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Ledum Mitee, president, Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP, speaks to Chris Ajaero, deputy general editor and Godfrey Azubike, staff writer, on the recent environmental assessment of Ogoniland by the United Nations Environmental Programme, UNEP, and why emergency measures should be taken swiftly to restore the livelihoods of the people. Excerpts:

Newswatch: Recently, the United Nations Environmental Programme, UNEP, released its report on the degradation of the environment in Ogoniland by Shell Petroleum Development Company, SPDC. The report concluded that the environmental restoration of Ogoni is possible but would take 25 to 30 years and will cost at least one billion dollars. Does that report meet the expectations of the Ogoni people?

Mitee: Yes and no. First, it vindicates our position in the sense that we have raised these issues over the years. Ken Saro-Wiwa raised these issues before he was killed and, in fact, all the Ogoni 13 were killed as a result of issues of the environment. Shell has always given the impression that the environment was only raised by us to get international attention. In other words, it was not real. So far, this report has just confirmed what we have been saying and we can say that it is positive in that direction.

But beyond that, looking at the ordinary people, what did they expect? Their expectation is not just for a report. They know that their lives have been affected by this devastation of their environment. They know that their crops are not yielding. They know that their streams are polluted. They know that they cannot get fish from the   streams again. So, for us, it is not just the idea of releasing a report. We see it as one more report in the shelves, especially in a country where we have had thousands of reports that have never been implemented.  So, that does not add much, except for the purposes of saying that there is a UNEP report on an issue we have raised. So, for us, we thought that it was like Shell has bought another four years of inaction and who knows how many people have died within four years that it took UNEP to complete the report.

Newswatch: When you say that Shell has bought another four years of inaction, are you talking about the period it will take to do the clean up which UNEP said would be 30 years?

Mitee: No, what I am saying is that it took four years to get this UNEP report out. And if the 10 million dollars that was used to produce this report had been put into the actual process of clean-up, then maybe some lives would have been saved among the people who have died. Let us look at the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in the United States which happened in 2010. Did it take UNEP to do a report before it was cleaned up? It didn’t take a report. You don’t require a report when there is a spill. So, you don’t need someone to say we have looked at the spill, we have seen crude oil on the river. Even a blind person can see that the environment has been polluted.

Even before the UNEP report was released, Shell had in anticipation of the UNEP report awarded contract to local people who poured sand on the sites to cover up the oil spillage and yet when you look at it, you will know that it is not a clean-up. For us it is a cover-up.

Newswatch: Are you satisfied with the 30 years duration UNEP said the clean-up will last?

Mitee: I think it is completely unacceptable to us. Why do you need 30 years to clean-up? In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, the volume of the oil spillage was huge but within a year, it was cleaned. So, why can’t that same technology be used to clean-up Ogoniland? And as we speak, the federal government is still saying they are studying the report. So, actions have not started.

Newswatch: Are you not worried that the special presidential committee set up to study the report does not have anybody from Ogoni as member?

Mitee: Clearly, it buttresses the saying that those who want to do things do it, those who do not want to do things set up committees. If  UNEP  is saying that the water that  Ogoni people are drinking now has about 900 times the level of contamination that is acceptable anywhere in the world and that  people are going to die of cancer as a result of all these, why should a responsible government not move swiftly to save lives? By setting up a committee, what the government is saying is that Ogoni people should continue dying until they wake up from their slumber. I think that this is callous.

Newswatch: Shortly after the UNEP report was released, Mutiu Sunmonu, managing director of Shell, claimed that most of the oil spills were due to illegal activities of vandals and not by the activities of his company. Do you see that as a fair assessment of the problem of pollution in Ogoniland?  

Mitee: That is the normal line that Shell takes, but it flies in the face of the law. The law says that if there is a spillage, no matter whatever the cause may be, you need to contain it within 24 hours. In fact, within a month or two, you should completely get that place cleaned. When  you have done that, and it is later determined that it is not your company’s fault, then the federal government will now pay you back the cost of what you have done, because the polluter is supposed to pay. That’s what happens all over the world.

Now, let’s take it the other way. I am not disputing whether there are issues of vandalism. We are talking of over 50 years of pollution that had been there. If you put something dangerous in the land, you should also protect and guide it so that it is not an excuse to say third party went there to do damage to it and that’s what caused the damage.  The problem is that in most cases, Shell prefers to be a judge in its own case.

In the practical sense, once there is any crime anywhere like vandalisation of oil pipeline, who always benefit from it? Is it the farmer whose crop is damaged that wants to get what they call compensation which the management of  the oil company sits in Lagos to decide that this year we are going to pay five Naira for okro, 10 Naira for beans, which most times is 100 times less than the market value. Is it the farmer? No, certainly not. My experience is that whenever there is a spillage, those who benefit from it are the Shell contractors who do the so called cleaning, who work in partnership with Shell officials. However, some local people are fronts for the Shell people who get those contracts and make money out of their misery. That is where we need to interrogate to find where these causes come from.

Newswatch: Beyond the UNEP report, is there any recommendation on some sort of compensation for the oil communities in Ogoni whose environment has been degraded over the years?

Mitee: That is the shame of the system. There is nothing that says this is how they should be paid. That is one of the gaps in this report. Again, mind you, this is the report that was paid for by Shell. We raised the issue of Shell not being the sole financier of this project because he who pays the piper dictates the tune. We also knew that some people who were involved in the project were Shell ex-staff, and we raised some of those flaps. I was supposed to be a member of the presidential implementation committee which was to drive the UNEP report but because, may be, I knew too much and raised these issues; they didn’t invite me for any of their meetings.

 There was nothing in the report that even looked at these human elements in it and how to compensate the people who have suffered untold hardship from the pollution of their environment for decades. The UNEP representative told us at a meeting that initially they had the human element as part of the project. He said that it is usually their practice to put in place certain things that will ameliorate the plight of the affected communities by giving them some benefits. But that, in this case, when they submitted the budget for the project, Shell struck out those bits from the project.  Shell said they will handle those things themselves. These are some of the gaps we find in the report. 

 Another gap was that where they feel the report could be a platform for legal action, they would apply some trick. For instance, when they wanted to test whether the fish were polluted, they left the communities that were heavily polluted like Ejamaa, K-Dere, Bodo and Yorla  and took samples of fish from Kaa Market. Kaa is a market area where you have Andonis just across there and oil is not produced in Kaa. They took the samples of fishes in that area as a way of playing down the impact of the damage. That tells you the level of insincerity with which Shell handled the issue just to cover up.

Newswatch: Could you give us an insight into the level of environmental degradation in Ogoniland and the damage it has done to the people’s means of livelihood?

Mitee: Ogoni used to be the food basket of this part of the country. When I grew up in my local community, K-Dere, people never liked to eat iced fish. We were close to the sea and every child knew that you could go to the stream and catch fish and your mother goes to the farm to bring all sorts of farm products to prepare your meal. So, you could live without money. You had a certain river that people do not fish in because of its spiritual significance, certain trees that you could not touch because of their spiritual significance and even some animals that people referred to as their totems. They said if you killed such animals, someone would die. That was the sort of environment that we grew up in.

When Shell came, the situation we found was that gradually even rivers that were revered were desecrated; they cut down trees that were supposed to be revered. And for Ogoni people, our tradition is one of the issues that the people cherish so much. When you strike at the   traditional beliefs of a people, it hurts. Environment to the African man is greater than flora and fauna. If you go to a place called Yorla in Kpeen where we have the Yorla oil field, they have the La deity there. Yor in Ogoni land means deity. Yorla was a forest that people never used to touch. But when Shell came, they mowed down the trees in Yorla. The Yola oilfield has witnessed more blowouts than any other one in Ogoniland.

In that community, the people believe that some of unnatural deaths in that community were because the La deity is angry that its own abode has been desecrated by this oil company. They also think that most of those blowouts had occurred because of the anger of their particular deity. So, you cannot take away the beliefs of the people. So, beyond the flora and fauna which is what the dominant paradigm of the environment is, there are other losses. There are areas in Ogoni where people will fetch water from the well and you see crude oil on top of the water which they drink.

It has also done a lot of damage to farmers whose yields have gone down considerably.  Our fishermen have equally lost their means of livelihood because the streams have been polluted and fish have died off.  People now eat only iced fish. That is the only thing that is available because fishermen now need to go far, maybe to Bonny area before they could get fish because the whole of the remaining fishes in Ogoniland have been contaminated and there are no yields in the rivers any longer. Fishes cannot survive under the toxicity of oil spillage. 

Newswatch: What is the implication of the UNEP report for the Ogoni struggle, particularly the environmental rights activism initiated by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the late president of MOSOP for which he paid the supreme sacrifice?

Mitee: For the Ogoni people, they see it as a vindication of what the leaders of MOSOP from the beginning had always advocated. We wish that perhaps Ken and the others were alive today to see that the world has come back to the issues we raised and even used the same language we used when we started the struggle.

It is also something that goes beyond Ogoni. It becomes a metaphor for the issue because there are other communities in the Niger Delta region and even the rest of the country that are going through this sort of frustration. And I thought that what the government needs to do is to show that the non-violent method that the Ogonis have used can also get federal government’s response instead of the thinking that the only way that attracts government’s response is the resort to violence in form of militancy. This is because unless we go back to this issue, we will continue to replicate various cases of violence all over the country. Now, here are the Ogoni people who said they didn’t want to use violence and the world has come to say that even your environment is this bad and needs to be cleaned. And government simply set up a committee. Now, juxtapose that with those who are using violence, you would have seen them in a presidential plane. I thought that any country that wants to show that non-violence is the preferred option should accord the UNEP report on Ogoni the urgency it deserves. The world has confirmed that Ogoni people have suffered injustice and so there is no need for government to dilly dally over the issue, otherwise what the government is saying is that you only need to carry arms before we can talk to you.

Newswatch: What would you suggest President Goodluck Jonathan should have done as far as the UNEP report is concerned to avoid unnecessary acrimony?

Mitee: I think that what our president should have done is to commit fund into it immediately. He could use the ecological fund to ensure that some action is started. He should invite the people who did the work in the Gulf of Mexico to start some work in this direction. The people whose environment has been polluted should be cared for through an emergency arrangement that would make their lives meaningful. I am not excited about the setting up of the presidential committee to study the UNEP report.   Clearly, this is the time for the federal government to hit the ground running.