What about Nigeria's oil spills?

By Steve Hynd

The Guardian's John Vidal wonders why there's so little notice taken in the West of Nigeria's oil spill disasters, which dwarf the Gulf leak in magnitude.

"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."

"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different."

"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.

It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.

One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil � 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska � has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.

Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell - they're all involved in Nigerian spills on a scale that boggles the imagination. Yet the Western media seems to have had a "not in our back yard" attitude. I confess I had no idea of the scale of the leaks in Nigeria until I read this report, even though my colleague Dave regularly blogs about the Nigerian oil industry. Is this just casual racism on the part of the media - what happens to brown people far away doesn't matter? I can't for a moment believe that if it had been happening in, say, Australia, that they'd have been so silent.

And what does this report mean for analysis of the Gulf leak? Can we really trust BP when it says it is doing its best, when in another nation it and other oil corporations have clearly not done anywhere close to their best, with malice aforethought?

Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International, told the Guardian that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law:

"What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.

"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."

Seems like a good idea to me. And any government officials, of any nation, found to have abetted their lawlessness should be there as co-defendants. I'm looking at you, Dick Cheney.