OPEOLUWANI AKINATAYO examines the debate over the cleanup of Ogoniland in Rivers State despite the release of billions of naira for the project
Despite the several millions of dollars released out of the $1bn pledged for the first phase of the cleanup of Ogoniland, the area continues to drown in the murky oil-spill-laced soil which has desecrated its land for the past two decades.
Communities in the area – Bodo, Goi, Kpogbaa in Bomu, Bon Mbabari Asakpugi, Bon Tamana, Bon Tigara, Bon Kolore, Bon Legbaa, Bon Dukori Naadube, all in Kpor community of the Gokana Local Government Area, Rivers State, and others are still battling with the Shell Petroleum Development Company with respect to cleanup.
The communities battle to hold the SPDC accountable for the spills which have denied them of their livelihoods, health and wellbeing.
The most recent outcries from the communities were from the youths, who demanded monthly salaries, employment and scholarships from the SPDC over the fresh multiple oil spills from the Trans-Niger Pipeline that rocked the area in the last two months.
Despite the unrest which has characterised the region, the body responsible for the cleanup, the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, has continued to broadcast its expertise and successes in the cleanup exercise.
Since the clean-up by HYPREP started in 2016, a total of 692 oil spills have so far been confirmed in Rivers State. About 60 of these were in Ogoniland, with an estimated spillage of more than 2,200 barrels of oil.
Ogoniland is even dirtier than it was before the cleanup commenced, according to a recent United Nations Environmental Programme document seen by The PUNCH.
The UN document described the HYPREP cleanup exercise as enmeshed in mismanagement, incompetence, waste, and a lack of transparency.
“Going by the recent cleanup by HYPREP, we civil society group are particularly pained by the fact that there is little or no information coming from HYPREP. We cannot be able to justify the amount that has been given side by side with the type of work that has been done,” an environmentalist with Friends of the Earth, Environmental Rights Action in Port Harcourt, Kentebe Ebiaribo, said.
But the Project Coordinator, HYPREP, Dr. Ferdinand Giadom, said all the remediated spots had been certified clean by relevant agencies.
He said, “We have made appreciable progress in our remediation work. We have completed remediation of 48 lots out of the 50 lots in phase one, batches one and two remediation contracts.
“Out of the 48 lots, 25 lots have been certified and closed out by the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, the other lots are undergoing sampling for certification. The phase one of remediation is gradually being wound down for the remediation of the complex sites to start.”
HYPREP’s spokesperson, Joseph Nafo, also said the UNEP report was far from the truth.
“So far two batches of contracts have been awarded: 21 lots in phase one batch one and 29 lots in batch two. 48 of them have been completed and 25 out of them have been certified and closed out by NOSDRA.
“So, certainly the land has got better and not dirtier than before, unless the critic of HYPREP is referring to new pollution that was not in the UNEP report that HYPREP is implementing.”
According to him, there is the challenge of re-pollution arising from illegal oil bunkering and refining which “we are making effort through aggressive enlightenment campaigns to dissuade those involved to stop.”
Nafo then went ahead to give a breakdown of the funds deployed so far.
“Between 2017 and 2019, a total sum of $360m was paid into the Escrow Account of Ogoni Trust Fund by the Shell-joint venture partners. Out of that amount, a total sum of $99.4m was released to HYPREP Project Coordination Office at various times from 2017 to 2022,” he said.
Nafo added, “In 2019 when remediation activities began to gain momentum, the sum of $11.6m was expended for administrative support services and remediation execution activities. For the remediation activities about 192,000m3 of hydrocarbon-contaminated soil was remediated at the cost of $6.7m.
“The average cost for remediation of 1m3 (one cubic meter) of contaminated soil was about $35. The average cost in the international market for bioremediation of hydrocarbon-contaminated soil is between $100 to $150 per cubic meter.
“In 2020, the sum of $20m was expended, out of which the sum of $10.5m was for remediation of about 300,000m3 of contaminated soil. In 2021, the sum of $34.6m dollars was expended, of which $15.75m was for remediation of 450,000m3 of hydrocarbon contaminated soil.”
The HYPREP spokesperson stated that the ex-situ bioremediation technique used by the contractors was refined by HYPREP by introducing the concept of an engineered biocell to prevent the possibility of secondary pollution of surrounding environments during floods in the rainy season.
He explained that the design and standard operating procedure were reviewed by UNEP with necessary inputs made.
“UNEP was also engaged and paid annually by the Federal Government to undertake capacity building and give technical support to HYPREP site supervisors,” Nafo stated.
He added, “Consequently, training was given both in-country and in Switzerland. If the supervision skills of HYPREP staff are inadequate, then the training content and approach should be questioned.”
A UNEP Senior Programme Manager, Stefan Smith, said the UN body was “currently wrapping up its project support in line with the agreed date at the end of 2022,” and declined to speak further on the document.
A source close to the matter told The PUNCH that the entire coordination of the cleanup by HYPREP had been muddled in mismanagement.
“From day one, we had complained about the strong role of Shell in HYPREP beyond funding, about officials being proxies for Shell,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorised to speak on the matter, said.
The source added, “Following the polluter pays principle, how can you be objective when you are out to protect the polluter? Then there’s the issue of transparency and accountability.
“It’s been scandal after scandal about spurious contract awards, and the cleanup exercise itself has not followed the minimum standards, resulting in massive recontamination.”
The PUNCH learnt that HYPREP was recently moved from the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Environment to the Federal Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, a move which was described as “unacceptable and reflection of government’s unserious attitude towards the cleanup and the politicisation of the exercise.”
The Convener and Executive Director, Policy Alert, Tijah Bolton-Akpan, told The PUNCH that Ogoniland remained one of the most polluted places on earth today, going by the UNEP report.
“It would be expected that 25 years after the cessation of Shell’s activities in the area and three years after the cleanup was inaugurated, the environment should be having a breath of fresh air by now and there should be some significant changes in the livelihoods of the people. But this is not the case,” he said.
Akpan added, “Another issue is the snail speed of the exercise. As we speak, there are new spills happening from a failure of decades-old equipment. The entire scenario is more depressing when you reason that the Ogoni cleanup was meant to be a pilot for the cleanup of the rest of the oil-polluted Niger Delta.
“If Ogoniland is taking this long to even gain traction, when will the comprehensive social and ecological audit of the rest of the Niger Delta happen, before we even talk about the bigger cleanup?
“As we speak, companies are divesting, literally running away from the mess they have created in our backyards and there is no government policy to address that. The situation is just getting more complicated and it is a ticking time bomb unless the government acts really fast. The Ogoni situation was just a litmus test, and I’m afraid we are failing at it.”
The Spokesperson for SPDC, Bamidele Odugbesan, did not respond to our email.
His assistant, Anthony Ogedengbe, also did not respond to our email or messages on the matter.
The SPDC who currently sits on HYPREP’s governing council and Board of Trustees blamed oil theft and sabotage for most of the spills.
As the land continues to be dirty and remains unhealed from both past and fresh oil spill events, Ogoniland residents and their international representatives say both Shell and others ever involved in desecrating their communities should be held accountable.
“The oil companies should be responsible for cleaning up the environment,” a partner at United Kingdom law firm, Leigh Day, that represents an Ogoni community and another group of Delta villages in an ongoing case against Shell, Daniel Leader, said.
“They have essentially deflected their legal obligations and created this parastatal that has failed to deliver,” he said.
A UNEP document released in March said most contractors on the project lacked expertise and could not explain the quantities of chemicals used for the remediation processes, and that some displayed “very poor waste management and disposal methods.
It added, “There must be a more robust selection of contractors to ensure they have the necessary experience, staff and finances.”
The list of the first 16 companies to be awarded cleanup contracts earlier reported by Premium Times had included poultry farms and palm oil manufacturers.
“HYPREP-hired companies clean oil-saturated soil by storing it in shallow pits lined with tarps where microbes eat polluting hydrocarbons. But those pits are often overloaded or poorly constructed with torn liners and poor drainage, creating pollution pathways and potential contamination of underlying soils,” UNEP said in a 2021 review.
“Piles of the contaminated soil left outside the biocells for long periods of time meant the hydrocarbons seeped into uncontaminated land and creeks, thus increasing the pollution footprint,” the document added.
After a $1bn first batch fund to repair the damage was promised, the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), created HYPREP in 2016.
Shell and its joint venture partners, Total and Eni were to provide 90 per cent of the fund in a cleanup exercise that could span 30 years.
HYPREP began the cleanup a year after it received $180m from the pledged funds. It has since received a total $540m, according to findings.
However, Prof. Philip Shekwolo, who spent nearly two decades at Shell, where he last ran its Ogoniland cleanup efforts, before becoming HYPREP’s acting Project Coordinator in 2021, said Shell had so far paid $360m into the Ogoni Trust Fund, but just $99m had been released between 2017 till date.
“Out of the money, HYPREP has made use of only $80m and not $200m as being claimed,” he said, adding that all impacted communities in the Eleme Local Government Area now had access to potable water.
“All other impacted areas in Ogoni communities including Ebubu, Kedare, Bidare, Barako, Korokoro and others will soon get portable water,” he said.
He said HYPREP was working to ensure that oil sites where pollution occurred got access to potable water.
Although Shekwolo was replaced in March by a former UNEP consultant, he was still the Director of Technical Services for HYPREP.
According to its budget document, HYPREP’s governing council has again approved the sum of $296m to be spent this year.
HYPREP’s budget for this year also showed a budget of another $171.6m meant for cleanup of more technical and complicated sites.
The UN had in April written a letter to the Federal Ministry of Environment, discrediting one of the areas already booked for treatment.
According to the letter, UNEP said the 79-hectare Ajeokpori-Akpajo site could gulp up to $50m, describing it as “not an appropriate use of resources and is not scientifically defendable” and could “pose serious reputational risks to HYPREP, UNEP and SPDC,”.
Senior Adviser to the Minister of Environment, Abdullahi Attah, termed the UNEP report as “baseless”, saying that the cleanup process had been “successful”.
“I don’t work with HYPREP. You are not entirely correct that the cleanup is a failure. There may be some issues but I can’t give you details because I am speaking as an ordinary Nigerian,” he said when contacted.
However, when pressured for his comment, Attah said “The programme is a huge success, and Mr. President will soon commission most of the project that has been executed, and you will see that most of these writeups are misleading.”
Apart from the £55m Shell paid to the Bodo community in 2015, and an additional N45.7bn it agreed to pay the Ejama-Ebubu community last year, the company’s efforts to sell its onshore assets had met with a brick wall pending payment $1.9m being a court 2020 judgment in compensation to 88 plaintiffs.
Last year, it also lost two cases against it by some Niger Delta communities. A January 2021 court ruling in The Hague also ordered it to pay damages to farmers for oil spills that took place over 15 years ago.
The UK Supreme Court also ruled that cases filed by the Bille community and the Ogale people in Ogoniland would be heard in English court against SPDC’s argument that the communities lacked jurisdiction to file the cases outside Nigeria.
Although the UNEP called on HYPREP to “adopt a culture of zero-tolerance to corruption or financial malpractice,” there were still doubts over its competences in the cleanup process.
“We are not happy because we thought this would have been a role model to other communities in the Niger Delta to kick off theirs but there is little or no hope for them.
“We expect that the cleanup should be fast-tracked and done properly.
“It needs to be scrutinised on how funds are being deployed, most importantly their key performances in the exercise are to be monitored closely.
“Most importantly, we need to have enough information from them. HYPREP has been more like an agency where they act and don’t release information to people. We want HYPPEP to be probed,” Ebiaribo added.
