Our people cannot sleep without having soot
as a thing to worry.
It's terrible.
It's actually terrible.
You wake up in the morning to black particles.
Everyone you meet in Port Harcourt
has stories about what they call black soot
caused by the manufacturing and consumption
of these fuel products in the illegal refineries.
This black soot has been falling from the sky
in a region key to Nigeria's economy for about five years.
Oil theft known as bunkering and the refining of its spoils
is worsening the damage from decades
of fossil fuel exploitation,
creating one of the world's
most severe ecological disasters.
The illegal oil bunkering is a sabotage
to the economy of the nation.
It's very dangerous to the health of our people
and we cannot sit down and see our people dying.
Our sacred forests, our homes
have to give way to oil wells
and no one gets much benefit.
But stealing and refining oil
is a major source of income
in a country where wages are meager
and more than half of working age adults
are either unemployed or under employed.
Many believe that efforts to stop the illegal trade
will be in vain and that the health of the people
of the Niger Delta will continue to suffer.
Imagine a resident of Port Harcourt
who inhales this soot every second in 24 hours,
seven days a week, 30 days in a month
and for years now.
We are dying slowly but surely
and our lifespan is reducing every day.
Half a century
after prospecting began in Nigeria,
Shell and BP struck crude in 1956.
♪ We've been waiting to sell in bridge Nigeria is spring ♪
In 1960, when the country declared
independence from the British empire,
citizens were hopeful that their newfound resource
would bring prosperity to their nation,
but the years following would be volatile,
giving away to civil war and a succession of military coups.
Nevertheless, Nigeria established itself
as a major oil exporter, but this came at a price.
There have been many, many years
in the last 40 or 50 years
where oil sales have accounted for more than 90%
of Nigeria's export earnings and when oil has contributed
well over 50% of government income,
all this easy money from oil and gas
meant that the government neglected
other areas of the economy that should have been key
to Nigeria's development, such as agriculture,
basic manufacturing, and mining.
Aside from oil companies
and a privileged few Nigerians in business and politics,
the country as a whole has seen minimal benefits
from being Africa's biggest petro state.
One only has to visit the Niger Delta
to see the extent to which the wealth generated
by the deposits there has not been shared equally.
It's a region in which most people live
in really quite impoverished conditions.
There isn't much in way of employment
and you will not find anyone who lives in the Delta
who thinks that their people have got a fair deal
out of 60 something years of oil production.
We drink this river water.
Then if you don't have money, you drink this water.
Then if you have money, you buy the water and drink.
In the '90s, in a area called Ogoniland,
a very charismatic activist called en Saro-wiwa
launched a campaign against Shell's operations in the area,
accusing it of causing immense levels
of environmental degradation.
These demonstrations caused Shell's operations
to shut down and exit the area,
but the activists were met with swift and violent action
at the hands of Nigeria's then-military dictatorship.
Ledum Mitee is a lawyer, activist,
and survivor of that tumultuous era.
Ken and this other of my colleagues were executed.
I stood trial with Ken and I was lucky
that I was found not guilty and released.
The fate of ken Saro-wiwa and his comrades
laid the path for a violent backlash in the 2000s
where militants who preferred to call themselves agitators
blew up pipelines, attacked oil and gas facilities,
and kidnapped employees.
Most times, people I ask them,
"Why are they resorting to armed struggle?"
And the people ask me, "Why shouldn't I?
You guys went no- violently are you were killed.
So we are not gonna wait to be killed
before we carry the arms."
And that's how militants,
they took over the rest of the region.
People were angry because they were not getting
what they thought were their just rewards
from the oil from their land
and they decided to sabotage the pipelines and all that.
We met with a former militant leader,
a former agitator leader who goes by the nomme de guerre
of Osama Bin Laden.
That name because of what we used to blow the pipe
and do all those things.
That was our bush name.
We are suffering.
You will see charcoal everywhere.
See this thing?
I can see the stain on the clothes.
Our objective that time is that
they cannot collect our oil
without making our place okay for us.
Do you see?
If they're getting the oil from us,
they should make our place fine.
The Ogoniland native is one of the leaders
in a loose coalition of heavily armed militias
that carried out a campaign, which at its height,
reduced Nigeria's oil production by up to 40%.
This violence became so bad in the late 2000s
and was having such a negative impact
on Nigeria's daily oil output
that the then president offered the main leaders
and their men an amnesty program.
The leaders got properties
and lucrative business opportunities for disarming
and their men got monthly stipends
which they still receive to this day.
Now he prefers to present himself as a peacemaker.
This will encourage me to do more
and make sure that the Ogoni people,
all the place have peace, thank you.
If we lay down our arms, they will empower us.
They will find job for our boys.
Then they will make sure that the environment here is okay.
But the environment is anything but okay
and many of the jobs that have been created
are in the black market.
Much of the crude oil
that is stolen from pipelines
makes its way to illegal refineries
that are situated deep in the creeks
and deep in the forests of the Niger Delta,
far from the prying eyes of the government.
It's at these sites
where the entire industry of illegal refining,
which is commonly known in the Delta
as kpo fire takes place.
The products that they produce
in these refining sites are sold to traders
who go and sell these products throughout the Niger Delta
and throughout the wider country.
The government currently estimates
that up to 150,000 barrels of oil are stolen every day
equivalent to about 10% of official production.
Some industry figures estimate the scale
of the theft is even greater.
So what we are seeing today
is the flip side of the same militancy
instead of breaking pipelines,
just to spite the government and the oil companies,
we break pipelines to make money
through illegal refining.
The tapping of pipelines, stealing of oil,
and the emissions from the refining process
have added another complication
to the region's environmental crisis and as expected,
it's affecting the health and wellbeing
of local inhabitants.
We first observed these medical refining issues
that culminated into the appearance of the soot
in Port Harcourt and its metropolis
sometime in 2017 when it became very much visible
and since then we've been having issues with respiration,
issues with the heart, issues with the liver,
issues with the kidneys of residents
of Port Harcourt and its environments.
The complaints are valuable.
They're not static.
They are just too many.
And this is what we inhale every day.
If we bathe our body, it's charcoal.
If we step on the ground, everywhere is charcoal.
This issue of black soot is not new.
It's been around for a couple of years,
but the governor told us that he was obliged
to launch his war against illegal refining
because the problem had become so bad.
What we did was from our own vigilante
to monitor what is going on.
I cannot tell you here authoritatively
that we have completely stopped.
I can say that we have been able
to reduce the level of these illegal activities.
If identify a site, I'll destroy it.
Since launching his crusade,
the governor's task force
claimed to have found and destroyed
at least 480 of the so-called ovens
used for cooking the crude oil.
The governor declared a total war on illegal refinery
to keep the people of Rivers State alive.
You can't drink from the water.
You can't do anything from this place
because of these activities of illegal oil refineries.
This is the route.
They bring in their speed boats here.
On drums and barrels? Yes, in barrels.
You can smell oil. Crude, yes, it's crude.
All our rivers here are gone.
The environment is messed up.
We have published names.
We have also conducting house to house arrest.
When we visited a site
which had recently been dismantled and destroyed
by the local government, it really gave us a sense
of the size of this industry in this very small area.
If we don't destroy the heart of the activity.
which is the illegal refining centers,
then the crude will be cooked,
the soot will still be in the air,
and you just be scratching the surface.
We have done what the governor has told us to do
and it has yielded huge amount of results.
That was one small area in River State.
So if there was that many ovens just there,
it gives an impression of how many might be elsewhere
throughout the Delta.
Fyneface Dumnamene is a local activist
who spent years fighting for environmental justice
for the residents of the River State.
The entire Niger Delta is the most polluted part
of the earth anywhere in the world.
This community has been massively polluted by hydrocarbon
from the activities of multinational oil companies.
The people of Ogoni are dying as a result of pollution.
If you test an average Ogoni man,
you will see that he or she has been polluted in their lungs
because of what they inhale every day
in the polluted environment that they live.
In Niger Delta, we have well over 40 million people.
23 million of these are young people
and a lot of these will have a lesser percentage
that are gainfully engaged.
The youth of the Niger Delta have waited
for the oil companies to provide jobs for them.
They are not getting the jobs.
When they go to them to seek for opportunities
to be able to be employed, they are not getting it.
Fred Barikpoa says he's been involved
in the black market of oil refining since 2016,
but has had to stop due to the recent crackdown.
His cousin Favour said she used to sell the fuel
and suffers from multiple ailments
that she blames on inhaling oil fumes.
We don't have any means of livelihood.
We don't have any support.
Since we don't have any other means,
we don't have any other choice than to risk our lives
and all of my friends are going into the business more
and the business is killing a lot of people more.
If you get to the mortuary, you see what we are saying,
but since we don't have any option,
we are going into the business that is killing us.
You can see my sister, Favour, they are suffering
because I have no option than to go for the business
for her to sustain a little.
When this thing started, I cannot stand it.
I cannot do anything in here.
So I am praying, pleading for the government.
They should do something about it.
When I saw the woman, she's having Anasarca.
That means that generalized body swelling.
There has been oil spills there before?
Everywhere. Everywhere?
A lot of these kpo fire thing?
It's everywhere.
It's all everywhere.
If you look at the woman, she could hardly breathe.
She couldn't walk
because her heart is failing. Congestive cardiac failure.
She has the classical features of almost all,
all the major complications of the soot is manifest.
We want to check your heart, your liver, and your kidney.
Help me and get me out of this trouble and this sickness.
I still want to live.
I have children to take care of.
I have family to take care of.
The life span of residents of Port Harcourt,
it is reducing and it will keep reducing
far as long as we still breathe in
this polluted air occasioned by the soot.
According to Amnesty International,
hundreds of oil spills occur in the Niger Delta every year
and they are rarely properly cleaned up.
While most go unnoticed by the outside world,
two recent incidents did capture public attention.
In November 2021, a well exploded, spewing oil and gas
into the surrounding rivers and mangrove swamps
for almost 40 days.
A meaningful cleanup has yet to take place.
A few months later,
a storage tanker blew up just off Nigeria's coast.
The environment ministry says
it was holding up to 60,000 barrels of oil.
The environment has been irredeemably damaged
and yet nothing is happening.
Nobody has been held to account.
No government official has been sacked.
No action has been taken with respect to,
you know, holding people accountable
for failure to take care of their responsibilities.
In 2010, the United Nations Environment Program
produced a report about oil spills' environmental damage
in the Ogoniland, recommending a five-year cleanup project
estimated to cost one billion dollars
and funded primarily by Shell.
A government agency
called the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project
or HYPREP has been put in charge of the cleanup effort
and awarded its first contracts in 2018.
While HYPREP does publish regular activity updates,
Ogoniland residents claim not to have seen
substantial progress as of yet.
12 years later, there's a lot of concern
about the progress of the project
and activist groups, environmental groups
accused the people managing the project
of not operating in a particularly transparent way.
We had a lot of hope and some sense of satisfaction
that at least we have achieved something,
but several years after, I'm afraid that
I cannot say that there's a cleanup.
They haven't even finished cleaning up the sites
that were classified as simple and are yet to even give out
the contracts to clean up the areas categorized as complex.
HYPREP did not respond
to several requests for comment.
Not much have been achieved in Ogoni
that was supposed to serve as a model
for other parts of the Niger Delta
and I think they need to go back to the drawing board
and be able to carry out the environmental remediation
of Ogoni and then extend it to other parts of River States
and other parts of the Niger Delta
because if they keep delaying this process,
the lifespan of an average Ogoni Rivers man and Delta man
will continue to reduce because we live
in polluted environment every day of our lives.