Oil spills blight Nigeria creeks
Bodo, Nigeria (AFP) July 2, 2010 – The waters around the Niger Delta swamps of Bodo are covered in a thick film of oil that has left the once lush mangroves looking like burnt twigs covered in grease. The air reeks of crude. “I struggle everyday,” said fisherman Gaagaa Giadom, 60, paddling his blackened canoe through the meandering oil-coated creeks. These days he is forced to cast his nets deep into the high seas to catch anything but still frequently returns home empty handed. “Now you can go for three days without catching anything,” added fellow fisherman Mike Vipene, 40. In Bodo, in the famous Nigerian oil-producing Ogoniland, “spills have been occurring for 20 years. But they are getting worse now,” he said. Activists claim the environmental crisis in Ogoniland is replicated elsewhere in the Niger Delta, southern Nigeria’s oil producing region and home to about a fifth of the country’s 150 million people. A 2006 report by international and local experts suggest between nine and 13 million barrels (1.5 million tons) of crude has been spilled in the delta’s ecosystem over the past five decades, or the equivalent of roughly 50 times the volume of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Oil spills that have stirred outrage over the past two months in the US Gulf of Mexico, are part and parcel of the daily life for the 30 million dwellers of the Niger Delta, one of the world’s most oil-damaged areas. The region has in recent years experienced an average 300 spills a year, roughly one spill a day, from terminals, pipes and platforms, according to government officials and experts. “What we have in the Niger Delta is the worst in the whole world, I mean it’s worse than what you have in the Gulf (of Mexico),” said Kingsley Chinda, a top environment chief for Rivers State government, a key Nigerian oil producing state. Villagers are resigned to the situation. “We have nothing but oil flowing on our rivers,” says a local traditional ruler, Peter Le-ele. “Our fish are dying, our crops are dying even us human beings are dying,” he added. …
