Currently — February 13th, 2023

February 12, 2023

What you need to know, currently.

Currently’s staff reporter, Anna Abraham, wrote an article, “Thirty years on, Nigeria continues to suffer from Shell’s oil pollution.” In it, she explains how Shell’s activities continue to cause devastating oil spills for people in the Niger Delta.

“Before big oil moved into the Niger Delta region, it was the food basket of Nigeria, where the fishing and farming Indigenous people, like the Ogonis of Ogoniland in Rivers State, thrived. When companies like Royal Dutch Shell arrived in 1958, all was lost.

‘They promised us that oil production was better than farming or fishing. They said they would develop the region — build roads, hospitals, and schools. It wasn’t long after they began operations that we discovered that the only roads they built were dirt tracks to take their trucks to the oil sites,’ said Celestine Akpobari, the National Coordinator of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum in Nigeria.

Gas is now being flared in close proximity to human habitation, devastating the people’s traditional livelihoods. It earned the Niger Delta, now Africa’s largest oil-producing region, its infamous status — one of the most polluted regions in the world.”

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