After nearly a century of plunder and pollution, transnational oil companies operating in Nigeria are divesting their onshore and shallow water oilfields and moving out of the country. They are doing so without accounting for decades of environmental degradation, loss of livelihood and health hazards caused by their extractive activity, enraging the oil-producing communities of the Niger Delta region, home to the West African country’s vast crude oil and gas reserves. The stage is set for a major confrontation.
Since May 2024, protests and demonstrations across the region and beyond have demanded a halt to divestment. The movement, which started when activists picketed Shell offices in Lagos, peaked on 19 December with coordinated actions in three out of nine states of the Niger Delta (Rivers, Bayelsa and Delta) and a press briefing in the federal capital territory, Abuja.
Powered by residents in oil-producing communities and civil society organisations, the campaign has exposed the sordid motive behind the divestment plan, while raising public awareness about its potential harm to local communities and the environment.
Oil wealth
Nigeria is the largest crude oil producer in Africa and the 16th in the world. Crude oil accounts for 40 per cent of Nigeria’s GDP, 70 percent of budget revenues, and 95 per cent of foreign exchange earnings. The resultant oil wealth has never been equitably distributed – much of it ending up in the balance sheets of the international oil companies (IOCs) and politicians while the people living in oil-producing regions live in squalor. Several communities in the Niger Delta continue to lack basic amenities like public schools, hospitals, electricity and motorable roads.
Royal Dutch Shell, Norwegian-owned Equinor, Italian ENI, French-owned TotalEnergies and the American multinational ExxonMobil are some of the IOCs drilling crude oil in the Niger Delta. Between them, they have drilled millions of barrels since 1956 when oil was discovered by Shell D’Arcy, the predecessor of Royal Dutch Shell. All of the oil supermajors – except Shell, whose deal is still locked in controversy – received regulatory approval last year to sell oil mining leases (OMLs), of mostly high emission oil fields, to domestic companies. In exchange, they will move drilling to deepwater oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea, which accounts for about 13 billion of Nigeria’s 37 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and where an even more lax government oversight will likely ensure their nefarious activities – which have historically included gas flaring and dumping hydrocarbon waste into public sewers – are shielded from public scrutiny.
Aided by a corrupt and parasitic local capitalist elite, big oil operates in Nigeria with impunity and without regard for the environment or public safety. As a result, the Niger Delta has become perhaps the most polluted place on earth. An average of 240,000 million litres of crude oil are spilled in the delta every year, with more than 7,000 spills occurring between 1970 and 2000 alone. These spills have contaminated drinking water, poisoned agricultural land and fisheries, and harmed the health of local residents. A recent report by a state commission accused big oil of committing environmental genocide in the Niger Delta, manifested in 16,000 annual neonatal deaths and a life expectancy of 41 years – ten years lower than the national average.
No compensation, no divestment!
The December protests involved hundreds of villages and saw activists protesting in Port Harcourt in Rivers state, Yenagoa in Bayelsa state and Warri in Delta state. The marches ended at the governors’ offices, where protesters handed over a list of demands.
‘All we want is for the oil companies to pay compensation for decades of pollution and carry out proper remediation of the farmlands and rivers they have destroyed. This is not too much to ask,’ says Peter Maazi, adding that oil-producing communities are not, in principle, opposed to divestment. Mazzi is the programme and communication administrator for Social Action, one of the civic groups powering the protests.
Once the international oil companies are gone, the communities will have no one to hold accountable for the decades of environmental pollution
Activists say several of the domestic oil companies buying the oil mining leases from the transnational firms have no known track record; nor is there evidence that they possess the capacity to handle the enormous liability associated with the high-emission oil fields they are buying. Big oil appears to be using the divestment to offload high-emission oil assets to local industry players to avoid responsibility for the legacy of environmental degradation and pollution. The local oil firms also serve another purpose – they provide a black face for the enormous crimes committed by big oil in the Niger Delta.
Campaigns against the activities of big oil in the Niger Delta have often focused on the colonial dynamics of exploitation, highlighting how plunder by transactional oil firms reinforces the global north/south dichotomy. Politicians hope that communities will feel a sense of community with local and national companies. In fact, it is likely that this changing of the guard will do no more to end poverty and exploitation than black majority rule has done in South Africa.
The fight of their lives
The Niger Delta people have a proud history of struggle. Since the British imperial period when natives fought fiercely to protect their palm oil trade – at the time their main export – and from when Shell D’Arcy struck black gold, their forms of resistance have undergone numerous phases. In the mid-1990s, nonviolent resistance was powered by the executed environmental activist and poet, Ken Saro-Wiwa. At the start of the millennium, the creeks convulsed in demonstrations as the echo of the Kaiama declaration’s clarion call swept the mangrove. That movement was violently suppressed – paving the way for the militant insurgency that erupted in the region during the early 2000s as armed youth in speedboats waving kalashnikovs and machetes blew up pipelines and abducted expatriate workers for ransom.
Despite all that has happened before, the current struggle is likely to be the most defining. Once the IOCs are gone, the communities will have no one to hold accountable for the decades of environmental pollution and other harm. This is why activists and villagers are urgently discussing next steps in the face of the Nigerian state’s intransigence.
‘Right now, we are considering legal options. In recent times, we have had successful litigations against Shell in Nigeria and abroad. Since it is a proven method that has worked before, it is something we are considering undertaking once again to halt the divestment,’ says Peter Maazi. ‘We can’t give up’.
