John: Delta no place for a holiday

Nov 19 2009 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Shell is alleged to have been blase about illegal gas flaring, about oil spills and the illegal appropriation of land for oil extraction.

And it’s allegedly been doing this for the best part of 50 years.

The internet is not always an accurate reflection of the truth, but few can drop everything and fly out to the Niger Delta to see for themselves who’s telling fibs.

Sometimes you just have to make a judgement.

Website after website mentions human rights abuse on a massive scale, affecting millions of people.

The International Crisis Group, for instance, says that 20m Delta residents have been systematically exposed to violence, driven into poverty by the oil monoculture (former cash crops for export included cocoa, cotton, rubber and groundnuts) and generally treated as dirt by the major oil companies.

It’s true that the many political factions in Nigeria are partly to blame.

It appears they regularly sabotage oil installations and attack opponents with lethal violence.

We have, I suppose, come to accept that Africa is the world’s most dangerous continent.

We seem to consider its problems simply too large-scale, horrific and widespread to be resolved.

Is digging a well in Namibia and paying for a couple of goats in Ethiopia going to do anything but salve your conscience?

Yes, it is. It may save lives.

But ultimately the only way forward is through international pressure.

Shaming Shell into real action will tie the hands of the Nigerian government, which desperately needs the oil billions and would probably toe Shell’s line on human rights, environmental stewardship, health, education ... if Shell were man enough to force them.

Perhaps the least that can be done is for Shell to be asked to clean things up a bit.