Amnesty report questions oil spill narrative in Nigeria

The recent report by London based rights group, Amnesty International (AI), which claims that Royal Dutch Shell and Italian oil multinational, Eni, might have wrongly attributed 89 oil spills in Nigeria’s Delta to theft and sabotage is questioning the prevailing narrative of people bursting pipelines out of spite.

Amnesty International says 46 of the pollution incidents were triggered by Shell and 43 by Eni. “Amnesty International researchers have identified that at least 89 spills may have been wrongly labelled as theft or sabotage when in fact they were caused by ‘operational’ faults,” the London-based group said in a report released recently.

The watchdog group employed the services of thousands digital activists worldwide who helped them uncover the truth about oil spills in the Niger Delta. The report found that in 2011, Shell was responsible for 17.5million litres of spilled oil while Eni was accountable for 4.1million litres.

Mark Dummett, Amnesty international researcher says based on evidence from their research platform Decoders, the companies are negligent and do not respond hastily to spill reports: “Shell and Eni claim they are doing everything they can to prevent oil spills but Decoders found that the companies often ignore reports for months on end. The Niger Delta is one of the most polluted places on earth and it beggars belief that the companies responsible are still displaying this level of negligence.”

In 2008 and 2009, two massive oil spills in the fishing town of Bodo had a catastrophic impact. Thick black oil leaked into rivers and creeks for weeks, killing fish and robbing people of their livelihoods. Shell, the operator of the leaking pipelines, repeatedly understated the volume of oil spilled – and offered the community only a paltry amount of compensation of $4000, reports AI.

“With the help of Amnesty International, the Bodo community took legal action. Shell admitted it had made false statements about the size of the spills and settled out of court, paying the community £55 million in compensation.

“We wanted to help other communities get justice too, but we knew we could not trust the oil companies’ version of events. We needed to look through all the spill reports provided by oil companies and compare them with pictures of the pipelines, to understand what was really happening in the Niger Delta.

“But we had a problem: there were thousands of documents and images, far too many even for Amnesty’s dedicated researchers to look through,” says the group underscoring the huge scope of the problem.

Some of the multinational oil companies have often attributed spills to activities of sabotage but the AI investigation shows the oil companies are also complicit. The Niger Delta continues to suffer the worst form of pollution because the Federal Government who owns a significant stake in these joint venture operations cannot be objective in holding to account the oil companies.

In its monthly financial and operations report, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) reports thousands of spills attributed to sabotage, this Amnesty International report casts a doubt on the veracity of this reporting.

ISAAC ANYAOGU