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POLLUTION
CRISIS IN NIGERIA
Video: Black Snow: Nigeria’s Oil Catastrophe ... ongoing for decades
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Black Snow: Nigeria’s Oil Catastrophe ... this presentation is very thought provoking, and it has made my blood boil. It reflects a level of greed and irresponsibility that is difficult to comprehend.
I got to know this part of Nigeria ... that is the Niger Delta back in the early 1970s when I was the CFO of Continental Seafoods and later when I was doing consulting work for the World Bank and the United Nations.
I got to know something about the Niger Delta when our company got involved in a joint venture called the Nigerian National Shrimp Company (NNSC) between our company and the Federal Military Government (FMG) of Nigeria and the Mid-West Government of Nigeria. The original plan was to operate from an existing port at Koko in the Niger Delta that had good facilities ... quai and warehouse structures ... but had almost no commercial activity. This plan changed in 1973 with the OPEC oil shock and the dramatic increase in crude oil prices, and Nigeria suddenly had oil revenues to pay for imports. I was physically at Koko port with the Port Manager when the first commercial shipment came to Koko and it became clear that the NNSC was not going to be able to use this location for its shrimp fishery operations.
After some delay, we located a property in Ogharefe, on a branch of the Niger Delta near Sapele, and set about building a small fishing port together with shore support facilities, shrimp processing plant and cold stores. Before we acquired the property it had been used in connection with export of lumber, which arrived from upstream in log rafts. In order to get permission from the government authorities I had to prepare and submit the engineering drawings for everything we had planned for the site ... which I did based on what I had learned as an engineering student some 15 years before. One of the issues we had to concern ourself with was the lack of any solid grounding for foundations ... essentially the hard ground was floating on top of a lake of slurry washed down the river over centuries.
Sapele and Ogharefe are not far from Benin City and Warri ... a little bit North of the Ogoniland talked about in this video. In the easrly 1970s when the the NNSC operation was being put together I travelled between Ogharefe and Benin and Lagos almost every month. We were just outside the environmental disaster being talked about in the video.
In the early 1980s I was recruited to be the team leader for a UN/IFAD project being evaluated in this general area ... actually the four States of Cross River State, Akwa Ibom State, Edo State and Rivers States with main cities of Calabar, Uyo, Ala Oji and Port Harcourt. The project as being designed to support the artisanal fisheries of the region which were being seriously damaged from the pollution of the oil extraction industry throughout the region. What we saw of the pollution from the oil industry was horrendous at that time, and by all accounts got worse in subsequent years.
I have never been a 'shrinking violet', and the evaluation report that our team produced for IFAD did not sugar coat the crisis of the artisanal fisheries and the local people of the area that depended for their livelihood on fishing ... but for all practical purposes nothing of substance got done. The explanation was not difficult to understand.
IFAD is a UN agency located in Rome close to FAO. They both concern themselves with agriculture and fisheries, but while FAO is funded like most other specialized agencies of the UN, IFAD is funded by the oil-rich Arab countries. IFAD is not particularly free to be critical of the energy (oil) industry which has done ... according to our draft report ... untold damage to this artisanal fishery.
Though our team had official standing ... the oil company management in the region studiously avoided any contact with me or our team. My impression at the time was that the international oil company strategy was to recruit respected local elders into their management ranks, which worked to do reputational damage control in the local area, but not so much for the rather rare international team like our own.
But the big international companies operating in the region had another problem. Africans may not be technically sophisticated in a Western sense, but they are better than most at mechanical improvision and they have figured out all sorts of ways to divert flows of crude oil away from the corporate pipelines into all sorts of locally operated subsidiary and informal pipelines to get processed somewhere in the bush and eventually get sold into a very active and extensive informal and illegal market.
Attempts are any sort of law enforcement have been perfunctory at best. Informal payments ... corruption that is ... are likely to be substantially bigger than the base pay of most ordinary working people. It is no surprise, therefore, that the system as a whole gets worse and worse rather than better and better.
The big international companies like Shell, Chevron and others that have been the foundation for both the environmental and the social mess that has metastasized over several decades have avoided being held to account using rather crude legal maneuvers ... pushing responsibility as far from the head-office to remote local subsidiaries as they possibly can. Whether this will work, remains to be seen, but they are obviously trying to do this.
I would like to be optimistic tha things are going to get better for the people impacted by the environmental mess in Nigeria, but I am not. Even if a lot of money is made available for a massive clean up, it is unlikely that the money will end up in the right places ... and in the end it will be the 'same old, same old' mess that people will have to contunue to live with.
For me, I am a little bit encouraged because it is clear that there are no existing management metrics that can be applied to get effective oversight of this whole crisis. The conventional financial management accounting works quite well for corporate profit optimization, but does not work to delived performance accountability in situations like the one in the Niger Delta. My work with TrueValueMetrics has the potential to be an answer, and I hope this will help in due course.
Peter Burgess
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