ENVIRONMENT: Ex-Shell Environment Chief For Nigeria Blows Whistle

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

LONDON, May 18 1996 (IPS) - Shell Nigeria’s former environment chief has revealed that the company ignored his repeated warnings that the Anglo-Dutch oil giant’s operations in Ogoni territory were violating international standards and causing widespread pollution.

“Wherever I went, I could see that Shell were not operating their facilities properly. They were not meeting their own standards, they were not meeting international standards,” Bopp van Dessel, former head of environmental studies for Shell Nigeria from 1992 to 1994, said in a documentary aired on national TV Monday night.

The documentary showed massive flares burning 24 hours a day throughout the region from gas released by the oil drilling and water supplies heavily contaminated by oil spills. Interviewees said that any oil recovered from the spills is simply dumped in a pit where it leaks as soon as the rains come.

The documentary will come as a major blow to Shell which holds its annual general meeting in London on Wednesday. Pensions Investment Research Consultants (PIRC), advisers to 35 pension funds who are major shareholders of Shell shares, has asked its clients to vote against Shell’s annual reports and accounts to protest the Nigerian operations.

Shell’s Nigerian operations, which produced some two million barrels of oil a day, became the target of international outrage last November when the Nigerian military dictatorship executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni leader, who had led protests against the oil company for the environmental damage caused by the oil drilling.

Van Dessel, who quit Shell in 1994, because of “professional frustration” says that he produced two environmental audits on the Nigerian operations and 50 technical reports.

After quitting he handed over the reports to Greenpeace, the international environmental lobby group, in the Netherlands, according to sources, but asked them not to publish the material. Greenpeace has since decided to drop its international campaign against Shell.

Van Dessel decided to go public on World in Action, an investigative television programme in Britain. Reporters from the television programme travelled secretly through Nigeria to film evidence of Van Dessel’s charges. A second programme to be aired next week will show evidence that Shell paid to supply military equipment to the Nigerian internal security force.

Shell denies negligence. “Our approach to the environment has always been to take some care with what we do. However I do believe that we have paid more attention to it in the last few years,” says Brian Anderson, the head of Shell Nigeria.

Cor Herkstroeter, Shell chairman in the Netherlands, told De Telegraaf, a Dutch newspaper, that if Shell withdrew from Nigeria, the operations would continue because the Nigerian government owns 55 percent of Shell in that country.

Last week Herkstroeter told journalists that Shell intended to clean up the oil spills in Ogoniland if Shell staff were guaranteed safety if they returned to the region.

“We want a constructive solution. Leaving Nigeria does not get you that. It is much more constructive to stay there and do the right thing such as reconciliation,” he said.

Robin Pellew, the British director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), who also appeared in the television documentary, strongly criticised the Shell operations in Nigeria.

“Here you have an international company which is manifestly applying different environmental standards in different parts of the world,” he said.

“More greenhouse gases were being emitted by the burning of gas in Nigeria than by all the residential houses in the UK,” he added.

Some 82 communities that make up Ogoniland are affected by Shell operations.

From 1985 to 1993 that region suffered at least 111 oil spills. The pollution has destroyed farmland, forcing landowners to grow food in tiny plots. Shell claims that 77 of the Ogoni spills resulted from sabotage and says that rapid population growth has shrunk the people’s farmland. Company officials also say that they have drawn up plans to improve agriculture, school facilities and roads and have begun a scholarship programme for Ogoni students.

Beginning in 1990 protests against Shell were led by a group called the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), which was headed up by Saro-Wiwa.

MOSOP has demanded 10 billion dollars in reparations from Shell.

Shell shut down its operations in Ogoniland after the last spate of oil spills in 1994 but is now proceeding with plans for a new natural gas project, despite the fact that international funders like the World Bank have backed out of the project.

Oil, discovered in Nigeria in 1956, provides more than 90 percent of the country’s export earnings and 80 percent of the government’s revenues. Nearly half of the oil is exported to the United States.

But very little of this revenue reaches the people from whose land the oil is extracted. Until 1982 communities were not compensated at all but since then the part of the revenue paid out to the local community has risen from an initial 1.5 percent to 13 percent today.

For example Oloibiri, a community 96 kilometres west of Port Harcourt where oil was first discovered in Nigeria, is one of the communities that has suffered from the oil operations.

Shell built a block of secondary school classrooms in the village in 1992 some 20 years after it started drilling in the community, the first contribution to local people that the company has ever made.

Meanwhile in Oloibiri, a hospital constructed in 1982 remains closed because the government never supplied beds and a water tower remains idle because the government never finished building the town’s pumping station.

Oloibiri residents have repeatedly asked government authorities for a sea wall to prevent the four months of flooding every year that forces them to flee their homes. Nothing has been done about the matter.

These matters have not apparently worried investors in Britain though. Shell shares were up last week at 53 cents to 13.30 dollars after the company reported that it had boosted sales to 4 billion dollars for the first three months of 1996 up from 2.7 billion dollars for the same period in 1995.