Oil wealth leaves poverty trail three decades later

The river looks still from a distance – the way oil sometimes appears calm before it catches fire. At K-Dere, a farming village in Nigeria’s Ogoni region, women wash cassava in water that shimmers with rainbow streaks.

“It’s been like this since I was a child,” 39-year-old woman, known as Mama Grace, said in a documentary monitored by BusinessDay, pointing at the oily patches rising to the surface. She wipes sweat from her forehead and shrugs. “The water is bad. But what choice do we have?”

More than 60 years after oil was first pumped from beneath their feet, and almost 30 years since the execution of nine local activists led by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were hanged after being tried by a military tribunal for their protests against Shell’s pollution in the oil-rich Niger Delta, which is home to the Ogoni ethnic group, poverty remains widespread in oil-bearing communities.

The executions sparked international condemnation against Nigeria’s then-military junta, and has continued to be a contentious issue in the nation’s history.

Years after, the Ogoni people are still living with the consequences of a boom that enriched a nation and impoverished its hosts.

The Ogoni region in Nigeria’s Niger Delta sits atop some of the country’s most prolific oil fields. The Niger Delta produces all of Nigeria’s onshore crude, making it the economic heart of Africa’s biggest oil exporter.

Read also: Is oil resumption or genuine sympathy reason for presidential pardon of Ogoni 9?

Yet, in Ogoniland, communities remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and environmental degradation so severe that farming and fishing, the backbone of the local economy, have become impossible for many areas.

“We used to cool our garri (processed cassava) with rainwater,” Jonah Barinem, 64, a farmer whose plot sits less than 300 meters from a decommissioned wellhead, recalled. “Then the rain started smelling of petrol. Children became sick. Our land became cursed.”

What complicates remediation is that Ogoniland is not merely polluted; it is wounded. The region consists of six kingdoms, roughly 1,000 square kilometres, and about 220 communities spread across Khana, Gokana, Eleme and Tai local government areas.

Read also: Ogoni group insists HYPREP’s cleanup falls short

Nearly two million people live here, most in villages connected by narrow roads that flood at the slightest rain. Where forests once stood, dust now blows across fields of dehydrated earth.

“We are surrounded by oil, yet we can’t drink clean water,” said Grace Badon, a farmer in Tai, whose crops have failed three years in a row. “The land rejects what we plant.”

Nigeria enjoyed two major oil boom periods – in 1977 to 1983 and again in 2008. Crucial infrastructure, an industrial base, and generational savings could have been built. Instead, crude oil windfalls were swallowed by corruption and mismanagement. For Ogoniland, the booms left a legacy of spills, gas flares, and broken promises.

Between 1976 and 1991, Shell recorded 2,976 oil spills in Ogoniland, releasing about 2.1 million barrels of crude, roughly 40 percent of the company’s total global spills over that period, according to Nigerian government data.

The spills seeped into farmlands and creeks. Gas flares burned day and night, sometimes so close to homes that families could read at night without lamps.

Shell, which halted oil drilling in the area in the early 1990s and later sold its assets there, has denied any responsibility or wrongdoing.

In 2006, after decades of protests and international pressure, the Nigerian government invited the United Nations Environment Programme to conduct an independent assessment.

Five years later, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issued a damning report: hydrocarbons had penetrated the groundwater to depths of more than five meters in some areas, with benzene levels in drinking water at one site measured at 900 times World Health Organisation (WHO) safety limits.

The report estimated that restoring the environment would take up to 30 years, with the first five years alone requiring $1 billion in funding.

UNEP called the cleanup, perhaps, the most complex environmental remediation project ever attempted in the oil industry. At stake was not only environmental recovery, but public health, livelihoods, and national credibility.

Today, cleanup is underway, but slowly, and confidence has been slower.

Contractors hired by the government’s Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) are working at dozens of sites, but community leaders say the pace is still too sluggish, and the impacts on daily life are barely visible.

“It took 50 years to destroy Ogoni. We are now in year eight of a supposed cleanup, yet people still dig wells that bring up black water,” Alagao Morris of the Environmental Defenders Network said. “The pollution that should be addressed has not been addressed.”

The resumption of oil drilling, a proposal that has resurfaced under President Bola Tinubu’s administration, deepens tensions.

“It is, however, insensitive for this administration to open any form of discussion with a handpicked group of Ogoni leaders for such talks. The overall will of the majority of Ogonis is paramount in this matter,” a coalition of civil society organisations in Niger Delta said in a statement seen by BusinessDay.

Last June, Tinubu announced a posthumous pardon for the ‘Ogoni Nine,’ including internationally renowned writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose execution in 1995 triggered global condemnation and led to Nigeria’s temporary suspension from the Commonwealth.

Tinubu’s gesture was widely seen as an attempt to reset relations with the Ogoni and pave the way for renewed production.

Ogoniland activists swiftly rejected it.

“You cannot pardon someone who committed no crime,” said Celestine Akpobari, coordinator of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum. “If there is a group that deserves pardon, it is the Nigerian government.”

To many, the pardon was too little, and too convenient.

Tinubu’s spokesperson said the president acted appropriately, noting that activists could pursue exoneration separately.

“The president has done what is normal. They can make an argument for exoneration and the president will look into it,” Bayo Onanuga, special adviser on information and strategy to the president, told Reuters.

But for Ogoni elders, exoneration is non-negotiable if the government wants a chance to drill again.

Alagao Morris, deputy executive director of the Environmental Defenders Network, an interest group in the Niger Delta, said the pardon appeared to be an attempt to mollify the Ogoni people in the face of the region’s continued environmental devastation.

“The pollution that ought to be addressed has not been addressed,” Morris said.