An Interview With Human Rights Activist Celestine Akpobari
Celestine Akpobari is a Program Officer Coordinator at Social Action, an NGO that monitors the impact that oil exploitation has on human rights in the Niger Delta. “Shell and the other multinationals oil companies have made some promises here in the Niger Delta but have never respected,” says Akpobari. “They managed to do all of these things with the collaboration of the government officials. They have destroyed our environment, our livelihood,” he opens up. “We don't have any tap water in the Niger Delta. There are very strange things happening in the area, and they have been going on for decades.”
On the 26th January 2010 at a hearing at the Dutch parliament of The Hague, Shell was bombarded with accusations from Amnesty International and other pressure groups of abusing human rights, failing to clean up disastrous environmental damage and continuing the hazardous practice of burning off gas from about 100 wells in the area of the Niger Delta. Despite the backlash following the hearing at The Hague almost a decade ago, executives from Royal Dutch Shell PLC have ever since defended their operations in the Niger Delta, by blaming the local population and claiming that an overwhelming majority of the environmental damage in the area is directly caused by sabotage.
Shell's Director for Sub-Saharan Africa, Ian Craig, blamed sabotage for a total amount of 70% of the oil spills that have occurred in the area over the last decades. Speaking with Mr Akpobari, however, we get a different version of the story: “This is not true.” “Oil spills are not a result of sabotage. What has been called sabotage by the oil-production companies is on the contrary the result of equipment failure.”
According to a leaked US diplomatic cable exposed in 2010, the oil giant Shell admitted having inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, obtaining full control of the politicians' decisions about oil-rich Niger Delta. Shell's top executive in Nigeria, Ann Pickard, told US diplomats that the company had seconded employees to every relevant department, so she was aware of “everything that was being done in those ministries.”
Ms. Pickard has boasted on several occasions that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration in the country’s political system and was unaware of the extent to which the company knew about its deliberations.