The Killing Fields

Oil ravages the Niger Delta

by Greg Campbell

In These Times magazine, June 2001

C hristiana Akpode was knee-deep in gasoline when the fire started. No one knows
how it started exactly, only that a roaring fireball suddenly engulfed a river of raw
petroleum on the outskirts of this rural village in the Niger Delta. Some days before
the tragedy in October 1998, a pipeline valve either had malfunctioned or was intentionally
breached to steal the gasoline that was being pumped from a refinery in Warri to Kaduna.
For days, amber gasoline spurted into the sky, first pooling around the valve station and
eventually flowing up to a half a mile away along a ditch approximately 50 yards wide.

Though Nigeria is the world's 12th-largest producer of crude oil, it's a telling sign of its
backward nature that it must import gasoline. There are only four refineries in this country
of 123 million, and only one is fully operational. But Nigerian law dictates that gas be sold at
22 naira per liter, about 18 cents, making it among the cheapest in the world. Therefore, it's
tempting for tanker truck drivers to steer toward the Cameroon and Niger borders-where
they can sell their entire load on the black market for up to 30 times the state-mandated
rate. Much of the gas ends up back in Nigeria, sold on the side of the road by profiteers
hawking the fuel from plastic yellow jugs adorned with religious stickers. The fuel is often
double the price of that from gas stations, but it's far more widely available. Shortages have
created mile-long lines of cars at filling stations.

In a country like Nigeria, where endemic corruption and misguided subsidy policies
combine to create constant fuel shortages, free gas isn't something villagers keep away from.
Indeed, in Jesse Town they swarmed the river with buckets and jerry-cans to scoop up the
precious fuel for sale on the thriving black market. By the time of the inevitable cataclysm,
village elders say, the gas was chest-deep in some locations.

Alfred Dmamogho, spokesman for the Jesse Town council of elders, says there were up to
1,000 people wading through the river and standing on the banks when it caught fire. He
muses that perhaps a careless person with a cigarette or heat from the sun started the blaze.
"The fuel," he says slowly, in a massive understatement, "does not like the fire."

"Just as I pull you to me in a quick hug, that's how fast the fire came," recalls Edward
Akpodonor, a farmer from the village who was standing on the bank at the time. In a
deafening whoosh he was instantly ablaze. He ran screaming from the fire, stumbling out of
his burning clothes as quickly as he could, but not before suffering severe burns on his legs
and buttocks.

Most of the people in the river couldn't escape, their bones reduced to ashes as the fire
burned for two weeks. Christiana Akpode, however, managed to run through the river of
fire to the bank, a human torch emerging from the inferno.

Almost three years later, she wishes she hadn't escaped.

Though it's one of the most dramatic examples of how oil pollution has ruined lives in the
Delta, the tragedy at Jesse Town is hardly unique. Pipelines carrying both gas and oil
rupture with alarming regularity in Nigeria, either at the hands of saboteurs or through
neglect. Most of the 3,000 miles of aboveground pipelines crisscrossing the Delta are 30
years old and built to lower standards than modem pipes.

Shell Petroleum Development Corporation-the Nigerian arm of Royal/Dutch Shell-reports

that 50,200 barrels of oil were spilled in 1998 and 123,377 barrels in 1999, citing sabotage as
the cause for 70 percent of the volume spilled in 1999 (these are the most recent numbers
available from Shell's 2000 annual report).

Gasoline pipe explosions occur less regularly, but with more deadly results. In December
2000, a pipe that had leaked for weeks exploded in Atlas Cove, near Lagos, killing about 50
people. Media accounts have implied that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the
state-owned refinery and distribution company, didn't repair the damage because high
ranking officials were receiving kickbacks from the black marketers.

Recent arrests have bolstered this theory: In Lagos State, several police officers have been
arrested in the past eight months for allegedly plotting with fuel scoopers to vandalize
pipelines. In April 2000, the head of Ajowon Police Station was arraigned on charges of
colluding with fuel thieves to hack open an oil pipeline. In July, Lagos police arrested three
members of the Nigerian navy alongside fishermen who claimed that the men supplied them
with hoarded petroleum products. And that September, two more naval officials were
caught with fuel believed to have come from a breached pipe.

Shell-the largest field operator in Nigeria, accounting for half of the country's oil
operations-claims to adhere to the highest standards of practice in cleaning oil spills, but
even a cursory visit to the Delta shows that those standards are far lower than in other
countries. On the side of the highway leading to the town of Besini, two separate 2 year-old
oil spills turn the jungle black. The lakes of oil make it seem like passing motorists could
scoop it out with tin cans and feed it directly into their engines.
Near Shell's Etelebu flow station, where a roaring flare of spent natural gas torches the
atmosphere around the clock, an oil spill ignited in January when a nearby farmer burned
her fields to prepare for harvest. "It's frequent," says Chief Diekivie Ikiogha, the head of
the Bayelsa State Bureau of Pollution and Environment. "We have a lot of spills. At this spot
alone we have had three spills."

Even though Ikiogha is the government bureaucrat in charge of fining Shell for the spill and
signing off on the cleanup, he's also Shell's contractor hired | to do the cleaning. Apparently
aware of ~ his conflict of interest, he refuses to be I photographed while overseeing the
cleanup operation, which amounts to four shirtless men scooping oil from the surface of the
polluted water with Frisbees.

He claims most of the oil was removed earlier with absorbent foam and blankets. "This area
is not so bad," he says, surveying the blackened moonscape of dead coconut and mangrove
trees. "This will regenerate in about two years."

No one is sure of the exact environmental impact of the spills. To date, there have been no
baseline studies of the Delta's ecology, says Miriam Isoun, director of the Niger Delta
Wetlands Center, an environmental group in Port Harcourt. "Nigeria has never had that as
a priority," she says. "In Nigeria, you've got the attitude that [oil spills] are only affecting
400 people, but for those 400 people it's absolutely devastating. It's a very serious problem.
We as scientists would like to know what we have so we can start working with it."

Such shoddy remediation efforts have fueled more than destructive fires. Lackadaisical
response from oil companies and virtually no governmental oversight of pollution problems
have been a source of high tension in the Delta for decades. ° Two years into democratic
rule, little, if anything, has changed.

What we need now is for Shell to 77 come in and settle with us 4 billion naira [about $40
million] for destroying our stream," says Isaac Osaro Agbara, village chief of Ebubu in
Ogoniland. "We have been waiting for Shell to come in and say sorry."
Ebubu residents want Shell to apologize-and pay for-a massive oil spill that occurred in
1970. An oil pipeline ruptured and caught fire, destroying 30 homes and killing about as
many people. The fire was so intense that it created a lumpy asphalt surface where the
homes once stood.

The facts about the fire are disputed. Ebubu residents clearly blame Shell for the accident,
but Shell has long maintained that the fire occurred at the end of the Biafran civil war in
1968, when it wasn't operating in the area. The company claims that the fire was set
intentionally by retreating soldiers.

Chief Philip Ode, the only survivor of the fire, remembers things differently. In his cinder-
block and linoleum home near the fire site-slumped under a 1998 calendar from the
Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation that proudly announces, "We touch your lives in
many ways"- Ode says the day the fire occurred was a normal one. He only escaped death
by walking to town to retrieve food for his family, all of whom were killed. He says there
were no soldiers in the area.

In June 2000, a Rivers State high court apparently agreed more with Ebubu's version of
events and ordered Shell to compensate the community with $40 million. The company has
appealed the decision. Awaiting the outcome of the court fight is a monstrous piece of
machinery designed to clean oil-polluted soil. The equipment was installed by Safewater
Technologies of Dallas, Texas, an environmental remediation company. A year ago, the
company performed a pilot test and determined that it could almost completely remove the
oil from the ground, but nothing has been done since then, pending the appeal.

Six Ogoni men have been guarding the machine against thieves and looters night and day
even though they stopped receiving wages eight months ago, according to one of the guards.
"The type of water we are taking in here because of the pollution is killing us," Agbara says.
"The air we breathe is poisonous, no crops grow well because the oil has killed the land. It is
time for them to come into this area and pay us."

"If they fail to settle with us," he adds, "we will take this problem worldwide."

Many have stopped waiting. In Ebubu, the elders created the Ejamaa Youth Council-run by
a handsome, gregarious man who looks like he could coach high school basketball- to keep
the town's youths from attacking tanker trucks with rocks and bottles. Even though Shell
ceased operations in Ogoniland in 1993, trucks filled with gasoline must pass through
Ebubu to other areas in the Delta. The Ejamaa Youth Council is meant to organize youths
for nonviolent protests and political action, but so far has enjoyed limited success in
preventing attacks on passing tankers. And on April 25, Ogoni youths engaged in an hours-
long gun battle with Nigerian police in Port Harcourt as they attempted to disrupt
operations at the city's refinery. Media accounts say the youths were protesting the lack of
wealth distribution in the Delta. The Associated Press reports that three protesters were
wounded during the clash.
The 14-day fire in Jesse Town fixed the valve leak: The entire mechanism was melted away
and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation eventually turned off the flow from the
Warri refinery. After the victims' ashes were shoveled into wheelbarrows and buried in a
mass grave- and after tons of dirt was placed atop the scorched earth-a new valve was built.
This one is guarded by three bored police officers, who lounge shirtless in a thatched-roof
hut and spend their days cleaning their assault rifles and drinking palm wine.

The damage to the survivors wasn't so easy to erase. After the fire, private vehicles
transported some victims to the nearest medical facility, a small hospital in Sapele about 20
miles away. That's where Edward Akpodonor was taken, but he says the care from the
overwhelmed staff was so substandard as to be nonexistent. He eventually left, reasoning he
could administer to his wounds better on his own.

Christiana Akpode never went to the hospital, and no doctor ever came to Jesse Town. Her
legs, which suffered crippling third-degree burns, were wrapped in bedsheets and doused
with water. To this day, that's the extent of the treatment she has received.

A procession of male chiefs leads the way over the plank that spans the community sewer
and through a narrow alley between mud huts. On the right is a doorway covered with a
billowing green sheet. Alfred Dmamogho leans his head inside and orders Christiana
outdoors to meet with visiting reporters. Beneath the sheet, a disfigured foot stirs.

Christiana can barely walk, her legs permanently forged into a kneeling position, and she
hobbles the two feet outside with great difficulty and in obvious pain, making her way to a
small porch to sit. Her legs are hard to look at: From the toes to the shin, the skin is shiny
and stretched tightly, threatening to crack. She scratches this section incessantly. From the
shin to the knee, her legs are little more than red and purple scabs bleeding white pus.

Christiana's days are spent warding away flies from the open wounds. Her arms, upper
chest and neck are also burned. The only thing untouched is her face, which, despite the
constant grimace of pain, reflects her natural 27-year-old beauty. She only has one question
on her mind: "Are you here to cure me?"

It's difficult to imagine that anyone can cure her at this point. Her legs are obviously
infected beyond repair-and without amputation, she doesn't seem likely to survive.

When the answer from the strangers is an uncomfortable "no," she makes the difficult
journey back to where the flies are easier to control, dragging her young son, who was 3
months old when the fire ravaged his mother, behind her.

"Then you should kill me," she says, before disappearing behind the curtain.

Greg Campbell is a freelance reporter living in Colorado. He's currently working on a book about
diamonds and their impact on the civil war in Sierra Leone.