Thursday 15 January 2026 marks 70 years since colonial Nigeria and the oil industry began their continuing joint dating of the Niger Deita region. Over 40 years before that rendezvous, the search for petroleum oil in Nigeria had started, in about 1913, the year before the Southern and Northern parts of present day Nigeria were joined together to form a single country, by the then colonial authority (the British government).
The German Bitumen Company was the first to start exploration. Some other companies, mostly British and European, also explored many areas in the country with the aim of mining petroleum. Early in the 20th century, petroleum became a very important commodity and was in high demand across the world, especially with the emergence of motor cars and industrial, transportation (aviation, etc) or other activities that needed to be fueled from petroleum. In particular, oil was steadily replacing steam as the staple fuel for shipping, a trend propelled further by the massive naval fuel requisitions in the 20th century’s world wars.
Sometimes crude oil (petroleum) was found in parts of the country, but in quantities that were too little to be of commercial value, since huge financial capital was required to fund its production activities. Finally, after four decades of exploration, crude oil was discovered in commercial volumes on the 15 January 1956 in Otuabagi community in what was then the Oloibiri province (like a county or borough in the United Kingdom and United States), in the present day Bayelsa State within the Niger Delta region. The province was named after the nearby Oloibiri community, just five minutes drive away, which served as headquarters of the province. So that historic first oil well to yield enough petroleum for export was named Oloibiri Well 1. The company that drilled that oil well and made the discovery was Shell D’Arcy Petroleum Limited, which later evolved into The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC), owned by the UK-based Shell PLC, and has now mutated to Renaissance Africa Energy Company. Shell commenced production, and on 5 June 1958, two-and-a-half years later, shipped its first consignment of petroleum abroad.
There was great excitement at the time because the sale of crude oil would bring millions of dollars in profits never seen before to not only the company but also to the Nigerian government that was declared the owner of the oil in the ground.
After the British government colonised the various kingdoms and emirates making up the present Nigeria, it made series of laws, starting with the Minerals Ordinance of 1902, declaring that all minerals in the lands and seas of Nigeria belong to the government, and in practical terms therefore to the colonial British Government. This is unlike most other countries like the United States or Canada where minerals belong to whoever owns the land in which they are found, whether individuals or families or communities. In those countries, companies can negotiate with land owners where minerals are found and buy the lands at substantial amounts or share some of the proceeds of the production of minerals with the land owners. So it is today that Alaska, an oil producing state in the US, has so far built up a savings fund (sovereign wealth fund) of approximately $80 billion from its oil revenues, besides what it has already invested in the welfare, preservation and development of its communities.
Since the opposite was the case in Nigeria, no monies from the proceeds of oil and gas went to the communities or families who owned the lands. When Nigeria gained political independence from Britain on the 1st of October 1960, the Nigerian government inherited the laws and assets of the former colonial government and it continued to receive the majority share of proceeds from the sale of petroleum as ‘owner’ and production partner, instead of the communities or families.
In the course of time, Shell and other foreign companies (e.g. Mobil, Total and ENI/Agip) struck commercial quantities of crude oil in other parts of the country also, like in the Ogoni ethnic area where it was discovered in 1958 in a community called Bomu. But instead of bringing joy and prosperity to the local dwellers, oil production gradually started to have several damaging effects on the people and their environment.
In addition to being denied a share of the fabulous profits from oil and gas, the operations of the industry were seriously polluting their communities’ lands, forests and waterways. Neither the companies (operators) nor the government cared much about restoring the damaged environment. This then started affecting the traditional economic occupations or livelihoods of the people, like fishing and farming. As the lands and waters were polluted, the yields from fishing, farming and similar jobs for local people started reducing, therefore resulting in economic or livelihood displacement. This also caused many locals to leave their communities and go to urban areas to look for means of earning a living, with little assurance that they will find any. In addition, it led to worsening health conditions (such as respiratory/breathing diseases, cancers and birth complications) along with several social problems like frustration and conflicts that have never been fully measured.
There are thousands of oil spills in the Niger Delta region every year. They are usually due to negligent operations of the companies, including poor maintenance of the wells and pipelines, which mostly continue to be used long after they should have been replaced. Added to oil spills is the improper disposal of harmful waste materials from oil production, into surrounding rivers or dug pits. Thirdly, there is gas being flared (burned) into the air at many oil production sites. This poisons the air inhaled by people. In most countries, gas flaring has been banned or reduced to the minimum.
With all these troubles brought upon them by oil companies, people of the host communities became very dissatisfied and angry. Some started protesting, and the government often used military force to crush the protests. Although most of the protests were peaceful, some of the youths eventually felt they too must apply force and arms to press home their grievances and disrupt oil production as much as they could, since government was not listening to the cries for justice and the voices of reason from social leaders, lawyers, environmental NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and activists. This gave rise to youth militancy in the region, which also affected the level of oil production.
Unfortunately, some people took this situation as an excuse to organize themselves into groups and tap crude oil from the pipelines, either to sell directly (oil bunkering) or to ‘refine’ the oil themselves through rudimentary means (artisanal refining) and sell the diesel fuel that comes out of it. This practice further pollutes the environment and exposes the people involved to safety risks like fire, health hazards, and to arrest by the security forces. Many oil companies then took this as an opportunity to claim that most of the spill incidents are caused by vandals and community dwellers, and that they will therefore not pay compensation for the damage caused. To make things worse, they usually fail to clean up the mess or to do a proper job the few occasions when they attempt to.
One of the less talked about negative fallouts of oil operations is that the recreational uses and tourist potentials of the Niger Delta territory, with its lovely beaches and exotic creeks, have been terribly diminished. Community folks can no longer have a good swim in their rivers without risking health implications, some of which may manifest over a period of time. Yet, they must still take a plunge in the water because they have little or no choice. Many villages bathe, cook, wash and drink from the river water, as there are limited provisions of safe water for them. So they often have to manage the river water, as polluted and re-polluted as it is.
Now and then, some affected communities or individuals would sue the companies to court but the majority of victims do not have the resources to pay lawyers adequately and pursue the matters. A handful of such cases have been brought to court in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe against the foreign companies that own(ed) the companies operating in Nigeria. Again, it is very expensive and time consuming to pursue such cases abroad.
However, a couple of such cases have been won in the UK and Dutch courts in recent years. The regret is that, by the time judgment was given in the most recent one, the victims (all indigenes of Bayelsa and Rivers States) who filed the case had died.
Besides a few social amenities like classroom blocks and water borehole projects that some oil companies provide for their host communities, they argue that they are not responsible for their hosts, on the ground that government should take care of them from its share of the oil and gas proceeds. Voices for the communities maintain that neither government nor the companies are doing anything meaningful for them, compared to the billions of dollars flowing from the oil in their land.
In 2021, after almost twenty years of debates and rigmaroles in the Nigerian parliament (called the National Assembly, comprising two law making bodies: the Senate and House of Representatives), a new law titled ‘Petroleum Industry Act’ was passed to amend the former laws governing the petroleum industry. This new law requires the operating companies to put aside for the benefit of host communities 3% of the cost of their operations. Surprisingly, the companies and not the communities are to appoint or approve most of the people that will manage the 3% funds for the communities. Leaders of the Niger Delta region and champions of community rights are divided over this. Some are excited because it is the first time some of the oil money is being allowed by law to trickle down to the communities directly. Others have expressed displeasure on grounds that, first, the amount is too little for the needs of the communities and, secondly, the people are not being allowed to appoint whoever they want to manage even this 3% for them. Implementation of that provision is commencing slowly and haphazardly, and time will tell how it plays out.
On the 10 November 1995, during the military rule under General Sani Abacha, nine Ogoni leaders, amongst them an internationally acclaimed playwright, Ken Saro-Wiwa, were hanged following a death sentence issued on them by a military tribunal. They were quickly killed even before they could exercise their right to appeal to a higher court against the judgement. Ken Saro-Wiwa and fellow Ogoni leaders had peacefully but vigorously taken the struggle of the Ogoni people in particular and of the Niger Delta in general against environmental injustice to the world stage. They demanded that oil production in Ogoni land by Shell or whoever should stop until the wrongs were redressed. The global attention they drew to the sufferings of the locals caused a lot of discomfort for Shell and Nigeria’s ruling military dictatorship at the time.
But there were differences in approach between them and some other Ogoni leaders and their supporters, concerning how to conduct the struggle. These differences escalated over time to a point where four of the other leaders were seized and killed by an angry mob in an Ogoni community known as Giokoo. Saro-Wiwa was not at the scene when it happened. But he and nine other Ogoni leaders were arrested and charged with the murder of the victims of the mob, later sometimes called ‘the Ogoni 4’. Of the ten Ogoni leaders that were charged, Ken and eight others were sentenced to death and executed. Only one of them, Ledum Mitee, an illustrious lawyer based in Port Harcourt, was freed. The nine that were sentenced by the military tribunal and killed were later sometimes referred to as ‘the Ogoni 9’. Since then, thirty years now, the Ogoni people have refused to allow Shell or the Nigerian government to resume oil production in their communities. It is an important mark of the Ogoni’s continuing efforts to heal from the scars of that era that both the ‘Ogoni 4’ and ‘the Ogoni 9’ are acknowledged as great departed leaders of their people and now collectively called ‘the Ogoni 13’.
As the Ogoni continued to insist for their environment to be cleaned up, the Federal Government of Nigeria eventually invited the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, the environmental arm of the UN) to assess the level of damage done to Ogoni land. UNEP undertook the study for about two years and presented in 2011 a scientific report titled ‘Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland”. Amongst countless details, the report stated that in a certain community, the quantity of benzene, a toxic chemical associated with oil production, in the soil and underground water was over nine hundred (900) times more than the quantity determined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a safe level for human consumption. Based on the UNEP report, following a four-year delay, the Federal Government and Shell in 2015 commenced an Ogoni environmental clean up programme which is supposed to go on for 25-30 years if properly done and without unnecessary delay.
The Ogoni clean up was estimated to cost one billion dollars for the first leg of the work, but it may cost a lot more due to the delay in starting it, and poor quality of work in some sites (as UNEP itself pointed out in its monitoring reports before it decided to exit the project). There have also been big corruption scandals under the supervision of some of the successive federal ministers of environment and project managers. It is considered the largest environmental cleanup in the world, perhaps only apart from the cleanup of Kuwait after that country was invaded by Iraq in 1990 and some of its oil facilities were bombed ablaze.
The rest of the Niger Delta, which may be over twelve times the size of Ogoni land and is equally polluted, is yet to be planned for a clean up. In Bayelsa State, an international panel of experts set up by the state government worked for four years (2019-2023) and released a report summarizing the footprint of the oil industry as environmental genocide. The panel was chaired by a member of the British House of Lords and former Archbishop in the Church of England, credentialed with a doctorate degree in law. Almost three years after the report, none of the panel’s proposals for redress has been implemented by any of the responsible governments or industry.
In the meantime, a metaphoric rebuke of Shell and the Nigerian government endures in vivid sight in the sites where it all started. About 50 years after Shell left its 1956 pioneer oil wells in Otuabagi, having sucked out the viable volumes for twenty years, some of the wells in Otuabagi continue to seep out crude and soak their environs in the black liquid. Recent clinical studies carried out on a cohort of women indicate that most residents of the community may have elements of crude oil in their blood and may be breathing methane-laden air.
This is the simplified summary of the 70-year joint romance of Nigeria and Big Oil with communities in the Niger Delta. While the world wails over climate change, there is an ongoing ecocalypse in the oil region of Nigeria. As the poor bride fuels Nigerian governments’ budgets in trillions of Naira annually and pumps profits in billions of dollars into oil boardrooms in London, Lagos, Milan and Houston, could any of these oil moguls and government powers care a hoot about the millions of humans wallowing along the creeks and coasts? It has been a roller coaster 70 years of romance! Or rape? Or a rapine? The answer is flowing crudely over the creeks.
