How Shell Profited from the Corruption of the Nigerian Government

Article by Batuhan (30.01.2025)

Many of you reading this are currently aware of or have heard of an oil company known as Shell, a.k.a. Royal Dutch Shell. For nearly a century, the oil company has been operating in Nigeria as an exporter of its oil to sell, while simultaneously causing many major oil spills within the country.

Shell first operated in Nigeria in 1938, as Shell D’arcy and discovered its first major oil field in 1956, before beginning operations two years later. This change was good for Nigeria at first, as beforehand it relied only on agricultural exports to sustain itself. More recently, Shell has declared a clause that frees itself from certain legal obligations, after an underwater pipe leaked and they struggled to fix the issue. The Shell Petroleum Development Company is the largest fossil fuel producer in the country, with 30% of the exported oil in Nigeria coming from the company. Tensions formed between the Ogoni people living in the Niger Delta and Shell, due to the environmental damage caused by crude oil operations in the region. In 1993, large protests were organized by the movement for the survival of the Ogoni people, or MOSOP, against both Shell and the government for allowing the exploitation. While Shell would withdraw from the Ogoni area, the government's response was much less timid.

Government forces raided the villages and arrested several of the leaders before promptly executing them. The most prominent amongst the leaders, was a man named Ken Saro-Wiwa (a well-known environmental activist belonging to the ethnic minority Ogoni), whose death caused much outrage and consequently opposition amongst the Commonwealth of Nations and multiple human rights organizations. The government's response to the protest was heavily scrutinized, which led to the militarization of the Delta by multiple different groups, which was later financed by local and state officials. Shell would later be revealed to have bribed two witnesses in a Greenpeace report and also gave money to the Nigerian military. When accused of contaminating the Niger Delta with oil, Shell would fervently deny the accusation and instead imply that MOSOP was a movement that advocated violence and secession, which was poorly received by the public.

In December of 2003, Shell acknowledged the difficulties in operating safely due to the conflict in the Niger Delta and stated, “We sometimes feed conflict by the way we award contracts, gain access to land, and deal with community representatives.” Shell then stated its intention to improve its business practices. However in 2009, Shell offered to settle the Ken Saro-Wiwa case in New York, with a sum of $15.5 million US dollars, which it called a humanitarian gesture effectively continuing to deny its involvement. Journalist Michael D. Goldhaber of The New York Times revealed that the settlement came days before the start of a trial in New York, which revealed Shell and MOSOP activities within the Niger Delta.

The air, ground and water surrounding the Niger Delta have been used as examples of ecocide (destruction of the environment by humans before proceeding to threaten all humans reliant on that same ecosystem). Sometimes individuals surrounding Shell pipelines will drill into those pipelines to take the oil and illegally transport and sell it (a lucrative tactic). This is referred to as “oil bunkering”, an activity which costs Nigeria 400,000 barrels of crude oil per day, further harming the environment as individuals no longer bother to close the drilled-in pipelines. Consequently, this causes further oil spills and environmental damage. Oil spills also occur due to the poor quality of the extraction and transportation equipment, which leads to corrosion by the oil and further oil spills referred to as “operational spills”. 18.7% of all reported spills have been accredited to “operational spills”.

In October 2004, Eric Dooh would receive a call from one of his father's employees, who stated that the waterway surrounding their house was running black with oil. Dooh suspected that a nearby pipe (built by Shell in the 1960s) had sprung a leak and was unable to inform Shell or its Nigerian subsidiary, due to their abandoning of the region a decade earlier because of uprisings. It was only a day later that officials boarded a helicopter and inspected the pipe, finding that the pipe had indeed sprung a leak and the stream of oil was not slowing down. Later that day the oil spilled into a local farmer's house and a cooking fire soon followed, causing extensive damage to the surrounding mangrove forest, the creek and the village itself. On the 12th of October, a team of investigators found that the source was an 18-inch (46 cm) hole and later sealed it with a clamp. However, the late timing of the action had caused 23,000 liters of oil to leak over a 3-day period and had also caused nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest to burn.

Shell later stated the leak was an incident attributed to vandalism of the pipe and therefore the work of saboteurs, while Dooh and his father attested that it was the result of a poorly maintained pipeline. It took two years before government agencies began a cleanup of the region. Even six years after the initial leak, Goi was far too polluted to sustain its residents, leading to many being forced to abandon their homes, after a government order ruled the region uninhabitable. In 1970, there was an oil spill from a pipeline caused mainly by corrosion, which led to 250 barrels of oil being spilled. In 2006, a team of investigators from Nigeria, the UK, and the United States conducted an independent assessment and deduced that between 9 million and 13 million barrels of oil had been spilled, with Shell being responsible for 50% of the oil production in Nigeria, leading to the assessment that Shell has spilled 491,627 barrels of oil, which averages out to a mean sum of approximately 41,000 barrels of oil every year.

In 2011, Shell started publishing the reports required every time a spill takes place through the use of JIV or “Joint Investigation Visit.” These reports were published in 2015 by “The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency” or “NOSDRA”. The reports, according to Shell, indicate that since 2011, 1,010 oil spills have occurred, with an overall sum of 110,535 barrels of oil or 17.5 million liters of oil lost. Of the oil spills since 2011, only 25.7% of cases saw Shell tend to the spill within the first 24 hours of it happening–the legally required minimum for all oil companies. It is even more common for Shell only to begin cleaning up the oil spill and not finish the job. While Shell states it shuts off its pipelines in the event of a spill, it has remained silent on the oil spilled and lost which is still present in the ecosystems.

One example states that in February of 2016, Shell took 252 days to visit the site of the oil spill, with a second example in May of 2015, where it took 190 days to visit the site of the oil spill. In both cases the area itself was reported as easily accessible, leaving little room for excuses. Overall, Shell takes an average of 9.68 days to respond to an oil spill and conduct a JIV report on spills occurring in water and around 5.35 days on average to respond to oil spills on land. Due to the volatility of oil, 50% of the exposed oil tends to evaporate 24 to 48 hours after the initial spill, which can make a point that the estimate proposed by Shell is vastly underreporting the true amount of oil spilled due to their delayed response time of at least taking 5 days to respond. Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth International would later contest Shell’s claim that 98% of all its oil spills were the result of sabotage, which caused Shell to revise the claim to 70% and a Dutch court to rule in 2013 that Shell was in fact liable for the oil spills in the Niger Delta regardless of its claimed “sabotage”.

Shell and an Italian energy multinational corporation (MNC) named Eni were charged with corruption over the purchase of an offshore oil field, in which it is believed that Shell and Eni paid $1.3 billion worth of bribes to numerous Nigerian government officials. Shell and Eni were both acquitted and face no consequences. Unfortunately, it is believed that lax regulation by the Nigerian government and rampant corruption amongst its administration have led to the numerous pipelines and overall oil spills that have cost thousands their livelihoods and homes. In June 2005, residents from Oruma village saw oil “bubble out of the ground” and ended up causing 63,600 liters of oil to spill from a Shell pipeline over the course of eleven days. In August 2007, 100,000 liters of oil leaked from an above-ground wellhead built over 40 years ago by Shell in 1959, which was reportedly “never used for oil extraction”.

Recently, the backlash faced by Shell has grown and Shell has stated its intention to sell off its Nigerian subsidy and therefore exit Nigeria. Many advocates have called against this course of action, as it appears that Shell wishes to leave Nigeria without cleaning up any of the pollution it has caused. The Amnesty International director for Nigeria has stated, “With Shell currently seeking regulatory approval for the sale of its business in the Niger Delta, it is essential that it is held fully to account for decades of grievous human rights abuses related to oil spills that have polluted the environment, contaminated drinking water, and poisoned agricultural land, fisheries, and people. An offer made by Nigeria’s industry regulator to fast-track approvals of sales by oil companies that accept responsibility for pollution must not be an easy option that allows Shell to cut and run from the suffering related to its operations in the Niger Delta or that exposes local communities to more human rights harms.” These sentiments are shared amongst all the advocacy groups currently attempting to halt Shell from its course of action.

In conclusion, Shell has showcased to the world how easy it is to exploit a country’s resources once the country’s government has been bribed to accept certain conditions. Shell’s operations in Nigeria are a stark reminder of the power behind MNCs and how far they will go in order to profit. Shell is not the first MNC or large corporation to do this, but the most obvious in its dealings. Overall, Shell and Nigeria is also a hopeful reminder to the people of their power. Once multiple advocates and communities began to condemn Shell and its human rights violations, Shell was backed into a corner and was forced to admit its wrongdoings. Shell’s operations in Nigeria are a message of how even the largest corporations must appease the people and also a warning to what happens if those same people should remain silent.

Sources:

1-Doe, John. “Shell Nigeria.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Oct. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Nigeria. Accessed 27 Dec. 2024. 

2-Doe, John. “Shell Must Be Held Fully Accountable for Human Rights Harms before Being Allowed to Sell Its Niger Delta Business.” Amnesty International, 14 May 2024, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/05/nigeria-shell-must-be-held-fully-accountable-for-human-rights-harms-before-being-allowed-to-sell-its-niger-delta-business/. Accessed 27 Dec. 2024. 

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