Sooty towers of flame spew into the air, night and day, as excess natural gas from the petroleum industry burns off, buffeting Nigerian villagers with jet-force heat and noise.
For many living near the dozens of gas flares dotting southern Nigeria, the flames are just another, particularly potent, reminder that the country’s oil wealth has done little to benefit its people.
”The fish have gone from the rivers because of the noise. The fields are polluted from the oil, nothing grows,” said Uche Onyemetu, who lives near an oil installation and four flares.
”This is supposed to be a rich village but the whole area is poor,” says the unemployed 31-year-old.
Oil began flowing shortly before the west African nation’s 1960 independence from Britain. International oil companies operating here have since given untold billions of dollars to the federal government.
Royal Dutch Shell, Nigeria’s biggest producer, paid with its partners $2,2-billion in 2004 alone.
But most of Nigeria’s 130-million people remain mired in poverty, much of the oil money stolen by leaders.
Across the south, Nigerians are clamoring for a greater share of the proceeds flowing from the region’s massive oil installations.
Some Nigerians have taken up arms, attacking oil installations and kidnapping foreign oil workers to press their point.
Bitterness over seeing so little benefit from the oil industry is compounded by living with the pollution it produces.
The natural gas flows along with the crude when it’s pumped from the ground. While a valuable energy resource in its own right, processing and shipping the gas wasn’t viewed as sufficiently profitable when much of Nigeria’s oil infrastructure was built, so the gas was treated as an unwanted byproduct and burned off.
Gas flares pollute the fields and traditional fishing grounds.
Villagers say the acrid black smoke sickens and blinds them and the flares’ keening whine, which sounds like a jet plane, hurts their ears.
”They never end, never since before I was born,” said 27-year-old Gift Obilor Jonah.
A Nigerian court recently ordered Shell and its joint-venture partners to pay $1,5-billion to one community to clean up pollution. The joint venture is appealing.
The federal government, under pressure from people in the Niger Delta, said about a decade ago that all the flares must be extinguished by 2008.
The international firms that work with Nigeria’s state-owned oil company are investing billions to harness the excess gas and sell it off, but they say a lack of major regional markets and other spending priorities by their local partner is hampering efforts.
Shell, which plans to shut off its flares by 2009 — about a year later than originally planned — ”is committed to ending routine flaring of gas in its Nigerian operations”, says a company spokesperson, Caroline Wittgen.
”This requires the company to gather and bring to market gas from more than one thousand wells, which is a big undertaking,” she said by telephone from London.
At Eaboch, a town of mud huts and a one-room schoolhouse, such vows — of an end to flaring, jobs for the people, development of their region — are given little heed.
”They keep telling us that it will stop, but it’s not stopping,” says Onyemetu. ”The government is always saying they’ll stop, since I was born. But up to now, it’s still continuing.”
At another flare in southern Nigeria, one of the few that shoot sideways a few feet off the ground, one woman has found a way to harness the fires for herself.
Ukpamueki Ogwhe (70) staggers under a woven basket balanced on her head and filled with shredded cassava. She places the cassava as close to the flames as she can tolerate.
The cassava, a staple food in Nigeria, dries faster near the flares than under the pitiless sun overhead. Ogwhe can produce the tasteless white curls faster than her competitors and sell more of them at a roadside market.
”This is good for us, it’s useful for us. We can dry our cassava,” she says as the flame roars nearby. ”But if it could be used to make lights or fuel for cooking, it would be even better.” — Sapa-AP