Author: Nnimmo Bassey
Shell Petroleum Development Company Ltd of Nigeria (SPDC), Shell for short, recently received a report titled “Sustainable Re-mediation and Rehabilitation of Biodiversity and Habitats of Oil Spill Sites in the Niger Delta” from its partner – the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The document dated July 2013 is also tagged as “a main report including recommendations for the future.”
The report has five chapters covering: background and role of the IUCN-Niger Delta panel; Principles underlying re-mediation and rehabilitation of biodiversity habitats in the Niger Delta; Background to recommendations for re-mediation techniques in the Niger Delta; Recommendations and Conclusions. The annexes listed in the document are only to be accessed by sending e-mail requests to the IUCN.
In a critique of this report sent to the IUCN, Professor Richard Steiner, an expert on oil and marine issues, raised a number of concerns of which we shall turn to in a moment. But we hasten to note that the overall picture of the report is one that treats the desperately polluted situation of the Niger Delta in a way that indicates that Shell is up to nothing but more prevarication and time-buying while they get on with profiteering from their high impact exploitation activities.
In its unsigned ‘preface’, we are told that the report sets out the “panel’s overall strategy for sustainable re-mediation and sets the scene for the other two objectives of the panel’s work: to ‘develop a strategy to safeguard the Niger Delta’s remaining areas of biodiversity’ and ‘build capacity with local organizations.” It also says that ‘now that the recommendations contained in this report have been proposed, SPDC can soon start on the planned set of field pilots, based on specific advice from the panel and monitored by the panel over the next two years’.
We emphasise the fact that the panel and Shell recognise that the biodiversity of the Niger Delta has been so decimated by the oil companies’ activities that they can now be talking of “the Niger Delta’s remaining areas of biodiversity.” This admission of the scandalous destruction of the Niger Delta’s ecosystem speaks volumes of the great harm that Shell and other oil companies have dealt on Nigeria.
The statement also indicates that Shell intends to take tentative steps towards re-mediation over a period of two years. Recall that the UNEP report stated that Ogoni waters would require thirty years to be cleaned up. By this report, Shell has extended that to thirty-four years if we take into account the two years of inaction that have already passed.
We should state here also that partnerships between conservation agencies and oil companies have often ended up with the polluters using these engagements for no other purpose than green-washing. It was for the reason of IUCN’s partnership with Shell that Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), at its biennial general meeting held in Honduras, October 2008, voted to relinquish its membership of the IUCN.
A reading of this report emanating from the partnership of IUCN with Shell validates FoEI’s position and shows that the conservation body is enjoying a ride on the back of the tiger.
The report is careful not to mention that this panel was set up in the wake of the UNEP report of the assessment of the Ogoni environment that issued a damning verdict of Shell’s atrocious behaviour in Ogoniland. The UNEP report stated categorically that the oil company acted below its in-house standards and neither kept to international standards nor the Environmental Guidelines and Standards for the Petroleum Industry in Nigeria (EGASPIN).
The IUCN report now shamelessly states: “SPDC has implemented its re-mediation measures to meet the Environmental Guidelines and Standards for the Petroleum Industry in Nigeria (EGASPIN) standards.” This claim is contrary to what the same report reveals when it states that “in a recently concluded re-mediation site in Soku, the hydrocarbon levels were higher than the EGASPIN standards of 2002, even though all the authorities has signed off on the certificate for a clean bill of health for that site.”
The report makes a case that because the EGASPIN standards are generalised and not ecosystem specific as in the USA, Canada and the Netherlands, it means that standards may be stricter or less for certain locations. The report then takes the role of the lawmaker and urges Shell to disregard the laws of the land and follow “suggested target levels indicated in Annex II as a guide for monitoring ecosystem recovery, until site specific standards are established for the Niger Delta ecosystem.”
It is not a surprise that the names of the writers of this report and the members of this IUCN/Shell’s Niger Delta Panel are not listed in the publication. It would help observers to discern better the basis for some of the claims made in the report including why certain areas could not be visited for reasons of the access roads being cut off by floods and for security concerns.
For part 2 of this report, please access Nigerian Telegraph website on Tuesday, Sept. 17 2013.
