It
was on my second day that I noticed a crowd of people at the Catholic secondary
school across the road although the students were just
then on Easter break. A friend I quickly made explained that some lawyers from
the UK were taking submissions from the local farmers and fisher folk in order to
assess the damage from two huge offshore oil spills from Royal Dutch Shell
pipelines in 2008, itself acknowledged by everybody – Shell included - as one
of the worst ever in the country’s history, which is saying a great deal.
Like
the good reporter I aspire to be, I ventured into the school compound and
sought an audience with one of the lawyers. I was received cordially by a young
woman who broke off from attending to the crowd around her in one of the
classrooms. I explained who I was and asked if I might interview her at a more
convenient time. Before she could respond a tall, muscular man approached us
and cautioned her against saying anything. She smiled apologetically and
returned to her work, whereupon her minder told me to get lost.
Later
that evening, my friend explained that just the previous month a freelance
photographer sent by Shell had been unmasked as he prowled around pretending to
be who he was not. I gathered he had been lucky to escape a beating. Two or three
days later again, he told me that he had received a number of calls from Port
Harcourt asking about his white friend who had suddenly turned up claiming to have
written about the shenanigans of the oil companies and their ‘native’
collaborators, including the extrajudicial execution of Saro-Wiwa, but it
didn’t help my cause with the foreign lawyers.
According to recent
reports, Shell has admitted responsibility, although they could hardly have
done otherwise. All that now remains is the amount of compensation the company
is prepared to pay, which in turn depends on the numbers involved: ‘London-based
law firm Leigh Day…says some 16,000 fisherman and 30,000 inhabitants were
affected by the spills that leaked 500,000 barrels of oil. Shell says about
4,000 barrels were spilled and that the affected lagoon area did not sustain
16,000 fishermen.’ It’s difficult to know whose figures to believe. It wasn’t
only my new-found friend who confirmed that the local people lied when they
didn’t exaggerate but who can blame them? It was a miracle that anyone had come
to ask them; as to why it had to be foreigners – and from the former colonial
power - is another story but nevertheless part of the same story that is the
tragedy of this non-country where we quibble over the price of a human life.
I
saw for myself the usual signs of environmental degradation - the blasted,
dying mangrove swamps, the oil slicks lapping at the water’s edge where
children bathed, the statistics of which are all over the internet - but what
remains with me above all is the humiliation of a conquered people. As I wrote
in an earlier blog, it was in Bodo town centre that I saw a contingent of
soldiers move swiftly on a scuffle between two okada riders and then proceed to
whip the culprits into their jeep as ‘the people’ looked helplessly on. Later,
crossing over to Bonny Island in a speed boat, we passed a military bunker with
soldiers who required us to raise our arms at gun point as though we were the enemy.
On the island itself, I watched an armoured personnel carrier patrol the main
street twice a day, morning and evening.
At
the guest house I caught snatches of conversation about oil bunkering, which
was the only game in town and accounted for the considerable number of
storey-buildings in the surrounding poverty, although the town itself was neat
enough, clean and well-ordered. My friend told me that only the more daring
boys went in for it. You could be killed by the soldiers, as happened to
Saro-Wiwa for daring to suggest that the oil was already theirs in the first place, or roasted alive, as has happened to a great many Nigerians, and not
only in the oil-producing Niger delta because the politics we play in this
country ensures that the subjugated must attempt to steal their own resource.
As
for Shell, the company will settle for as little as it can possibly get away
with because, as one of the lawyers remarked, ‘It is entirely
depressing that one of the largest companies in the world is acting like the
playground bully, trying to batter local people whose lives have been
devastated, into submission. We will be doing our damnedest to ensure that
Shell pay out a fair amount for the damage they have caused and put the Bodo
Creek back into its pre-spill state.’ In Nigeria, this must be measured as
progress, whatever obtains elsewhere, for instance in the world both Shell and
the lawyers come from, and where the insult would never have been tolerated in
the first place. But then Shell can only get away with what it does because the
representatives of ‘the people’ – the minister of petroleum resources, for
instance - are themselves contemptuous of those same people they supposedly
represent.
©
Adewale Maja-Pearce
Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy,
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy,
Leftovers
and Non-people and Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998
and
1999 annual reports on human rights violations in Nigeria. He also
edited
The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka:
An
Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: Collected Poems, The New Gong Book
of
New Nigerian Short Stories, and Dream Chasers
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU
Great resonant images. Thank you for writing this.
ReplyDeleteA shame we have to get to this.
ReplyDelete