Nick Ashton-Jones, with Oronto Douglas and Susi Arnott

“ The primary beneficiaries will be the shareholders of the oil companies, the highly paid technical and managerial staff and, most of all, the plethora of corrupt officials, politicians and military personnel. The wealth generated by the oil industry has been concentrated in a very few hands while the avaricious desire for a portion of the wealth directs and has thoroughly corrupted and criminalised the political life of the state to a degree where civil society is collapsing. ”

“ The World Bank has concluded, with reservations, that there does not seem to be any large-scale oil pollution in the Niger Delta. At the same time it is noted that there is little scientific available.
It is clear, however, that oil spills can have serious consequences for the local environment and population. A farmer whose fields have been ruined by the oil pollution is not helped by being told that nature generally recovers within ten years. The same is true of a fisherman who sees the fish in a river decimated by an in spill. They have lost their sole source of income is in dire straits. ”

“ In order to be able to have a clear and objective view of how the oil industry makes an impact upon the environment it is necessary first to understand the nature of environmental impact assessment in terms of the mining of oil. ”

“ Because oil is, and will continue to be, the prime source of wealth for Nigeria as a whole, and the revenue base upon which the federal government rests, it is the nucleus of all political strategy. In the Niger Delta all political issues centre around who is to have what proportion of the oil wealth. ”

“ Because of the income inequality, which is exacerbated by corruption (whereby a very few people are extremely rich) , only the top few percent of the population have access to services such as water electricity and education because they can pay for them. Everyone else more or less does without because public provision is so bad. ”

“ The oil industry has a significantly adverse environmental impact upon the human environment of the Niger Delta. It's activities not only exacerbate other environmental problems but create unique problems which are worse than they need be because the industry as a whole is corrupt and careless and clearly does not operate to the standards which are expected elsewhere in the world. ”

“ A rarely mentioned impact of flaring is the way that they light up the night sky. Most small communities, and a number of larger ones, do not have electricity so that, at night, in many places, there is a strange contrast between the general darkness of a village and the pulsating glow of nearby flares. ”

“ In terms of costs and benefits, the great majority of the local people bear all the environmental costs and receive no economic benefits. When the oil reserves have been exhausted the human environment will have been unnecessarily degraded and the local people will be worse off than they would have been had there been no oil industry. ”

“ Direct pollution such as offshore and on-shore spillage, gas flaring and abandoned installations. Alteration of the environment by activities such as the construction of access slots, pipelines, flowlines, roads, drilling sites and wellheads. Pollution and alteration of the environment by other primary and by secondary and tertiary industries encouraged by the oil industry. More insidious costs include the build up of heavy metals in ground-water, changes in soil acidity caused by atmospheric pollution and disruption to local communities and their relationship with their natural resources. ”

“ But above all, it arises from the manifestation of the oil industry in the midst of the community which seems to represent huge wealth and yet has given nothing to it, except for the impoverishment of their land. This sense of frustration is most apparent amongst the young men and women who crave a better education but if they get it find that they can do little with it. The young men particularly, hang aimlessly around their communities (sometime helping their mothers on the farm) or migrate to the court-yard or water-side slums of Port Harcourt in search of work and something better... ”

“ So that at every stage in the management of human activities and projects, good design, good management and good social responsibility is possible. Thus, approached properly, EIA gives direction, and it saves time and direct costs for project development and management. But more importantly, it reduces the environmental costs of a project to society as a whole, that may, in the end, save an oil company from a great deal of political opposition. ”

“ Local people need clean water, farmland, fish and forest resources but so do people outside the region. Effectively the demand for the natural resources of the Niger Delta are infinite: for instance every bit of timber that could be felled would find a market. In the near future pressure will intensify for developing the agricultural potential of the Niger Delta, for oil palm and for rice for export. These agricultural activities could have an even more profound influence on the local ecosystems than does oil industry. ”

“ In order to understand the significance of the actual adverse impact that the oil industry has upon the environment of the Niger Delta, it is important to be able to make an unemotional and objective analysis of the environment, both locally and globally. ”

“ Easy for instance, to assume that all the environmental problems in the Niger Delta which have arisen in the past forty years are caused by the oil industry simply because the industry has been active for the same period. ”

“ Moreover assessments of the significance of the environmental impact of human activity are, in the end, unavoidably subjective. This is because, even with all the available information in front of them, decision-makers have to make essentially arbitrary, valueladen decisions about the significance of certain impacts. ”

“ As described in this book, the environment in which the oil industry operates is a very complex human ecosystem. In the first place, the natural ecosystem, as the determining basis of all human activity, is a dynamic inter-relationship of young wetland and lowland deltaic ecosystems, which are fragile and highly valued in terms of global biodiversity. These ecosystems are important as the sources of a wide range of renewable natural resources ”

“ In reality they receive no compensation for loss of farmland and very little or nothing is received for crops lost.
Generally the local people are ignored by the oil industry. Except for a few token projects (often replacing facilities lost in the construction of oil industry infrastructure) and ex-gratia payments, sometimes quite large, paid to influential individuals, none of the oil wealth reaches the communities in the oil producing areas in the Niger Delta. On the contrary, they appear to be the net losers, bearing most of the environmental costs of oil extraction. ”

“ The area produces 3.2% of the world's oil requirements. Evidence of the industry is everywhere, map 5 showing how pervasive is the industry today. Moreover, the map shows only the pipe-lines which carry bulk crude oil from the flow stations to the oil terminals, it does not show the thousands of kilometres of flow-lines which run in batches across the lowland farms carrying the crude from the well-heads to the flow-stations. An abiding picture for anyone who has worked in the area is of women, carrying farm produce on their heads, trying to negotiate these flow lines. ”

“ Rising sea levels resulting from global warming The 1995 World Bank Report suggests that the Niger Delta is particularly at risk because of its low elevation. A 1m rise in sea level would flood 18,000 km2 of Nigeria, severely disrupting the oil and gas industry, forcing up to 80% of the delta’s population to relocate, in addition to destroying much agricultural land, forests and fisheries. ”

“ A subsequent impact of oil spillage is on human health and especially mental health. In areas of intensive oil industry activity, local people often complain of increased physical and psychological symptoms which they blame on the presence of oil in their ecosystems. ”

“ What is a Project? A project describes a human activity which uses existing resources to achieve specific objectives. For instance logging is a project, the resource being the forest and the objective the production of logs. ”

“ It is important to appreciate that while the participation of local people is an essential part of good EIA, decision makers often have to make difficult decisions which are not in the interests of local people but which benefit the wider community. In these situations the participation of local people is even more important so that project design minimises the potentially adverse impacts of a project upon them. ”

“ The country has a Human Development Index, according to the United Nations Development Programme, which puts it 139th out of 173 countries, and a per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of US$340 compared to US$1000 in 1980. The reason for this poor and deteriorating economic situation arises from the neglect of the Renewable Natural Resources (RNR) sector of the economy (Agriculture, Forests & Fisheries) in favour of oil revenues, coupled with a rapid increase in population which has put particular pressure on the RNR sector. ”

“ Since the formation of the country by Lugard in 1914, Nigeria has had governments that have been careless of the environmental impacts of mining. Tin mining in the Jos Plateau and coal mining in the area around Enugu are good examples of where mining has always ignored the well-being of employees and local people alike. ”

“ Carbon dioxide is not the only Greenhouse gas. It makes up about 55% of the total. Pollutants from air-conditioners and refrigerators (Chloroflurocarbons - CFCs) make up about 20%; and, Methane makes up 15%. Gas flaring in the Niger Delta is considered to be a major source of Greenhouse gases. ”

“ Which arises from income inequality and the unjust provision of services and housing in urban areas. This ranges from a general awareness of the injustices of life to an anger that can occasionally flare up into mass political action. But perhaps the worst manifestation is the general air of depression that the condition lends to life as a whole in the Niger Delta.
All members of society appear to suffer from frustration both for themselves and for their children. ”

“ Flowlines generally leak because they are not replaced on schedule, and also burst, sending out fountains of emulsified oil and gas because they are under pressure. The potential danger is increased because pipe and flowlines intrude into villages. Oddly, the oil companies maintain that originally pipelines and flow lines are initially sited away from settlements, as if, over forty years, the expansion of settlement areas was not anticipated. ”

“ Pollution caused by upstream activities The Fresh and Brackish-water ecozones of the Niger Delta are the last terrestrial sink for the drainage of much of Nigeria and a very large chunk of West Africa. ”

“ Because most people in the Niger Delta have very low or no disposable income while workers in the oil industry receive comparatively high incomes. For instance a flow station supervisor may receive up to N80,000 a month (about US$800 in 1997) compared with a well paid security guard who gets about N4,000 or a University lecturer, about N6,000. Civil servants are particularly badly paid compared to oil industry workers, which encourages corruption. ”

“ Roads required by the oil industry often give the incidental economic benefit to local people of providing access to agricultural areas and forests. Nonetheless, potentially they have three adverse environmental impacts. ”

“ To an outsider, the diametric contrast between hopeless people scratching about in the degraded landscape and the high technology of the oil installations, the chemical plants of Onne and the expensive cars passing by on the Federal highway, suggests an unbalanced and unstable society. ”

“ Although any sort of employment ought to be seen as an economic benefit, seismic prospecting exercises typically employ young men from the local community for a few weeks or months only, paying wages that are much higher than they are likely to ever find again. ”

“ Nonetheless, in the absence of government initiatives, it is in the financial interests of the oil industry to combat local discontent because demonstrations, strikes and civil disorder, incur three high costs to the oil industry that share-holders might reasonably question: damage to capital assets ”

“ Also because public housing is severely limited and because the house building industry concentrates on building for the rich, housing provision for the middle classes and the poor is of a very low standard. ”