Nigerian villagers lifted their blockade of three oil pumping stations in the volatile Niger Delta on Tuesday after energy giants Shell and ChevronTexaco agreed to discuss funding local development projects.
The three plants had been occupied since Sunday morning by protesters from the ethnic Ijaw fishing community of Kula, which lies in coastal swamps near the Atlantic coast, 100km south-west of Port Harcourt.
The end of the protest saw more than 100 oil workers, who had been blockaded on board the stations, freed — including an American and a South African.
But the firms said they have yet to resume production at the sites, which pump 90 000 barrels of crude per day from a network of swampland oil wells.
”We’ve agreed to meet with the protesters in Port Harcourt tomorrow [Wednesday] to discuss the issues that they have raised,” a spokesperson for the United States major ChevronTexaco said by telephone from London.
A Shell spokesperson confirmed the occupation is over.
”They have all left. They have gone to an adjoining village called Freetown,” he said, also speaking from London, where the Anglo-Dutch multinational is based.
Two of the sites, Ekulama I and Ekulama II, are operated by Shell and the third, Robertkiri, by ChevronTexaco.
Both firms are now due to meet representatives of the Kula community in the south-eastern city of Port Harcourt — a major centre of the oil industry and the gateway to the delta’s maze of creeks and mangrove swamps — on Wednesday.
”The deputy governor has set up a committee to look into ways of resolving the situation,” said Emmanuel Okah, spokesperson for the Rivers state government.
Okah said the government has made contact with the protesters and hopes to persuade the oil companies to spend more on local development in Kula.
”They have to meet certain social obligations to the community,” he said. ”These are not armed youths, they are not violent.”
The managing director of Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary SPDC, Basil Omiyi, said: ”They say they want to have a memorandum of understanding with us, like the neighbouring communities. We hope to sort it out in the next few days.”
Shell and other oil companies working in the Niger Delta sign ”memoranda of understanding” with villages to record promises to fund local development, such as job-creation schemes, building work and supplies of electricity and water.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer and the fifth-largest exporter in the world, supplying 2,5-million barrels of light sweet crude to the international market, mainly to the US and Europe.
Despite the industry’s huge wealth, three-quarters of Nigeria’s 130-million-strong population lives mired in crippling poverty on less than $1 per day, and resentment against the multinationals often erupts into protests.
Last month, Nigerian soldiers opened fire on a group of Ijaws from the village of Ojobo who were trying to occupy a drilling rig operated by a Shell sub-contractor on the Bomadi Creek, 160km west of Port Harcourt.
Shell and the military said 12 people were injured in the shooting, but witnesses in Ojobo said that in addition to the wounded, seven more people had been killed. Grieving relatives showed reporters seven fresh graves.
In addition to facing largely peaceful occupations mounted by angry villagers, oil firms have also found themselves the target of organised, heavily armed gangs of oil thieves, river pirates and ethnic militias.
Hundreds of people die every year in waves of violence fuelled by youth unemployment and the profits of a multimillion-dollar trade in stolen crude, which is siphoned out of illegally tapped pipelines and shipped abroad.
The leader of the best-known Ijaw militia, Dokubo Asari, said his so-called Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force — a guerrilla outfit bent on winning independence for the region — has no links to the latest protest.
”It’s a community matter. The people are deprived, that’s why they are doing it,” he said.
He did not rule out that some of his fighters may have taken part as individuals, but said: ”As an organisation, it’s not a project of ours.” — Sapa-AFP