Curse of the Black Gold
Hope and betrayal on the Niger Delta
Photograph by Ed Kashi
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Oil fouls everything in southern Nigeria.
It spills
from the pipelines, poisoning soil and water. It stains the hands of
politicians and generals, who siphon off its profits. It taints the ambitions
of the young, who will try anything to scoop up a share of the liquid
riches—fire a gun, sabotage a pipeline, kidnap a foreigner.
Nigeria had all
the makings of an uplifting tale: poor African nation blessed with enormous
sudden wealth. Visions of prosperity rose with the same force as the oil that
first gushed from the Niger Delta's marshy ground in 1956. The world market
craved delta crude, a "sweet," low-sulfur liquid called Bonny Light, easily refined into
gasoline and diesel. By the mid-1970s, Nigeria had joined OPEC (Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries), and the government's budget bulged with
petrodollars.
Everything
looked possible—but everything went wrong!
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Beyond the
city, within the labyrinth of creeks, rivers, and pipeline channels that vein
the delta—one of the world's largest wetlands—exists a netherworld. Villages
and towns cling to the banks, little more than heaps of mud-walled huts and
rusty shacks. Groups of hungry, half-naked children and sullen, idle adults
wander dirt paths. There is no electricity, no clean water, no medicine, no
schools. Fishing nets hang dry; dugout canoes sit unused on muddy banks.
Decades of oil spills, acid rain from gas flares, and the stripping away of
mangroves for pipelines have killed off fish.
Because its refineries are constantly breaking down, oil-rich Nigeria must also import the bulk of its fuel. But even then, gas stations are often closed for want of supply. The sense of relentless crisis has deepened since last year, when a secretive group of armed, hooded rebels operating under the name of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, intensified attacks on oil platforms and pumping stations, most operated by Shell Nigeria. Militants from MEND and other groups have killed soldiers and security guards, kidnapped foreign oil workers, set off car bombs in the delta city of Warri to protest the visit of Chinese oil executives, and, to show off their reach, overrun an oil rig 40 miles (64 kilometers) offshore in the Gulf of Guinea. The attacks have shut down the daily flow of more than 500,000 barrels of oil, leading the country to tap offshore reserves to make up for lost revenue. According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, escalating violence in a region teeming with angry, frustrated people is creating a "militant time bomb."
From a
potential model nation, Nigeria has become a dangerous country,
addicted to
oil money, with people increasingly willing to turn to corruption, sabotage,
and murder to get a fix of the wealth. The cruelest twist is that half a
century of oil extraction in the delta has failed to make the lives of the
people better. Instead, they are poorer still, and hopeless.
"It's not fair," Felix James
Harry muttered in a meetinghouse in the village of Finima on the western end of
the island, close to the oil and gas complex. "We can hardly catch fish
anymore. Surviving is very hard. We can't support our families anymore,"
"The forest where the gas plant is
protected us from the east wind," Solomon David, the community chairman,
said. "Now, the rain and wind ruin our thatched roofs every three months.
They lasted more than twice as long before." Another fisherman mentioned
how construction and increased ship traffic changed local wave patterns,
causing shore erosion and forcing fish into deeper water. "We would need a
55-horsepower engine to get to those places." No one in the room could
afford such an engine.
Forced to give up fishing, the young men
of the village put their hope in landing a job with the oil industry. But
offers are scarce.
Bernard Cosmos spoke out: "I have a
degree in petrochemical engineering from Rivers State University in Port
Harcourt. I've applied many times with the oil companies for a good job. It's
always no. They tell me that I can work in an oil field as an unskilled laborer
but not as an engineer. I have no money to get other training."
Isaac Asume Osuoka, director of Social
Action, Nigeria, believes that callousness toward the people of the delta stems
from their economic irrelevance. "With all the oil money coming in, the
state doesn't need taxes from people. Rather than being a resource for the
state, the people are impediments. There is no incentive anymore for the
government to build schools or hospitals.
Across the delta, people are hoping that
someone will pay attention to the region's problems and intervene.
Who is to blame?
The answers are as
complicated and murky as the water trails in the delta.
When the oil curse began with that first
great gusher in the creekside village of Oloibiri, 50 miles (80 kilometers)
west of Port Harcourt, Nigeria was still a British colony. At independence in
1960, few observers expected that Nigeria would mature into an oil giant. But
in subsequent decades, the oil companies, led by five multinational firms—Royal
Dutch Shell, Total, Italy's Agip, and ExxonMobil and Chevron from the
U.S.—transformed a remote, nearly inaccessible wetland into industrial
wilderness. The imprint: 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) of pipelines, 159 oil
fields, and 275 flow stations, their gas flares visible day and night from
miles away.
No one can deny the sheer technological
achievement of building an infrastructure to extract oil from a waterlogged
equatorial forest. But mastering the physical environment has proved almost
simple compared with dealing with the social and cultural landscape. The oil
firms entered a region splintered by ethnic rivalries. More than two dozen
ethnic groups inhabit the delta, among them the Ijaw, the largest group, and
the Igbo, Itsekiri, Ogoni, Isoko, and Urhobo. These groups have a history of
fighting over the spoils of the delta, from slaves to palm oil—and now, crude
oil. The companies disturbed a fragile landscape that supported fishing and
farming. Engineers and project managers constructing pipelines through a
mangrove swamp, or laying roads through marshland, could disrupt spawning
grounds or change the course of a stream, threatening a village's livelihood.
Recent reports by the United Nations
Development Program and the International Crisis Group identify some of the
questionable strategies employed by oil companies: paying off village chiefs
for drilling rights; building a road or dredging a canal without an adequate
environmental impact study; tying up compensation cases—for resource damages or
land purchases—for years in court; dispatching security forces to violently
break up protests; patching up oil leaks without cleaning up sites.
The
delta is littered with failed projects started by oil companies and government
agencies—water tanks without operating pumps, clinics with no medicine, schools
with no teachers or books, fishponds with no fish. "The companies didn't
consult with villagers," says Michael Watts, director of the African
Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. "They basically
handed out cash to chiefs. It wasn't effective at all."
More oil fields continue to open, many of
them offshore where the infrastructure, though far more expensive than on land,
is much safer from sabotage and theft. The deepwater fields are attracting
aggressive new investors as well. China, India, and South Korea, all
energy-hungry, have begun buying stakes in Nigeria's offshore blocks.
"Most Western companies in Nigeria will find it difficult to compete, especially
with China," Goldman says. That's because oil purchases by the Chinese
come with their commitment to finance large infrastructure projects, such as
rehabilitating a railroad line.
The largest new petroleum endeavor on the
delta is taking shape along the Nun River, a tributary of the Niger. Operated
by Shell, the Gbaran Integrated Oil and Gas Project, scheduled to begin
producing in 2008, will encompass 15 new oil and gas fields, more than 200
miles (320 kilometers) of pipeline, and a sizable gas-gathering plant. New
roads are already gashing the forest. Mounds of long black pipes await burial.
Near a bank of the Nun, Nigerian soldiers crouch behind a ring of sandbags, a
.60-caliber machine gun facing the road as they guard the entrance to the construction
site of the gas plant.
Activists with human rights groups are pressuring
Shell to learn from past mistakes and treat this high-profile project, which
affects 90 villages, as a chance to work better with communities.
Where does all the oil money go?
That
question is asked in every village, town, and city in the Niger Delta. The
blame spreads, moving from the oil companies to a bigger, more elusive, target:
the Nigerian government. Ever since it nationalized the oil industry in 1971,
the government has controlled the energy purse. In a joint venture arrangement,
the state, in the name of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, owns 55
to 60 percent of multinational oil operations onshore. The windfall in revenues
from this arrangement has grown in real dollars from 250 million a year to more
than 60 billion in 2005. During that time, even though the government has
evolved from a military dictatorship to a democracy (the latest attempt at
civil governance began in 1999), what has not changed is what an International
Crisis Group report calls a "cancer of corruption." A Western
diplomat quoted in the report was even more direct, referring to "the
institutionalized looting of national wealth." The money involved is
staggering. The head of Nigeria's anticorruption agency estimated that in 2003,
70 percent of oil revenues, more than 14 billion dollars, was stolen or wasted.
On paper, a mechanism does exist for
distributing oil revenues somewhat fairly. Newspaper articles and court cases
document spectacular misuses of the money by military men and public office
holders. For the delta's 30 million people—most of whom struggle on less than
a dollar a day — seeing this kind of money coming into their states with
essentially none of it reaching them has created conditions for insurrection.
In 1996, Osuoka joined Environmental
Rights Action, an advocacy group that helps communities defend their resources
and learn their legal rights so they can avoid Oeliabi's fate. "We're seeing
that environmental damages often happen silently, with their effects not coming
out until years later," Osuoka said.
Between 1986 and 2003, more than 50,000
acres (20,000 hectares) of mangroves disappeared from the coast,
largely
because of land clearing and canal dredging for oil and gas exploration.
Oil companies operated in the delta for
years with little environmental oversight. There was no federal environmental
protection agency until 1988, and environmental impact assessments weren't
mandated until 1992. What pressure the government exerts now is directed mostly
at halting gas flares. Delta oil fields contain large amounts of natural gas
that companies have traditionally elected to burn off rather than store or
reinject into the ground, more costly measures. Hundreds of flares have burned
nonstop for decades, releasing greenhouse gases and causing acid rain.
Communities complain of corroded roofs, crop failures, and respiratory
diseases. After first ordering companies to eliminate flaring by 1984, the
government keeps pushing back the deadline. Shell, the main offender, recently
announced that despite making considerable progress, it could not meet the
latest target date of 2008. On land, there are oil spills, polluting
groundwater and ruining cropland.
The
cataclysm is upon the delta
The number and severity of attacks in the delta
have been building, led by youth groups demanding access to the oil wealth in
their territories. In the Niger Delta, escalating violence has undermined the
country's financial stability and its ability to supply crude to the Western
world. Shipments from new offshore rigs are making up for some of the oil lost
to sabotage, but rebels identified with MEND have threatened to shut down
everything.
No one is
sure how many delta people have picked up the gun to fight for their rights.
Estimates range from the low hundreds to the low thousands. What is certain is
that each time the military reacts with extreme measures, the number rises.
No
solution seems in sight for the Niger Delta. The oil companies are keeping
their heads down, desperate to safeguard their employees and the flow of oil.
The military, ordered to meet force with force, have stepped up patrols in
cities and on waterways. The militants are intensifying a deadly guerrilla
offensive, hoping that rising casualties and oil prices will force the
government to negotiate
