Judd-Leonard Okafor
23 December 2011
The environmental group, Friends of the Earth Nigeria, says the oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell must be held accountable for pollutions from its facilities, stopping it from causing further pollution and ensuring it deploys appropriate technology to deal with spills.
This comes after Senate committee on environment and ecology summoned the company, along with the environment ministry officials and two agencies in the wake of a 150km wide spill from a facility belonging Shell at Bonga, some 120km off the Nigerian coast
The two agencies are the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, NOSDRA, and National Environmental Standards and Regulation Enforcement Agency (NESREA).
Friends of the Earth said it didn’t “expect anything meaningful” to come out of the summons, calling it “cosmetic.”
“We had several kinds of summons in the past and nothing came out of it,” said Philip Jakpor, media head at Friends of the Earth Nigeria.
“Nigerians are demanding that the right thing be done. If we go beyond this cosmetic invitation of company heads to come and tell us what we already know. Shell is not going to tell us anything new.”
He went on: “We must hold these corporations accountable. They must not pollute our environment, they must deploy the same technologies that are effective that they use in other parts of the world here. There must not be double standards. And if they are liable to prosecution, you should go ahead and prosecute them.”
Corroborations
The group has said it didn’t believe NOSDRA would be able to independently verify Shell’s claim that only around 40,000 barrels of oil leaked into the ocean.
“Most times the information that is made public is actually information from the same industries that do the pollution,” Jakpor told Daily Trust.
“So, in this case we don’t believe their claim. We believe it would be far, far more than that.”
Independent bodies monitoring the spill have hinted the amount of oil dumped in the ocean could exceed Shell’s claim.
No independent verification is yet to come from any Nigerian agency like NOSDRA
But the Senate committee which summoned NOSDRA and the three other parties has expressed doubts as well about whether the agency is equipped to handle the job.
The committee chairman Bukola Saraki said NOSDRA lacks vessels and now “relies almost exclusively on the grace and benevolence of the oil companies, in this case, Shell.”
Jakpor said: “We don’t even have to come to a situation where these kinds of disasters happen before we start talking about doing what we are supposed to do.
“It is not in our place as a nation to be ferried to where those things happened by Shell.”
He said the incident is a wakeup call for government to equip its agencies to monitor better.
Meanwhile Shell has said it is continuing its “efforts to protect the coastline and have a sizable mitigation operation underway to protect sensitive areas.”
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