Crude World

by Peter Maass

  Across the creek, Sangama consisted of a few dozen huts crammed into an area the size of a football field. Privacy did not exist; if a husband and wife quarreled, the village heard it. Watching TV in the red glare cast by Soku’s flare, I heard, in the surrounding huts, young children cough the evening away. They were sick, and if associated gas was the culprit, the crime continued without punishment.

  “His Highness is coming,” someone whispered into my ear.

  King Tom Mercy strode into the hut, wearing a T-shirt, pants and a frown. He was the forty-two-year-old leader of an Ijaw subclan whose dominion extended over a dozen villages and a few thousand souls. This was size enough to warrant, in the delta, the most monarchial of titles. For informal interactions, villagers used their leaders’ royal titles as surrogate first names, as in “I think Highness is napping,” or “King, please pass the salt.” The king’s brother, who went by the nickname of Daddy, was introduced as Commander in Chief.

  The brothers let another man, the community development secretary, tell the village’s story. He recited it in Homeric fashion, half-singing, gesturing broadly, his voice rising and falling operatically Sangama was founded long ago, he said, but was abandoned in the early 1990s due to intertribal clashes. Resettled in 1999, the village got little compensation during the construction and expansion of the Soku plant, literally a stone’s throw away. A large generator had recently been delivered by Shell, and a concrete shelter built for it, but the generator would consume more fuel than the village could afford, so it remained wrapped in plastic by the creek, rusting by the hour. As a gift, it was akin to a donor giving crutches to a man who is paralyzed.

  If Shell truly wished to provide electricity, it could have laid a cable across the creek to connect Sangama with Soku’s power system. At Soku, where several hundred workers lived behind a wire fence patrolled by soldiers and private security guards, there was an abundance of electricity, as well as running water, a medical station, a helipad, showers, telephones, air-conditioning, hot meals and so on. The facility had its own power plant. It was a high-tech fortress of a sort that existed across the country. One of the best photos I have seen of Nigeria is an overhead picture of a Shell oil terminal at Bonny: the facility is pristine and well lit, with green lawns and smooth roads, yet on the other side of a river is a decrepit slum with as much misery as there are barrels of oil on the opposite bank. The poignance is greater than any picture can show, because the Niger Delta is stained with dichotomies of this sort, and one of them is fittingly located at Chevron’s terminal at Escravos. Beginning in the 1400s, Escravos was a departure point for the West African slave trade. In Portuguese, “escravos” means “slaves.” Nigeria’s oil, waiting to be shipped to America, was housed in far better circumstances than Nigeria’s people, who were going nowhere.

  Bonny oil facility in the Niger Delta

  His Highness was not pleased.

  “That gas plant is the largest in Africa,” King Tom said, cutting off his subordinate. “This is where the oil and gas comes out. They could give us water, give us light, give us scholarships, give us jobs. We would not quarrel with anyone again. We have tried everything, used lawyers and dialogue, and we see there is no way. The next thing is violence. We don’t care if everyone dies, we will burn it.”

  The next morning, he offered a tour of his domain. He was splendidly attired for the occasion, with a silver-tipped cane, gold bracelet, emerald brooch and black hat. His disposition was the opposite of splendid, however. As his twin-engine canoe slid from Sangama, he remarked, “They are treating us like goats, not even human beings.”

  The canoe moved through mangrove creeks in which there was no screeching of monkeys, no hippos or crocodiles in the water, no butterflies floating in the air. I began counting the number of birds, because wetlands are usually filled with them. I noticed one, a white egret, but not another until five or ten minutes later. I kept track of the time between bird sightings; they were never more frequent than one every few minutes. In these wetlands, the wildlife was all but gone. Between the war and the pollution, it seemed to be both a killing zone and a dead zone.

  We found a fisherman using a pole to propel his leaky dugout. He had been fishing since the previous day but had not caught nearly enough to feed his family. In his canoe, there were a half dozen fish the size of large minnows. “Wherever I go, there is pollution,” he said. “All the fish have gone to the ocean.” His gear consisted of a hook at the end of a string that was attached to a stick. He could not afford a fishing rod.

  This journey required, for comprehension, the imagination of a science fiction devotee. We passed a small island that was known as Little Russia. The origin of its name was not clear, but the island served a distinct purpose—it was where prostitutes lived, servicing the needs of soldiers and oil workers. On its shore, young women stood in the shade of shacks fronted with empty beer bottles and off-kilter picnic tables. A sign over one of the shacks announced, “Warri Plaza—Food Is Ready.” The girls waved.

  We saw pits of burning oil and we saw flames roaring from flares on the ground; the earth was hissing fire. The smell of oil was strong in these places, and even when wells or flares were not visible, the odor of petroleum was present. Where did it come from? I looked down and saw a film of oil on the river. According to official statistics, between 1976 and 2001, there were, on average, more than five spills a week in Nigeria, but according to unofficial estimates, the true figure could be ten times higher. Shell and other firms claim to abide by first-world standards, but that seems a fairy tale, the punch line to which was announced by a sign at a flow station that was dripping fluids into the water: “Keep Nigeria Safe and Clean.”

  King Tom Mercy

  The canoe stopped in front of six leaky wellheads coated in oil that fell, drop by drop, into the water. King Tom said Shell planned to build eighteen more wells and two more flow stations in this area.

  “How can we expect to catch fish?” he asked.

  His anger was no performance.

  “Let’s go,” he ordered.

  We soon passed a patrol boat with unsmiling soldiers.

  “You see how we live.”

  Oil brought more than economic and environmental misery to Sangama.

  A month before my visit, the army had attacked the village in much the same way it had attacked Tombia, and with a similar result. Helicopters and speedboats all but destroyed it, though soldiers, before torching the better huts, made of wood, looted them of anything that merited looting, including pots and pans. Most villagers got away, so just two were killed, the king said. The assault was unprovoked, he added, and he accused Shell of complicity. The company had evacuated personnel from Soku hours before the attack—the villagers had seen helicopters ferrying employees away. The company knew something was going to happen.

  The king was not as unaware as he pretended to be. Like Tombia, Sangama had been used as a base by Asari; King Tom was a supporter. On the surface, the situation seemed odd. Why would Asari and King Tom, who opposed Shell and all it stood for, live in the shadow of a gas flare rather than attack it? The answer revealed a perverse economic dynamic that ensured violence but discouraged total war. All sides shared a mutual interest in avoiding a long-term closure of the industry because all derived income from the flow of oil—not just Shell but also the rebels who tapped the pipelines and bribed the military to look the other way. If Asari or King Tom wanted to shut down Soku, a rocket-propelled grenade fired across the creek would do the job. Sangama was a dagger to the throat of Soku that nobody wanted to use. This was a Nigerian rather than a Mexican standoff.

  Though a few burned buildings remained as reminders of the army attack, Sangama was being rebuilt quickly, and this was a hint of its participation in “bunkering.” That’s the word Nigerians use to describe the siphoning of oil from company pipelines. Throughout the delta, bunkering deprived Shell and other companies of about 15 percent of their output, which meant billions of dollars
a year for the bunkerers. The theft was reasonable to the locals, because if King Tom and Asari’s other allies didn’t seize oil for themselves, the government and Shell would take it all and return little in the way of services or aid. Yet bunkering seemed to pay primarily for guns and bullets for the fighters, and the occasional rebuilding of villages the military attacked, rather than food and medicine for the people. Bunkering was a symptom of the problem, not an answer to it, because despite its bunkering income, Sangama was a miserable place. Just as corruption made government oil revenues disappear, it appeared to do the same with a sizable portion of the rebellion’s take.

  Even the military got a cut. Asari had to ship the purloined oil out of the delta, and this could not be done so easily, because oil barges are not like gems that can be slipped into a pocket for smuggling purposes. It was an open secret that military and police officials were paid to look the other way as illicit barges moved along the delta’s waterways. Two navy admirals were even court-martialed for their involvement in bunkering in 2005. (The surprise was that they were court-martialed, not that they were involved in bunkering.) It is confusing—were the military and rebels fighting against each other or doing business together? The answer was … both. Army assaults might be mounted for traditional military purposes, or to punish one of Asari’s subordinates for failing to pay sufficient tributes. This may have explained the attack on Sangama—perhaps King Tom had been slow to share his bunkering revenues with local military officials. King Tom wouldn’t say; he stuck to the attacked-out-of-the-blue script.

  At the end of the day, it was hard to make sense of what I saw. I slept in a mud-walled room in Sangama, sharing a bare mattress with Tony Iyare, a Nigerian journalist traveling with me. We shared the mattress because its grime was less offensive than the floor’s. Between the humidity, mosquitoes, fecal stench, red glow, gas fumes and coughing children and the novelty of sharing a filthy bed with a traveling companion who was six foot four, it was a night of unsound sleep. I understood why Senator had said, earlier in the evening, that Nigerians cannot think straight anymore.

  At a bend in a river, Shell was trying to make amends.

  The company’s involvement in Nigeria was older than the country itself. In 1938, when Nigeria was still a British colony, a Shell subsidiary, Shell D’Arcy Exploration Company, was granted exclusive exploration rights. Commercially viable deposits were not found until 1956, after which Shell reached a fifty-fifty profit-sharing contract with the colonial government. A few years later, Nigeria’s newly independent government awarded exploration contracts to other firms, including Mobil and Texaco, but Shell retained control of the largest number of wells. As the government took a more active role in the 1970s, foreign companies were required to transform their wholly owned operations into joint ventures with state-owned firms. In most of those ventures, foreigners were the “operators,” meaning they managed the enterprise. That’s one of the reasons foreign companies, rather than their government-controlled partners, became such lightning rods—they were the ones who were on the front line, so to speak.

  If the Nigerian government had been efficient and fair with the revenues from its share in the joint ventures (in addition to the taxes it received from the ventures’ sales), Shell might not have faced so much wrath from the public. Initially, in the 1960s, half of the government’s income from the joint ventures went to the oil-producing states in the delta, with the rest going to the federal treasury. But in the 1970s, after the failed secession attempt of the Biafran war, the laws were changed and everything went to the federal government. The funds that were then handed back to the oil states were not particularly generous and were often stolen by local officials before they could reach their constituents. The formula changed a decade ago, with more money going directly to the oil states, but the sense of grievance has not changed—the people in the delta feel cheated.

  In the 1990s, multinationals became aware of the downsides of being unloved not only in the third world, where violence was becoming a default response to their misdeeds, but also in Western markets, where consumer boycotts punished their bad behavior. Shell faced a public relations disaster after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa because the company was regarded as having encouraged the military government to eliminate the human thorn in its balance sheet. Saro-Wiwa’s murder led to anti-Shell boycotts in America and the United Kingdom, and in response, Shell devoted a larger (but still modest) share of revenues to development projects. The king wanted me to see one of the latest ones.

  The king’s canoe neared Elem Sangama—a sister village to the king’s Oru Sangama—and the first impression was of a paradise in the delta. Elem Sangama had a water tower, school buildings, a health clinic, several dozen market stalls, a town hall, electricity poles and paved walkways. It was a Hollywood-ready example of what a thriving African village was supposed to look like, at least from afar, and this was thanks to Shell, which paid for all of the construction. It was the sort of project oil firms publicize in annual reports and advertisements about their roles as good corporate citizens. If only there were more of these projects, one thinks, there wouldn’t be so much violence in the delta.

  The reconstruction of Elem Sangama was yet another lesson in rot, because almost everything Shell built was unused and unusable. The water tower and the pipes connected to it were dry because pumps had never been installed. The market stalls were empty because the village did not have enough goods or money to justify a market; the only commerce was conducted in a tin shack selling beans and beer, and the shack, a few steps closer to the huts where the villagers lived, had not been built by Shell. The health clinic was empty and padlocked because Shell had not provided medical equipment, medicines or, for that matter, a doctor or nurse. The electrical lines were filled with electricity only occasionally because Shell had donated a gas-powered generator but no gasoline (the same problem as in the king’s village). A village leader who showed me around was unimpressed when reminded that Shell executives said it was not their responsibility to provide everything the village needed.

  Street in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

  “But is it their responsibility to take our resources?” he said.

  Shell’s upgrades included signs for the footpaths it had paved, although a poor village in the Niger Delta was not in need of asphalt paths or painted signs for them. It was an almost mocking touch that the path in front of the health clinic was called SPDC Road, which stood for Shell Petroleum Development Company, and it was stranger still that a sign on the waterfront said “Sea Side Lane,” evoking a vista of blue water, whereas the actual waterway was an oil-ridden creek. The signs were announcements of Shell’s dominion and disregard.

  Before leaving Nigeria, I made an appointment in Lagos, the former capital, with Chris Finlayson, who, depending on one’s point of view, was a liar, truth teller, environmentalist, polluter, puppetmaster, puppet, devil in pinstripes, honest executive—the list continues. Finlayson was the director of Shell’s operations in Nigeria.

  Shell’s headquarters, in the center of the city’s business district, had a moldy look, an organic consequence of an equatorial climate that accelerates decay in cement and flesh. Finlayson’s upper-floor office had excellent views that highlighted the distant horizon but not the dreadfulness of life below. Finlayson, whose physique is well-rounded, had the congeniality of a decent man who’d won a modest lottery. He motioned to a conference table; there we joined his spokesman, whose cell phone interrupted us with a rap song about murder. The get-acquainted chatter touched on a photo on one wall that showed a small passenger jet. Finlayson moaned theatrically, saying it was one of many Shell used to fly its employees around the country. The company maintained its own fleet because commercial airlines in Nigeria were unreliable and unsafe. The cost of operating these planes, Finlayson groaned again, was enormous.

  Shell presents itself as a saddened bystander to social collapse. The company and its executives often stress their regret o
ver the misery and their desire to make things better. To an extent, their concern is genuine, as is their frustration, because their development efforts can incite violence, as communities that do not receive aid become jealous of communities that do. While in Lagos I was told of a health clinic in the delta that Chevron had built and equipped. It was burned down by an adjacent community. Chevron rebuilt the clinic, and it was burned down again. There was no third effort.

  A cascade of reports over the years has shown that good-faith development efforts are overshadowed by day-to-day practices that have helped make the delta as violent as Chechnya and Colombia. One such report, entitled “Peace and Security in the Niger Delta,” noted that Shell’s facilities and operations relied on the protection of law enforcement agencies that used “jungle justice,” which means murder and torture. Shell was also criticized for engaging in bribery by awarding no-work contracts to front companies owned by local leaders. “The manner in which [Shell] operates and its staff behaves creates, feeds into or exacerbates conflict,” the report states. “After over 50 years in Nigeria, it is therefore reasonable to say that [Shell] has become an integral part of the Niger Delta conflict system.”

  The report was remarkable not for what it said, which was a standard critique of the company, but for who said it: Shell. The company, wishing to understand what had gone wrong and how to correct its problems, had commissioned a confidential study, which had leaked out shortly before I arrived in the country. The ninety-three-page document confirmed everything the company had denied or avoided for years—and then some. In the wake of the report’s publication, the task of damage control fell to Chris Finlayson.

  “Ninety-eight percent of what was in that report was good stuff,” Finlayson said. “The one negative point”—he was referring to a prediction that violence may force Shell to abandon its wells in the delta—“we probably don’t agree with. But we accept that we have to improve. I’m not going to dissemble. We accept that we can always do better, and that’s what we are trying to do.”