While robust  scholarship and historiography exists on Nigeria’s oil politics, resource control and environmental change, there still remains a great need to capture the materiality of the social contexts of people living with extraction in the Niger Delta. It is often these social contexts that illuminate nuances and dynamics on the long history of people’s lived realities. Travelling to the Niger Delta to conduct fieldwork on oil and environmental transformation led me to intimately understand and experience people’s rich life histories, food cultures and their oil life worlds.  Making sense of the Niger Delta’s social context therefore became the most central and fundamental inspiration for me as we conducted interviews in  Eleme community. The Niger Delta is one of the most expansive wetlands globally and has become one of the most polluted extraction landscapes worldwide. While more than 6.5 million people survive from farming and fishing, some species such as catfish have become scarce. My fieldwork was based in Eleme local government area in Rivers State.

As a first time researcher of oil, political ecology and environmental change in the Niger Delta, my experiences were largely shaped by what I encountered every day during fieldwork. In this blog I share some ethnographic vignettes to explain people’s historical memory, their embodiment of oil toxicities and their experiences of environmental transformation from oil spills, gas flares and oil bunkering from refineries. One of the things I immediately noticed was  the construction of oil pipelines in the vicinity of houses, marketplaces and schools (see picture above).                         

Picture 1   Oil pipelines cutting across Okrika community, 28 June 2024 (taken by Jabulani Shaba)

The oil pipelines in the Niger Delta tells us a story not only of the desecration of communities’ spiritual shrines and deities, but also of the legacies of oil spills and environmental change in the community of Eleme. While people continuously suffer from oil pollution, they pass by the oil pipes on a daily basis. As noted by one of the community members, “no person in Ogali can understand what is in the pipes, we just pass by on bicycles.” Could this be classified as the art of unnoticing, as highlighted by Lorreta Ieng Tak Lou (2022) who conceptualises unnoticing as, “how people justify living in certain environments and live with certain adversities”? Certainly not. The Niger Delta provides a classic case to appreciate long term series of agitations ranging from the nonviolent protests of Ken Saro-Wiwa to those who took up the armed struggle which led to the 2009 Presidential Amnesty. This was a move towards, “de-escalating and defusing the militant insurgency that destabilized the oil-rich Niger Delta over the preceding decade, and was also designed to achieve broader socioeconomic and stabilization objectives.”, (Stakeholder Democracy Network, 2021). The legacy of oil extraction in the Niger Delta is still vividly evident. I got the opportunity to witness and experience the everyday livelihood of ordinary citizens who continue to suffer and embody these toxicities. Some continue to fish in polluted water bodies (see picture below).

Picture 2     Men preparing to cast their nets for fishing, photographed by Lucas Deinma, Bakana, 6 July 2024.                         

As scholarship has shown, oil is political and it is a conflict mineral resource. It provides a lens to understand how violence affects oil rich communities (Cyril Obi, 2010). Indeed  oil is political: while oil pipelines are a symbol of wealth and power, they jointly represent the marginalization, inequalities and health precarities experienced by people in the Niger Delta. One of the atrocious impacts of oil exploitation in the communities in Eleme has been the disruption of the agrarian economy and the pollution of water bodies.  Community members recounted how their cassava, yams, okra and other agricultural commodities used to grow very well and would have abundant crop yields, but that this has drastically changed in contemporary times. Throughout the interviews, interlocuters would note that, “back then we did not use fertiliser for our crops because the soil was fertile, but now they are forcing us.” Additionally, some interviewees also noted that, “the Eleme man does not believe in fertilizer, but now they are forcing us.” Communities face a double tragedy of oil pollution and the toxicity from fertiliser companies such as Indorama Petrochemicals and Fertilizer Limited. Local communities have been protesting against the pollution from fertiliser and natural gas processing from such companies.

In their quest for environmental justice, the people of the Alesa community in Eleme took the Petrochemicals and Fertlizer company to court to be held accountable for environmental pollution. Oil spills in the Niger Delta have upturned human and aquatic life, creeks and the mangroves. More than “240 000 barrels of crude oil are spilled in the Niger Delta every year” (Ordinioha & Brisibe 2013). Since 2010, the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) noted that there have been approximately 13655 “publicly available” oil spill records. According to NOSDRA some of the spills are largely caused by oil theft and some by operational problems.  As part of livelihood diversification and adaptation to the crises in the Niger Delta oil life worlds, some people  have created enclave economies through selling water. Because the majority of drinkable water bodies have been polluted, groups of Hausa men known as the Mai-Ruwa (water men) sell water in jerry cans to communities at profitable rates. In all the communities we visited, interviewees shared their rich stories on how they would drink rain water, but this is no longer possible because of the soot that mixes with the rain water. Other vulnerable groups such as women are rapidly engaging in other economic activities such as palm oil production and petty trading.

Protest movements and Environmental Justice

When Shell began its oil exploration activities, it told the people about the prosperity and development that was going to come with oil exploitation, without fully unpacking the repercussions that would come with the construction of oil pipelines in the communities. Over seven decades, people in the Niger Delta have endured oil pollution, oil wars which have exacerbated the precarity of their livelihoods and poverty levels. As part of resistance, community members also use songs a form of protest. “We no go gree, Shell must go!” (We do not agree, Shell must go!) is a pidgin English song that some oil communities used to sing as they protested against the pollution caused by the activities of Shell’s oil extraction. The song evokes a traumatic historical memory of how Shell left a toxic environmental legacy which the people in the Niger Delta continue to live with every day. In recent times, environmental human rights Non- Governmental Organisations have also risen to the challenge of the gross human rights abuses in the Niger Delta and they are also advocating for environmental justice. What remains plausible to some NGO groups such as the Youths and Environmental Advocacy Center (YEAC) led by Mr. Fynface Dumnamene is how they are aiming to raise community profiles in the Niger Delta and changing the mindsets of youths who are involved in criminality, such as pipeline vandalism and illegal oil bunkering, as well as cultism. The YEAC has been making concerted efforts in implementing special programmes for the youths, such as the Presidential Artisanal Crude Oil Refinery Development Initiative, which focuses on the legalisation, modernisation and integration of illegal refineries into the Nigerian economy. While these initiatives are crucial for the development of the oil economy in the Niger Delta, most of them do not reach their potential impact because of lack of funding.  

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog solely belong to the author and are not representative of the AFREXTRACT Project.