Ledum Mittee , a human rights activist and a strong member of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP, shares with Clara Nwachukwu, his perceptions of the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP Report on, Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, and issues relating to pollution of the area.

Excerpts:

Have you read the UNEP Report on hydrocarbon pollution in Ogoni land, and if so, what is your impression of it?

The report is a confirmation of all of the things we’ve been saying that our environment has been devastated by Shell. It also vindicates our forebears, who lost their lives in the struggle.

But beyond that, government and Shell, they’ve spent $10million to publish only what we already know. A report that took four years to compile, it’s like Shell has succeeded in buying four years of inaction.

Let us look at the Gulf of Mexico oil spill two years ago; they did not require a UNEP Report to clean up the spill to the satisfaction of everybody and restore the site to its original state.

First, there was an interim compensation even while investigations were ongoing. Some fishermen were said to be earning $1,000 per month from fishing in the region, and with the interim compensation, they got $2,000. So in less than one year, the environment had been restored.

But what is happening with ours, it took four years to admit to a wrong doing, people are pretending they don’t know that people are dying or that the local people are drinking water 900 times above normal WHO contamination.

Yet, they (Government and Shell) are not thinking of how to solve the problem and they have already spent $10m on the Report, money, which they could have used to provide alternative water for the people, all these years when the contamination was discovered.

In fairness to the UNEP Report, the issue of the water contamination has been before the government several months before the final report was released. UN told government and Shell what they discovered about the water contamination and that something needed to be done urgently. But nothing has been done even as am speaking with you.

They fail to appreciate the fact that even children born today will continue to suffer from that pollution until they are 30 years or more, depending on how soon they move into action.

Also, there was a Presidential Implementation Committee set up by late President Umaru Yar’Adua, I was a member of that committee, but I was never invited to any of its meetings, and that begins to question the transparency of the motive.

So far, Ogoni people have chosen a peaceful means of resolution through dialogue, but government’s inaction and lack of attention is unwittingly giving the wrong signals that it is only through violence that people can get their attention. Today, we are hearing of bombings here and there and everywhere and that is what has taken government’s attention.

Some analysts of the UNEP Report believe the damages to the people and the environment were understated. Do you agree with this view?

Absolutely! If you look at the report, some of the samples they took were from communities that are not oil producing in Ogoni, like Okpali, which is in northern Ogoni where there is no oil well as well as from around the Akali Market, a market where people come from far and wide.

They did not go to places that the people are actually suffering from oil and gas pollution, because there are some areas where people are also dying because of the gas pollution and nothing was said about this in the report.

Also, in the area of health issues, the report only spoke about water not fit for consumption and substances capable of causing cancer.

They did not say how many people are at the risk of having cancer or already have it and other ailments that can be caused by these water bodies.

What is your opinion of the inter-ministerial committee set up by the Presidency to assess the report and make recommendations on the best way to go about the clean up?

I consider the setting up of the committee very strange because those who want to do something; go ahead to do it, while those who don’t know what to do set up inter-ministerial committees.

Also what government is doing by setting up the committee is to talk to itself rather than talking with the people affected. This is not the path that would have been adopted now because the UN spoke about very serious problems.It also spoke about specific things that various groups are supposed to do.

Rather than doing any of these things, government goes ahead to set up a committee. And to put insult on injury, there was a report credited to the NNPC that there is no going back on the resumption of oil production in Ogoni land. So what that means is that whether the people are dying or not, oil production will continue whether they like it or not.

We also find it curious that up till now, neither government nor Shell has offered any sort of apology to the people. It appears they are waiting for the recommendation of the committee before deciding on what to do. How do you feel about this?

That is to show you the level of insensitivity on the part of those that should care. Ordinarily, in a normal life situation, if your dog bites someone whether you had sent it to do so or not, the owner of the dog has the responsibility to apologise for any wrongdoing.

With the Gulf of Mexico, the chief executive of BP apologised publicly and admitted to being responsible. But in our own case, not only did Shell not offer any apology, they also told us that they were not the only company polluting Ogoni land, so it is a big shame.

The Report recommended for a cleanup fund of about $1billion, and there was no talk about compensation. We consider this to be grossly inadequate compared to what happened in the GoM case, or what do you think?

To be fair to UN, the Report said an initial commitment of $1billion and this was underlined in the report. So it was very clear to them that it was going to be far more than the $1bn.

But when you talk about compensation, you are talking about a situation that will put you in a position that you would have been before the interruption or incidence happened. It might not be adequate, but it will put you there.

Compensation should not be when you lobby for what should have kept you alive until the next generation. And when you are paid N5, 000, they say it is compensation. For me compensation is not something you pay to people and say: “just go!” That is why you find that those who had the courage to take the matter to other jurisdiction in England were even able to get far better judgment, than ever been awarded in the country.

Speaking about the British case, Shell is of the opinion that it has not yet been found guilty, and that the $410million being touted as compensation is merely an analyst’s opinion. What do you think about the case?

No matter what they say, Shell admitted liability and the plaintiff are liable to get the amount we have heard quoted. The problem is not whether Shell will pay compensation, but Shell is arguing that they want to pay an amount according to what they are paying in Nigeria. That is the peanuts I spoke about earlier. That is the argument and the matter is still on.

But what this means is that Shell is saying that if the spill had happened in their own domain – British or Dutch, the lives of the people would have been valued more than the lives of Nigerians. I think that is callous, because Shell is essentially saying that the lives of our people here are less than those over there.

Shell also says, the situation got so bad because it was denied access to clean up the place, after it left Ogoni land over 15 years ago, is this really the case and do you envisage a peaceful negotiation for speedy a cleanup exercise?

This is the double standard we are talking about and this is nothing short of environmental terrorism. Because the people say something is bad, you then want to force them to agree to it. When you force, you compel people to change their views.

Remember that the Report already said that Shell did not even obey its own standards, how much less the local standard. So what is there to negotiate? What Shell did two months in anticipation of this report, was to hurriedly award a cleanup contract.

So what they did was just to pack sands from somewhere and pouring them over some of the spill sites and nobody stopped them then.

They (Shell) knew that when the report comes out, journalists would want to go there, and as we speak, some foreign journalists have gone to see some of the spill.

So what they did was to give N5million to some young boys in the area that normally do things for them, and they went packing earth to cover some of the spill sites.

But what normally happens with such cover ups is that when the rains come, it will drain up the sand and the oil will come up again. That is why even the report said that some of the remediation Shell did was not properly done.

So denying Shell access is one of the many lies they use as excuses, who denied them access with the ones they did before and who is denying them access now? Who will see this kind of environmental degradation and Shell says they want to clean up and the people say, no don’t clean up, something that is already killing them and they have been complaining about it for long? They are all lies!