Nigeria: Bloomberg Reveals Malfunctions in Ogoni Land Cleanup Project
Mismanagement jeopardizes the cleanup of Ogoni lands, more than a quarter century after oil company Shell pulled out of the area in 1993. (File image) AP Photo/Sunday Alamba
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Mismanagement jeopardizes the cleanup of Ogoni lands, more than a quarter of a century after the oil company Shell pulled out of the region in 1993. A Bloomberg agency investigation reveals the dysfunctions of a project of billion-dollar cleanup in Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta, a region heavily polluted by the extractive industry.
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With our correspondent in Lagos,
Liza Fabbian
Internal UN documents seen by Bloomberg highlight the concerns of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the agency that supports the project to clean up pollution and hydrocarbons in question .
UNEP has estimated the budget needed to repair the ecological disaster caused by the oil industry in Ogoni land at one billion dollars.
In 2016, an oil pollution remediation project, Hyprep, was launched by Muhammadu Buhari.
The oil companies, Shell in the first place and minority Total and Eni, are supposed to finance it at 90%.
But according to the survey published this week by the American agency Bloomberg, this very expensive project has many dysfunctions.
Among other things: the selection of dubious service providers, some of whom have neither the necessary experience nor the means to treat toxic waste, with the consequent risk of over-pollution of the soil.
Furthermore, Shell plays a major role in steering the Hyprep project, whose director of technical services is a former executive of the company, which can lead to a situation of conflict of interest.
Following this publication, the NGO Stakeholder Democracy Network, very involved in the defense of local communities in the region, indicated that it had "
found contaminants above the thresholds set on more than 25% of the sites which had been certified as completed by clean in December 2021.
”
The NGO is especially alarmed by the withdrawal of the United Nations Environment Program, which will no longer participate in this project from the end of 2022, leaving local populations even more vulnerable.
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Nigeria
Environment
Oil