The Artisan Fishermen Association of Nigeria has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to prevail on Shell, the oil giant, to compensate its members who were victims of the 2011 Bonga oil spill.
The chairperson of the Bayelsa State chapter of the association, Princess Elizabeth Egbe, made the appeal on Wednesday in Abuja in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria.
According to Egbe, the spill affected fishermen and fishing communities in five states in the region.
These were Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Ondo State.
Egbe said following the spill, the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency directed Shell to pay $3.6 billion as compensation to the affected fishermen.
Egbe, however, claimed that the oil giant had not paid the fine.
She said: “We want to appeal to President Buhari to intervene.
“He said he is bringing change to Nigeria, which we believe, but we have not felt the impact.
“We want to feel the impact.
“We want President Buhari to immediately intervene and call Shell to order and pay the money that NOSDRA imposed on it so that there will be a form of remediation for the affected fishermen in the Niger Delta.
“We do not have the money to take Shell to court.
“But government can protect us.
“It is the duty of the government to protect its citizens.
“We know that President Buhari said that he is going to protect the citizen.
“We are the citizen of Nigeria.
“We need to be protected.”
Egbe also claimed that Shell had not cleaned up the environment after the spill, noting that when a similar incident occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil giant acted immediately.
She said: “The oil companies are treating our people with impunity and levity.
“While we are talking about Bonga spill, we have the Mobil spill, we have the Agip spill.
“We want to call on Mr President to stop this impunity in the Niger Delta.”
Egbe told NAN that over 30,000 members of the artisan fishermen association in the Niger Delta would soon take to the streets to protest the treatment being met to them by Shell.
She said: “When you push somebody to the wall and he has nowhere to turn to, he will turn and attack you.
“That is the plight of the riverine people, the fishermen.
“We have been pushed to the wall, we have been caged with our families, we are starving, we are dying and we do not want to die because nobody wants to die.
“`We want to come and protest and cry to President Buhari to call Shell to order because we do not have the money to take Shell to court.”
According to Egbe, what Shell did after the spill was to sink the spill oil into the bed of the sea.
She said: “Until now, nothing like clean-up was carried out, nothing like relief materials were supplied to those affected.
“We all know that the Niger Delta people depend on the sea for their source of water.
“There is a common saying that water is life.
“When the source of life is being polluted or cut off, what do you expect from the people?
“You want the people to die.
“Because of the spill, fishermen are no long catching fish.
“Instead of fish, they are catching sea weeds because of oil that was sank into the bed of our sea.”
Egbe also told NAN that the spill had even destroyed the sea weeds, which fish depended on to survive.
She said for instance, Bonga, the commonest fish in the region that fishermen depended on for their livelihood, had almost gone into extinction.
She said: “Bonga fish since 2011 has gone into extinction along side with other aquatic lives in the riverine area.
“Shell admitted that the spill had caused irreversible damage.”
The chairperson urged the president to pay attention to fishermen in the effort to diversify the nation’s economy to agriculture, saying that fishermen had a role to play in nation building.
Egbe said: “But unfortunately, in Nigeria, when we are talking about agriculture, we do not remember the fishermen.
“They want to replace fishermen with those people who rear fish, aqua culture.
“Aqua culture can never replace the real fishermen.
“Fishermen have their own part to play. They bring the real fish where you can derive the real protein.”
But a spokesperson for the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria said in a statement: “We are at an early stage of reviewing the claims made by the Bille and Ogale communities. Both Bille and Ogale are areas heavily impacted by crude oil theft, pipeline sabotage and illegal refining which remain the main sources of pollution across the Niger Delta. Ogale is in Ogoniland and it is important to note that SPDC has produced no oil or gas in Ogoniland since 1993. Access to the area has been limited following a rise in violence, threats to staff and attacks on facilities.
“The Bille and Ogale communities have chosen to bring these claims in the UK instead of in Nigeria, whose laws govern our operations. It is our intention to contest the jurisdiction of the English court over these claims. We believe that allegations concerning Nigerian plaintiffs in dispute with a Nigerian company, over issues which took place within Nigeria, should be heard in Nigeria.”
“Furthermore, Ogoniland is the area covered by the United Nations Environment Programme’s Environmental Assessment (‘the UNEP report’) of 2011. UNEP presented its recommendations as an opportunity to bring a culture of multi-stakeholder cooperation to Ogoniland, a process in which SPDC has been involved. SPDC has also initiated action to address all the recommendations directed to it in the UNEP report as operator of the SPDC Joint Venture. In mid-2015 SPDC JV, along with the government, UNEP and representatives of the Ogoni community, agreed to an 18-month roadmap to fast-track the environmental clean-up and remediation of Ogoniland which includes a governance framework.
“These steps have been widely lauded across civil society in Nigeria and have been welcomed by members of the Ogoni community itself. Asking the English court to intervene and order remediation activity covering the same ground as the UNEP implementation plan is a direct challenge to the internal political acts and decisions of the Nigerian State, and its sovereign right to determine, within its own territory, the appropriate future path for the Ogoni community.”
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