If anything, the April 20 Gulf of Mexico oil spillage and the United States’ prompt response has opened up the flanks of oil companies drilling oil in Nigeria, and the Nigerian government’s as well, to fresh and genuine attacks. It is no surprise then that the federal government has suddenly woken up from its slumber. Only last week, Nigeria’s worrisome record of oil spillage came to the fore in Abuja as the Federal Government disclosed that 3,203 cases occurred in the country between 2006 and 2010.
According to the minister of environment, John Ode, who gave the figure at a recent workshop, equipment failure, operational/maintenance error and corrosion accounted for 23 per cent of the figure, while 45 per cent has been attributed to sabotage/vandalism.
Odey’s statistics is a tip of the iceberg when put against happenings in the oil industry in the last 50 years during which period, foreign oil companies have spilled over 1.5 million tons of oil in Nigeria, but without legal action against them, and no compensation for victims who have been mostly rural people in the Niger Delta area. According to a CNN report, Nigeria ‘s Niger Delta is one of the most oil-polluted places on the planet, with more than 6,800 recorded oil spills accounting for anywhere from 9 million to 13 million barrels of oil spilled. This is said to have occurred over the 50 years since oil production began in the Delta. As calamitous as this incidents are, they never received a fraction of the kind of prompt and concerned attention that the April oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico received from the US government and British Petroleum, the offending oil company.
BP has spent $6.1 billion in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and forcast a total cost of about $32.2 billion.
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The disaster has forced out BP chief executive Tony Hayward, while the company is now seeking to sell $30 billion worth of assets over the next 18 months to help meet the clean-up bill. President Obama himself showed his concern for the national calamity. For him, the system failed badly. He said there was enough responsibility to go round, the US government inclusive.
Unfortunately, here in Nigeria, the opposite is the case. Oil companies go unsanctioned and many have simply got away with murder; the government establishments responsible for overseeing the oil companies have themselves been inept and complicit in various infractions by the oil companies. Without question, the neglect of many years of environmental and economic degradation, resulting in abject hopelessness and helplessness, has been responsible for the Niger Delta issues which remain intractable even now; the offer of amnesty by the late President Yar’Adua notwithstanding.
Shell oil spills and gas flaring in Nigeria remain a major human rights and environmental tragedy. We hope that John Odey’s resolve that government would, henceforth, strictly enforce anti-spillage rules on oil companies in Nigeria to make the country safe is not one of those political statements that are never translated into action. We must truly take a queue from the Gulf of Mexico example.
