Deserting
the Delta
DORIS EGBA’S
STRONGEST memory of her childhood in the village
of Otuabagi, in Nigeria’s Bayelsa State, is of
her parents’ interminable search for arable
land. “When I look back now, out of all my
memories, it is the one that stands out — the
fact that they were always looking for where
they could grow crops just to feed us,” says
Egba, who’s now a teacher in the village
school.
Otuabagi, a rustic
fishing village nestled within the vast network
of alluvial lands, mangrove forests, and
slow-moving creeks that make up the Niger Delta,
is the birthplace of oil production in the
country. In 1956, when Shell D’Arcy — as Royal
Dutch Shell was then known — struck black gold
in the region, the fortunes of Egba’s parents
and their fellow villagers, who are
predominantly farmers and fisher folks, took a
turn for the worse. Their ancestral land, with
its rich soil and plentiful water, became part
of what came to be known as the Oloibiri
oilfield. At least 18 of the 21 oil wells that
made up the oilfield were sited in Otuabagi,
mostly on farmlands, fishing ponds, and streams
that had served the villagers for
generations.
Over the next two
decades, the oilfield would pump over 20 million
barrels of crude oil, resulting in massive
hydrocarbon pollution that changed Otuabagi
forever. By the time Egba was born in 1980, two
years after the oilfield had ceased to produce,
the once-thriving fish ponds and farms had been
transformed into polluted, lifeless waters and
barren lands…
Shell never cleaned
up the mess it made in Otuabagi. Improperly
decommissioned well heads and manifolds (the
assemblage of pipes, valves, and other fittings
that help direct the flow of pressurized oil
from wells) still litter the
landscape.
Otuabagi isn’t the
only village to suffer such a fate. For decades,
Shell and a host of other international and
domestic oil companies expanded drilling
operations throughout the Niger Delta,
displacing local communities and despoiling the
natural environment in the process.
Now, in the face of
mounting lawsuits over spills and crude theft,
as well as a decline in output from the
oilfields in the restive region, all of the
international oil companies that plundered these
lands are attempting to rid themselves of their
once-lucrative-but-now-problematic assets in the
Delta.
Journalist
Obiora Ikoku reports on how the international
oil majors — including ExxonMobil,
TotalEnergies, and Shell — are scrambling to
exit the Niger Delta without cleaning up their
mess or compensating impacted communities.
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