A barrister berates Shell in front of village elders. It’s music to the ears o f the military, writes Patrick Donovan
GIVE him a wig and black silk gown, and Napolean Agbedetse could have walked b ack into the south London courtrooms where he used to practise as a barrister. He is on the bank of the Abadino river, deep inside the mosquito-infested man
grove swamps of the Niger delta. Despite the shirt-soaking humidity, Agbedetse is immaculately dressed in a heavy black pinstripe suit.
Standing on the jetty amid a welter of gawping young boys, he cuts an incongru ous figure as he courteously greets representatives of the Shell oil company a nd prepares, yet again, to do verbal battle on behalf of the Omadino people. This is only one of the hundreds of remote rural communities in Nigeria who fe el they are being cheated out of their birthright by foreign oil companies.
This issue has rarely been out of the headlines since the country’s military g overnment late last year outraged international opinion by proceeding with the hanging of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa — a campaigner for the the
Ogoni people, who live in the east of the delta.
Shell, which operates a consortium responsible for drilling more than half the country’s oil reserves, has been widely criticised for not doing more to oppo
se the execution. Shell is perceived by many in the West to have huge influenc e with the authorities as oil now accounts for as much as 90% of the governmen t’s revenue. But within the subsistence-level fishing communities like the Oma dinos near the oil town of Warri, anger is steadily growing.
Last month, 60 protesters forced Shell to shut down its drilling rig in nearby Jones Creek — the latest of a string of incidents throughout the Niger bas
in, where local communities’ dissatisfaction has boiled over into direct actio n against Shell activities.
Six million people live in this 70 000km2 province. These are rural communitie s, eking out their living from the brown waters of the Niger and its fast-runn ing tributaries snaking out across a massive expanse of rain forest and mangro ve swamp.
But their living standards have plummeted: wildlife is scarce, and fish yields are down. How much this is due to the pressures of population growth, lack of
land management or oil industry-related pollution depends on which lobbyists
you listen to.
All of which raises the question of to what extent any international company o perating in a deprived country should be held responsible for functions which are, or should be, the preserve of the national government. In the case of Nig eria, the debate is clouded still further by the failure of the national gover nment to redistribute hefty oil revenues to the producing areas, and by the my riad local tribal tensions which make it almost impossible to get an accurate assessment
of the views of local people.
Yet the debate that took place last week between Agbedetse and Shell’s local g eneral manager, Steve Ollerearnshaw, in front of an audience of villagers down the Abadino river does, in simplified form, highlight the underlying conflict
.
Although he had cut out a career for himself as a British-based barrister, Agb edetse says that he was driven by his conscience to return to help his native Itsekiri tribe.
Waiting until the contingent from Shell has sat down in the corrugated tin-roo fed meeting hall, Agbedetse drops to his knee before Chief Sunday and the othe r tribal elders, some wearing bowler hats and all seated at differing heights to reflect their varying degrees of seniority.
Waiting until his guests have been served Star beer or cola, he lulls them int o a false sense of security, praising Shell for its “sheer hard work” which ha s “opened up the unknown hidden wealth of our country”. And then he turns the knife. Listened to attentively by dozens of stony-faced villagers, Agbedetse a ccuses Shell of “dictatorship”.
“On paper, they dialogue with the community on what developments are needed, b ut in reality Shell operatives dictate what they want, irrespective of the nee ds of the people,” he says.
Not only do communities like the Omadino get little back from local oil explor ation, but also Shell, he asserts, is decimating the region’s staple occupatio n of fishing, through oil spills. He adds: “The plight of those of us in the r ural operation areas is one of depression, neglect and poverty.”
As they sit in their green overalls, several Shell officials have clearly hear d this all before. Ollerearnshaw gets to his feet, pointing out that the compa ny has given the community a block of classrooms and public toilets and will s hortly be donating a health centre — the latest items from Shell’s $30-mill ion-a-year community assistance programme for the Niger delta region. A furthe r $100-mil lion is allocated for the environment annually.
He tries to raise the point that Shell is a company, and cannot take on all th e functions of central government. But one angry young man, wearing blue and w hite robes, attempts to hijack the meeting, angrily shouting that the company must do more.
Back in Nigeria’s capital city, Lagos, the company’s managing director Brian A nderson admits that adverse publicity surrounding its involvement in Nigeria h as been “very bad” for the company’s image, particularly the controversy surro unding the Saro-Wiwa hanging. But Shell insists that the situation in the Nige r delta is far more complex, and Anderson claims that its influence on the har dline nati onal government is far less than the West supposes it to be.
Shell’s stance is that it is, after all, a commercial company with a 30% stake in a consortium in which the state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corporati
on has a majority holding. The group, which includes Elf of France and Italy’s Agip, pumps more than half of Nigeria’s output of two million barrels a day,
giving the country oil revenues worth $7-billion, of which the government keep s 75%.
At least 3% of this revenue should flow back to the people of the oil-producin g areas, according to the terms of a government decree. This is to increase to 13%, although the higher figure has yet to be ratified.
In practice, it appears that government aid has all but broken down, and Shell says that the administration is in arrears with its payments. That puts even
more pressure on the funds Shell and its other partners have for community pro jects.
The problem is that for many of the rural inhabitants of the Niger Delta, Shel l has effectively become the government. It may protest that it does not aspir e to become a 21st century version of the East India Company; yet the more it seeks to pacify local people by taking over the role of building hospitals and providing schools, the more it replaces Nigeria’s military dictatorship as a
target for civil dissent.
And yet Shell has been extracting oil here for 50 years. It may play the role of the community-minded Western oil company, but why is it only now making suc h a fanfare about its perfectly laudable programmes to replant the mangrove sw amps and bury its pipelines if not to improve its public image?
Of course attitudes change, but Shell cannot ignore the fact that it has drain ed billions of dollars of profits out of Nigeria during the past five decades. Its payback to the community has hardly been consistent over that period.
And as with all oil explorers, it has inevitably contributed to the pollution of the environment, although there is no obvious sign of any significant spill age within its operating areas in the delta.
But Shell is now having to pay in full. It has played such a pivotal role in N igeria’s economy that it must bear some responsibility when the going gets rou gh. But the company’s predicament may be useful, too, for Nigeria’s leader, Ge neral Sani Abacha: the controversy diverts attention from the country’s fundam ental problem — the corruption and inefficiency in its own military governm ent.