Fighting for Environmental Justice

Interview by Kitty Melrose

In 1990, the people of Nigeria’s Niger Delta started campaigning against Shell’s chronic pollution of their homeland. Thirty-five years on, they are still fighting for compensation and the remediation and restoration of the region. Now, the oil and gas giant – whose parent company is based in the UK – is set to sell its onshore operations in Nigeria in a bid to avoid its environmental responsibilities. It must be stopped, says Lazarus Tamana, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People.

I was born in Bodo, Ogoniland, Niger Delta. My mum was a housewife and a farmer, my father was a schoolteacher and my grandfather was a fisherman. Before the arrival of Shell, Ogoniland was a rich and abundant environment. The Ogoni people are subsistence farmers and fishermen. We depended on the forests, fertile lands and creeks for our daily existence. After primary school, my brother and I would run to the creek and catch so much fish and crab with our bare hands. That history has now gone.

The fight for Ogoniland

In 1939, Shell and BP were granted an oil exploration licence for the whole of Nigeria and the first commercial oil was extracted in Ogoniland in 1958. My forefathers, grandparents, parents thought Shell was bringing employment, knowledge, something good for the community. But then Shell started bulldozing crops on their land. I was eight when I first saw an oil spill. We secretly went to see this black stuff gushing out of the pipeline, which we’d never seen before. The odour was terrible. Everywhere, thick black. Crude oil is poisonous – anything it touches, it kills. Oil drilling devastated the land and gas flaring caused acid rain. Oil got into our water, killed the fish, poisoned our plants, people started having breathing problems. When the pollution got too much, the Ogoni people – women, young people, traders, farmers, fishermen, leaders, chiefs – came together and started asking, what do we do?

Collective action

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was born out of this frustration in 1990. It was led by activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who said Shell has turned our serene homeland into an ecological disaster. At that time, I was in the UK continuing my studies. Saro-Wiwa came to see us in 1991 and asked us to start an international campaign to pressure multinational corporations and governments to address the environmental and human rights abuse. A lot of people started supporting us, including Amnesty. MOSOP quickly became successful. On 4 January 1993, 300,000 Ognois converged in the Bori region against Shell. No stone was thrown, no one was hurt. Our campaigning was peaceful, which we are maintaining. All we wanted was a clean environment to continue to fish and farm, otherwise we’d die of hunger.

Activists targeted

In the UK, we could speak freely of our plight, but my people in Ogoniland faced heavy repression by the military government, who branded us a terrorist organisation. On 10 November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders were hanged by the government. That fateful day, as president of the UK MOSOP, I jumped from TV to radio stations telling the world what had happened. I don’t want them to have died in vain. In 1996, the United Nations sent in a team and confirmed the level of pollution was unacceptable and that the people were suffering very serious human rights abuses. Based on this visit the United Nations Environmental Programme published an environmental audit on Ogoniland in 2011. It was highly critical of Shell’s operations. In 2008, two major oil spills in Bodo destroyed the fishing industry, which our community and its culture have not recovered from. We sued Shell in London and won a £55 million settlement in 2014. Shell was ordered to clean up the pollution and remediate and restore the environment of the seven affected communities. Until now, it has not been done. We are back in court in the UK in May to compel Shell to clean [the delta] to international standards.

Leaving their mess behind

We are livid to hear about Shell divesting from the Niger Delta, leaving their mess behind. Shell has so many environmental obligations to fulfil, including cleaning up all the pollution sites and compensating all the affected communities for lost livelihoods. Shell must also decommission old equipment, some 50 or 60 years old, lying around [which is likely to cost billions of pounds]. The companies [Shell wants to divest from] do not have the financial capacity or willingness to do this. The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission must ensure that Shell meets all these conditions and international standards before it can move out.

Global climate crisis

When we started 35 years ago, a lot of people did not understand climate change, but we raised a fundamental issue which the world is now discussing. What is happening in the Niger Delta affects places far away from us like Australia, America, South America. The international community must check what Shell and other foreign petroleum companies are doing. The United Nations, governments, corporations and international organisations must work together to ensure that resource extraction does not come at the expense of human rights and environmental sustainability. The Nigerian government is still heavily involved in fossil fuel extraction, which is worrying. We want them to have a hand in compelling Shell to follow the steps to reduce its carbon imprint.

'Keep quiet and go into extinction?'

Every day I am hunted by Shell and the Nigerian government trying to pin me down, to not say what I am saying. What do they expect the Ogoni people to do? Keep quiet and go into extinction? People are already running away from the area. The Nigerian government owe us a duty of care but have let us down. They were fully in bed with Shell. They have not addressed the Ogoni Bill of Rights we presented to them in 1991 or the clean-up. They have a responsibility to hold corporations operating in the country to account. How I wish I could take the government to the International Criminal Court to face what they have done to us in terms of pollution and ecocide. I ask that Amnesty followers support the Ogoni people and other affected communities in their fight for justice, and our position on Shell not leaving the Niger Delta unless it meets its obligations. Oil spills are still happening every day. The 2011 United Nations report says it may take 25 to 30 years to clean Ogoniland. And we have not even started.

Finding inspiration

Each time I come back home and look at the faces of my people who don’t have a voice, who have nothing, who are being marginalised and trampled on, I pick up inspiration. I am campaigning because I believe the situation will change. I’m proud of Saro-Wiwa, our leader, who had the idea of non-violence. I’m proud of the many Ogoni people who are finding it very hard to survive but are committed to the struggle. And of the people working with me who are consistent and don’t allow the manipulation from Shell and the Nigerian government to worry them. We are focused on the ongoing fight for environmental justice.

READ MORE ABOUT THE NIGER DELTA HERE