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With the media searching for new angles on BP’s Gulf disaster, stories on the devastation in Nigeria and the “normality” of spills in the Delta are now finally making it back into the papers – see Benoit Faucon’s piece in the Wall Street Journal and Adam Nossiter’s NYT article. It’s about time, as several Exxon spills in quick…

Photo: Robin Bell Dr Wallace Heim – writes on and researches art and ecology, social practice art Sponsorship is a catalysing word. It allows profit to change from the excess of money garnered from one activity into the buoyant support of another. Like bequest, inheritance, grant, it implies benevolence. It is also a cleansing word,…

Breaking years of silence, politicians and regulators in Nigeria are talking tough on oil spills in the aftershock of the BP disaster. Officials had stern words with Shell over its inadequate clean-up activities, and Exxon Mobil, who were ‘cautioned’ over a recent spill of over a million gallons. Upping the stakes, the governor of Delta…

On day 58 of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, the US government forced BP to allocate $20 billion to compensate victims affected. While US lawmakers decried the fact that only $71 million had been paid out last Tuesday, the contrast with the Niger Delta is striking. Victims in the small village of Ebebu have waited for 40…

That BP covered up its worst-case scenario of gushing 100,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico simply confirms what many people living in Nigeria’s oil region have long protested about. In the Niger Delta, companies like Shell routinely under-report spill figures and volumes to limit their liabilities in terms of fines…

As the US government takes BP to task over the disasterous Gulf of Mexico spill, many Nigerians (including twitter users) are asking, ‘what about Shell?’. There is nothing clean about Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta, where daily oil spills are  frequently ignored for months and where ‘clean up’ methods include dumping oil-drenched soil into pits before…

An article by John Vidal in The Observer this week finds that the enormity of oil pollution in Nigeria ‘dwarfs’ BP’s Deepwater Horizon blow-out. Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta…

In a blunt display of corporate censorship, Chevron officials denied respected human rights activist and Niger Delta women’s leader Emem Okon and a global delegation including Justice In Nigeria Now from its annual Shareholder Meeting in Houston yesterday (picture credit: Rainforest Action Network’s Change Chevron campaign).  The company, which is facing multiple lawsuits regarding its…

As BP’s Deepwater Horizon continues to exceed the company’s efforts to control it, the arrogance and irresponsibility of the oil major’s chief executive, Tony Hayward and his team has never been as clear. The consequences of BP’s mismanagement of the rig loom large, with estimated legal costs currently pegged at $60bn, and rising. Since the quantity of oil…

The Financial Times pulled an Amnesty advert challenging Shell’s pollution in the Niger Delta today. The full page ad was due to appear the morning of Shell’s AGM, to contrast the company’s $9.8 billion profit with its role in causing Nigerian communities to drink polluted water, eat contaminated fish, farm on spoiled land, and breathe in air…