swamp. The oil companies usually hires a contractor to "clean up" when there's a spill. In Oruma, the contractor in turn hired the women in the village to turn the topsoil over in places where it was flooded by crude, and then they set the remaining oil-soaked vegetation to fire. 


Oruma spill site after the "clean up": Step on the soil that has been turned over and the crude oil oozes out of the ground. 

Little spilled oil was removed from Oruma. Instead the oil is washed out and decomposes over time, presumably.  The people said that it took about ten years for farmland and fishponds to recover after the last spill. And then came the next spill.

Effects of oil spills
The delta is very flat and thus the creeks flow both ways, depending on rainfall and  tidal streams. When there is a spill the oil slushes around for a very long time. Spending just one day in Oruma many months after the spill our eyes were irritated, our noses started running and our stomachs were upset. We were told that children had died, women miscarried and men become impotent.  Two years later the smell of petroleum still lingers in my camera bag. But what people fear most is cholera and hunger. Cholera, because toilet rafts and water sources alike get polluted, and hunger because oil in the groundwater causes cassava tubers to rot from within, and fish ponds and creeks to die.

How much gas is being flared?
There is a  comprehensive report (pdf, also in html ) from 2005 by the Climate Justice Programme and Friends of the Earth. More links at climatelaw.org

A global study by  for the World Bank, attach kml file of flares

Human Rights
HRW 2002: The Niger Delta: No Democratic Dividend, pdf
AI 2005: Ten Years On: Injustice and violence haunt the oil Delta, pdf

Politics
International Policy Report 2007: Convergent Interests: US Energy Security and the "Securing" of Nigerian Democracy