A piece defending oil giant
Shell's role in the Nigerian Delta.
Published in the Independent in November, 1996, the anniversary
of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa on the 10th November 1995.
A year ago today [[10 November 1995]], Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight
other Ogoni activists were hanged by the Nigerian authorities. This
African fighting for the rights of the indigenous poor of his minority
tribe as they were, so he claimed, raped by Shell, the Anglo-Dutch
corporation, was the epitome of the Anglicised product of Empire.
The affable and savvy sitcom writer and campaigner was pipe-smoking
and poshly-spoken; he owned a large house in Surrey and sent a son
to Eton. He was either a naive hero indifferent to risk, or a flawed
maverick who made fatal misjudgements. "Ken was no saint",
says Donu Kogbara, a London-based Ogoni journalist friend of his.
"He was tremendously charismatic and sometimes very nice",
she remembers. But she believes he lost touch with reality as he
was wooed by starry names in Europe and the US.
Ken Saro-Wiwa became a darling of the greener sections of London
liberal society, but had been on the federal side during the Biafran
civil war, and would thus have been reviled by liberals then. It
has been argued that he was a federalist because he thought only
a strong state would defend minorities like the Ogoni. Anyway, he
is widely believed to have feathered his nest when managing the
Niger delta oil port of Bonny during the civil war. Ken finally
and fatally enraged his country's military regime by demanding greater
autonomy for the people living in a patch of the swampy Niger delta.
Given the politics of the country, the more strident of these voices
were bound to be silenced. He seems to have been caught out by the
military's haphazard alternations between permissiveness and oppression.
And he did not help his cause by unleashing undisciplined and deeply
disaffected young men on moderate former colleagues in the struggle,
four of whom were murdered at a rally. Donu Kogbaru believes her
own father, one of the moderate leaders, was lucky to escape with
his life. "I'm accusing Ken of incitement to murder",
Donu Kogbaru insists, when pressed.
The West was interested in his campaign because it was directed
almost as much at the Shell oil giant as it was at Nigeria's regime.
Shell was the obvious target for an ironic reason, as most of its
Nigerian critics freely admit. The oil company is perhaps the most
respectable institution in Nigeria.
"We've been here a long time and we expect to be here a long
time", says Brian Anderson, the Nigerian-born white who runs
Shell's operations there. Shell started producing oil from the Niger
delta 40 years ago. It was in Nigeria when the place was one of
the bright stars of the continent and expects to be there when and
if hope returns. In the meantime, like any large firm there it funds
armed police seconded from the state for the defence of its people,
and necessarily deals with authorities of whom it strongly disapproves.
Ken realised Shell was amenable to pressure. It operates as a thirty
percent, and the largest private, shareholder in a Nigerian joint
venture company, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), alongside
Elf and Agip, with the Nigerian state oil company owning 55 percent.
In the delta, you see the Shell sign everywhere, but it stands over
facilities substantially owned by the Nigerian state, which must
put in 55 percent of the capital expenditure required to keep production
flowing - and clean. Shell's biggest problem is in wringing that
share from the state.
SPDC produces about a million barrels of oil a day, half the country's
total which contributes in a good year around $9 billion dollars
to the national exchequer, or three quarters of the total government
revenue (and about a third of the country's GNP). Some of the money
is salted away by the country's leadership and their friends. Little
of it reaches the delta where all of it is produced, and where six
million people live in a soggy region of farms, forests and swamp
about the size of the Republic of Ireland. Even less than its fair
share reaches Ogoniland, where half a million of Ken Saro-Wiwa's
compatriots people live in an area of about 1000 sq kilometres.
The lively Nigerian economist Patrick Utomi once proposed that
the oil ought to be given to the ruling elite once and for all -
in return they might give Nigeria back to the people. The Economist
Intelligence Unit's regional report notes that the country's economy
collapsed during the oil boom: too many important players gave up
conventional work and concentrated on trying to cream off a share
of the bonanza.
Arguably, none of this is Shell's fault: as Brian Anderson never
tires of stressing, three percent of the revenue SPDC pays the Government
was supposed to come back to the producing areas. It's a sum close
to Shell's 3.2 percent share of the oil dollar, and is a sliver
of the country's average 75 percent share of the barrel's worth.
If the arrangement had worked, the delta might have become a fine
area in a fine country. "The money was not fully spent, and
it wasn't wisely spent", Anderson insists, in a code which
speaks of corruption and waste.
A meeting with local chiefs at Sapele township in the north west
of the delta has the erudite community spokesman Vin Kariks Ekariko
rattling off a list of health and environmental effects many of
which probably aren't real or could not be caused by the oil industry.
After the meeting, and in private, a local chief thanks the Shell
people for the scholarships, the education schemes, the community
hospitals and all the rest that the company has done locally - and
much of it long before the disturbances of the early 90s. He wants
more, and knows that in a better society politics, not begging,
would sort things out. He does not say - but it's true - that community
leaders are usually as keen to cream off their share of the booty
as anyone else. Shell spends about $20m a year on community projects
(and eight times more on environmentally-orientated equipment renewal).
"Things are back to front here," says Anderson. "The
Government's in the oil business and we're in local government".
He believes privatisation is inevitable in the end, and looks forward
to it.
Flying over the delta in a helicopter for hundreds of miles, and
visiting several noted pollution hotspots as well as observing a
dozen or so oil production facilities and, crucially, the water
and ground around them - it is hard to see what the environmental
fuss has been about. In the delta there are plenty of rivers and
creeks where there is an oil sheen. They remain a tiny minority,
and the spills may as well have been caused by careless local boatmen
as by the oil giant. For the most part, the delta is a vast, watery,
deeply verdant region lying under skies which are ordinarily tropical.
Shell occupies one third of one percent of the delta: even if it
had devastated that area and ten times more besides, and it hasn't,
the damage would be a fraction of what is routinely claimed by campaigners.
What then of the famous flares? Firstly, there are none at all
in Ogoniland, where there has been no oil production since 1993,
following community disturbances. Elsewhere in the delta, about
a hundred flares waste a resource equivalent to a quarter of France's
gas demand.
The flares do very little useful work, and it has been castigated
by green commentators. Because oil production facilities bring people
with money, locals congregate wherever SPDC has kit. Some come to
live near flares, which constitute free light and a means of drying
crops such as cassava.
Rightly, SPDC is committed to putting out all the flares, if possible
by 2008, and about a quarter of them within three years. The latest
project to harness about a quarter of the wasted gas involves deals
with customers in southern Europe and 5.5bn dollars worth of new
plant whose financing was a nightmare, not least because the Nigerian
government, already heavily in arrears in its payments to SPDC,
had difficulty raising its share.
The scheme has been an on-and-off affair for twenty years, but
is now under construction. The deal was agreed in the weeks following
Ken's execution and seemed to some a symbol of Shell's venality.
For Anderson the position is simple: if Shell pulled out of Nigeria
someone less committed would go in. The gas scheme was a sign of
progress, not failure. On the revenue-addicted economy he comments,
"The 'curse of oil' is a real issue - but it has brought a
lot of good things. I believe very strongly that by being here we
offer something for them to choose from." Besides, he adds:
"No country in the world has ever left oil in the ground".
It is not the observation of an angel, but then there seem to be
few angels in this story. One can see the physical presence of Shell
in the delta and think it tolerably benign. What is harder to sense
is whether Shell has been canny - still less, whether it has been
at all noble - in its arm-twistings in the Nigerian corridors of
power.
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