We're fortunate that we have a government that can "shakedown" the oil companies. In Nigeria, the government isn't strong enough to stand up to the oil companies. Oil companies have abused, devastated and left the Niger Delta trashed and the people in poverty.
Kpor is a world away from the Gulf of Mexico.Profits first:
In the Niger Delta, there is little independent monitoring of spills, and the companies themselves disclose virtually no data about their own pollution.
But, according to the Nigerian Government, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000. Environmentalists believe spills - large and small - happen at a rate of 300 every year.
Site after site visited by the BBC - in both Bayelsa State and Ogoniland - had happened months before, and still not been cleaned up.
In May, an Exxon Mobil pipeline in Akwa Ibom State spilled more than a million gallons over seven days before the leak was stopped.
"The Gulf of Mexico has drawn the attention of the whole world," says Erabanabari Kobah, a local environmentalist.
"Even the President of the United States must go there to see it. The people there get compensation. But here, you must go to court. You cannot win against the oil companies in court." Read it all at Africa Review
Nigeria produced more than two million barrels of oil a day last year, and in over 50 years thousands of miles of pipes have been laid through the swamps. Shell, the major player, has operations on thousands of square miles of territory, according to Amnesty International. Aging columns of oil-well valves, known as Christmas trees, pop up improbably in clearings among the palm trees. Oil sometimes shoots out of them, even if the wells are defunct.
“The oil was just shooting up in the air, and it goes up in the sky,” said Amstel M. Gbarakpor, youth president in Kegbara Dere, recalling the spill in April at Gio Creek. “It took them three weeks to secure this well.” NYT
