The Niger Delta is one of the five most polluted ecosystems in the world due to oil spills that still affect both the environment and local populations, such as the Ikebiri and Ogoni. The oil industry, historically in a country like Nigeria, is the main cause of violent conflicts, environmental disasters and health disasters that are now structural. Moreover, this issue is also of interest to Italy since the civil trial at the Court of Milan involving ENI, with its Nigerian subsidiary, and the Ikebiri people, in 2018 .
The environmental situation in the Niger Delta and the health damage suffered by the Nigerian population
The Niger Delta is an oil-rich region in south-eastern Nigeria, where the activities of multinational oil companies (such as Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, Total Fina Elf, Eni/Agip) have caused serious environmental, social and economic damages. Specifically, pollution is caused by crude oil leaking from old pipelines that stretch for hundreds of kilometres in the territory.
In addition to oil spills into the river water and along its banks, another major problem in the area is gas flaring, the burning of excess gas extracted with oil. This gas could be pumped back into the ground or used for Nigeria’s energy needs. Instead, it is burnt by multinational companies because this makes the extraction of oil faster, thus lowering operating and production costs.
As a result, people living in these areas breathe polluted air, eat contaminated fish (what little is left in the area) and drink water mixed with oil. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, toxicity levels are 900 times higher than those permitted by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Consequently, the spread of health diseases has also increased: respiratory problems, skin and eye diseases, gastrointestinal disorders, leukaemia and cancer. Finally, it should be noted that mining, by polluting the reservoir and the land, has destroyed subsistence farming. Added to this is the expropriation of land from the Nigerian people by the government under treaties signed with multinationals in the 1960s and unchanged since then.
The oil industry in Nigeria
Oil itself represents 95% of Nigeria’s exports and 65% of its national budget. This is the reason why the theme of violent conflicts over the management of this resource is recurrent in the country’s colonial and post-colonial history. The oil industry in the Niger Delta involves both the government of Nigeria and the subsidiaries of large multinational companies, such as Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, Total Fina Elf and Eni/Agip, as well as some Nigerian companies. In this regard, oil exploration and production is carried out by ‘joint ventures’ involving the government-controlled Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and one or more foreign oil companies that have signed partnership and participation contracts with the NNPC. In this way, the NNPC holds the majority share, leaving the multinationals with the operational role on the ground. In fact, the companies manage huge swathes of land, with Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) alone managing an area of over 31,000 square kilometres, building much of the oil infrastructure close to the homes, crops and water sources of the communities.
However, communities in the Niger Delta do not benefit from the oil wealth and, despite the presence of 606 oil wells, Nigeria remains one of the poorest countries in Africa. The only ones to get rich from oil are the multinationals and the local elites: a situation that has led to protests and mobilisation on the one hand, and violent repression, on the other, by the state and private security agents hired by the companies. It should also be noted that 60% of the population of the Niger Delta survives through activities directly related to the ecosystem. In other words, when crops and fishing grounds are damaged, the inhabitants are unable to find alternative sources of income to those lost and sink deeper into poverty. In this ecosystem, therefore, it is not possible to live according to Nigeria’s motto “Unity and faith, peace and progress”, as people are increasingly presented with two alternatives: struggle or migration.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta
Local communities, mainly supported by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, oppose the exploitative policies of multinational corporations and demand the reclamation of waterways and land as well as a fairer distribution of oil revenues as compensation for ecological debt.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, the main population of the Niger Delta region, has been conducting a non-violent campaign against environmental degradation since 1990. The Ogoni are an indigenous people affected by the intense exploitation of oil resources granted by the military junta to the multinational company Shell in the 1980s. According to the agreement between the parties, although formally the land remained in the hands of the people, Shell was allowed to exploit the resources present and was obliged to allocate only 1.5% of the royalties from the profits to the local population. After numerous battles led by the Movement an agreement was reached, hence Shell must give more than 15% of the royalties to the people. Additionally, a major achievement of Movement leader Ken Sawro-Wiwa has been to attract international attention by using strong and impactful concepts to describe the problem. One of the most striking examples is the concept of ‘ecological warfare’.
However, in 1995, Ken Sawro-Wiwa and eight activists were arrested and sentenced to death by the government for allegedly ordering the murder of four traditional and pro-government leaders, despite the fact that the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights had called for a stay of execution on the grounds of ‘unfair trial’. Nigeria was subsequently convicted in 2001 for not having a fair trial and for failing to comply with the Commission’s order. In addition, Nigeria was convicted of violating the collective rights of the Ogoni people, in particular the collective right to a healthy and satisfactory environment and economic self-determination, both contained in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. To date, the Movement: demands the recognition of a Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Ogoni People; organises awareness-raising events and participates in international activities through networks of Ogoni communities living abroad.
In 2005, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta made its debut, demonstrating the level of exasperation reached by the Nigerian population forced to fight harder and harder to protect their resources. This movement claims to be engaged in an armed struggle against the degradation and exploitation of the natural environment by foreign corporations and multinationals involved in oil extraction. According to the guerrillas, the aim is to bring the plight of the Nigerian people to the attention of the international community. According to the members of the Movement, the most effective method to achieve this objective is to resort to kidnapping. However, the group has never accepted ransoms, and those kidnapped have always been released in good physical and mental condition. The manifesto of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta demands an end to the plundering of the oil multinationals, a fairer distribution of the oil wealth, compensation for the ecological debt and the demilitarisation of the territory.
The Ikebiri case and ENI’s involvement
On 9 January 2018, a civil lawsuit opened at the Court of Milan involving, to the one hand, the multinational oil company ENI and its Nigerian subsidiary Nigerian Agip Oil Company Limited (NAOC), and, to the other hand, the Nigerian community Ikebiri, composed of several villages located in the Niger Delta region. The subject of the lawsuit is the indigenous community’s claim against ENI for the severe environmental damage caused on their territory by the extraction activities carried out by the local subsidiary NOAC.
On 5 April 2010, the NAOC pipeline exploded 250 metres from the river in the northern area of the Ikebiri people’s territory. The pollution threatened the livelihoods of the local people, who depend on agriculture and fishing for their livelihoods. An initial claim for compensation was made against ENI, which offered €22,000 in response. This counter-offer was rejected by the king of the community. Faced with the difficulty of obtaining justice in the Nigerian courts, the community, with the support of the international NGO Friends of the Earth, started the process of suing the multinational company in its country of origin, Italy.
The case was represented in Italy by lawyer Luca Saltalamacchia and is a historic one, as it is the first time that a community from another country has decided to sue an Italian company. In addition, it is the first time that the “community subject” appears in a legal case. The case of Ikebiri v ENI marks a precedent of the utmost importance for the establishment of the responsibilities of Italian companies abroad. The Milan trial is in fact the first case brought in Italy by a foreign plaintiff against an Italian multinational for conduct committed abroad. The lawsuit requested compensation of €2 million, calculated taking into account the legal standards applied by Nigerian judges and the eight years that have passed since the incident without any clean-up procedures being initiated, in addition to the request to the company to reclaim the contaminated land. As a result of the oil spill, the Ikebiri community in the Niger Delta has seen its fishing, subsistence farming, palm oil cultivation, traditional boat building for navigating the river, as well as the destruction of the medicinal plants used by the Ikebiri to cure themselves.
With regard to the process of assessing the damage caused by oil spills, Nigerian law requires that oil companies be accompanied by representatives of the government and of the communities living near the affected sites. The government authority in charge is the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, which, together with the parties involved, gathered information and prepared the Joint Investigation Visit. Since 2011, these reports have been made public by the various multinational companies. According to ENI between 2014 and 2018 (ENI has been operating in Nigeria since 1962), 26,286 barrels of oil, approximately 4.1 million litres, were accidentally spilled. In the Joint Investigation Visits, malfunctioning pipelines, poor pipeline maintenance and ‘interference from third parties’ are cited as the causes of the accident. This refers to sabotage or the theft of fuel from local communities for illegal trade. Multinational companies often use the ‘third party interference’ argument to evade responsibility for oil spills.
After the incident, the community reported witnessing the burning of the area by company personnel who were supposed to be cleaning up the area. The reason for this action was that burning of polluted areas is a common practice in the Niger Delta as it makes oil pollution on the surface of the land unrecognisable to the naked eye. After these events in 2015, NAOC delegates returned to the area for a further inspection and declared that the area was no longer contaminated as they found no visible traces of oil and the presence of vegetation. Quite the opposite result emerged from the report by Frank Greenfields Ltd., the environmental consultancy commissioned by the community to carry out new tests for soil and subsoil pollution.
In conclusion, the Ikebiri case is unfortunately not the only one. It represents a structural situation of dependence between a resource-rich global south and a resource-exploiting global north with the complicity of local authorities to the detriment of the environment and its inhabitants. This situation consequently does not allow local communities and the civilian population to enjoy basic human rights and, increasingly, the people affected are forced to migrate because the conditions for a decent livelihood are no longer there.
