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Shell's Impact on Ogoni in Nigeria

A journalist investigating conditions in Ogoniland, Nigeria found conditions worse than expected, despite $30 billion in oil revenues extracted by Shell since 1958. The 500,000 Ogoni people remained in desperate poverty and pollution, with oil pipelines and spills threatening their homes and livelihoods. The journalist spoke to a woman still in pain from burns suffered three months prior in an oil fire caused by perilous pipeline placement. A Shell spokesman claimed ignorance of the accident details and said they could not investigate due to area tensions.

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Verra Beatrice
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44 views1 page

Shell's Impact on Ogoni in Nigeria

A journalist investigating conditions in Ogoniland, Nigeria found conditions worse than expected, despite $30 billion in oil revenues extracted by Shell since 1958. The 500,000 Ogoni people remained in desperate poverty and pollution, with oil pipelines and spills threatening their homes and livelihoods. The journalist spoke to a woman still in pain from burns suffered three months prior in an oil fire caused by perilous pipeline placement. A Shell spokesman claimed ignorance of the accident details and said they could not investigate due to area tensions.

Uploaded by

Verra Beatrice
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

CASE 11.

2: Shell and Nigeria Geraldine Brooks, a journalist on the Wall Street Journal, was arrested by the Nigerian Security Service for delving too deeply into the fate of the Ogoni people, among whom she found conditions far worse than she expected: I suppose that 10 years or working on a conservative pro-business paper had taught me that self-interest, if nothing else, usually prompts corporations to behave with a measure of decency. Oil companies, dogged by poor records in developing nations, have tried in recent years to better their image. But these days in Nigerias Ogoniland had quickly revealed a picture much grimmer than anything the Ogoni leader, Sari Wewa, had described. Since Shell struck oil there in 1958, an estimated US$30 billion. worth had been extracted and sold. Yet the poverty of the 500,000 Ogoni remained desperate, even by the harsh yardstick of the poor world. As subsistence farmers dug out yams with sticks, their naked children drank from streams polluted by the toxic chemicals of neglected oil spills. Oil pipelines snaked hard up against the farmers mud brick huts, even though current industry practice is to site them far from human habitations. I spoke to a woman burned in one of the inevitable oil fires that had resulted from this perilous practice. Still in pain almost three months later, she lay on the earthen floor of a traditional healers hut, her burns wrapped in poultices of leaves. When I asked a Shell spokesman about her, he said the company was hazy on the details of the accident, and couldnt investigate because of tensions in the area. Questions: 1. Is it appropriate to make an adverse moral judgement about a company such as Shell, which has had an appalling environmental record in Nigeria and a disastrous effect on the Ogonis people? 2. Can a multinational be an innocent bystander when it operates in a country ranked next-to-last (132nd) on Transparency Internationals 2003 Corruption Perception Index? 3. And what is Shells position when that oppressive regime executes dissenters such as Ogoni leader Ken Sari Wewa?

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