Oil giant takes initiative to remove Nigerians’ resentment
By Dave Clark
UGBORODO (Nigeria): US oil giant ChevronTexaco has laid the foundations of an ambitious new bid to end years of violent protest against its operations in the Niger Delta.
At a ceremony on Thursday on a 93-hectare patch of reclaimed swampland, Chevron and Nigerian officials symbolically began work on a 100-million-dollar new town to house a fishing community.
“The new town project is an opportunity for Chevron to leave an indelible mark on the landscape of Nigeria,” said Jay Pryor, chief executive of Chevron Nigeria, as local women danced in welcome.
So far, however, the huge Escravos oil terminal, lying 200 yards away from the new town site across a churning brown river, remains the most visible sign of the firm’s influence.
Holding 3.6 million barrels of crude, the tank farm is at the centre of a spider’s web of pipelines and drilling rigs spreading out into the Gulf of Guinea, and inland into the mangrove swamp.
The swamp’s original inhabitants, the Itsekiri, Urhobo and Ijaw peoples, are angry that so little of the vast wealth bubbling up under their feet has ended up in their impoverished villages.
Instead, they claim, oil industry pollution has destroyed fish stocks, and left them struggling to survive in a country which has earned 300 billion dollars from oil exports in 20 years.
The Ugborodo New Town project is Chevron’s bid to put this legacy behind it, and take responsibility for developing the patch it has so fruitfully exploited over 40 years.
“It may not look much now,” says engineer Larry Alabi. “But just laying this sand to serve as the foundation cost 15 million dollars.”
In the five years it should take to build homes for 10,000 people, a civic centre, police barracks, hospital, industrial park and schools, 100 million dollars will be spent, Alabi estimates.
“It will probably become the benchmark for assessing future community development projects,” says Jackson Obaseki, head of Chevron’s partner, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
Chevron will hope he is right, for it has been a year of bad publicity for Escravos and for the US-based corporation, and a better one for the women of Ugborodo.
In July hundreds of women from a village living in the shadow of the terminal seized control of its docks and airstrip, disrupting work producing 420,000 barrels of oil per day.
After an 11-day standoff their reward was a vow from Chevron to improve its support of the community. The firm says the new town had long been on the drawing board. Now building has begun.
“Better late than never,” said Delta State’s governor, James Ibori, who has set up a public-private implementation committee to oversee the project, and attended Thursday’s ceremony.
Oil is Nigeria’s sole significant export, accounting for 96 per cent of foreign income, according to World Bank figures, and more than tenth of its total Gross Domestic Product.
But the discovery of black gold in the Niger Delta and under the waters of the Gulf of Guinea has not brought wealth to Africa’s most populous country, it has fed conflict.
The World Bank’s representative in Nigeria, Mark Tomlinson, says that the number of Nigerians living in abject poverty — on less than a dollar per day — has doubled in 20 years.
In that time Nigeria has earned 300 billion dollars for oil. This year, barring future protests, Escravos alone should export oil worth more than three billion dollars.
Yet in the village just outside the terminal’s gates, the Itsekiri are living without clean water or electricity.
And the protests continue. According to senior Chevron officials, two company supply boats were hijacked on Thursday in the swamps a short distance from the ceremony.
But, Chevron and Nigerian officials say, the new town project marks a break with failed attempts to throw money at the problem.
Governor Ibori alleges that corrupt local go-betweens, including some Itsekiri traditional chiefs, have pocketed money given for community development.
Now Delta State and the oil giant are taking the matter in hand themselves, he says, and will see the project through.
One local chief, Wellington Ojogor the Eghare-Aja of Ugborodo, counters that there is deep distrust of government involvement, but admits there have been mistakes in the past.
“There have been cases of misappropriation and embezzlement,” he admitted after an angry speech in which he declared: “The project is the community’s baby, and should remain so.”—AFP
