Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta (review)

"You produce the oil from our lands, but we get no benefit from it. Look around. Does this look like an oil-producing community? Does this look like Saudi Arabia?" (196). Those are the angry words of Vinkaviks Ekariko at a meeting between officials of Shell Oil Company and chiefs of a local community in Nigeria's now volatile Niger Delta region. The meeting took place in November 1996, one year after the judicial murder by General Sani Abacha's regime of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the environmental and human rights leader of the Movement of the Salvation of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and nine other militants. That statement carries the burden of this book—a passionate, intensive documentation of a narrative of unrelenting, destructive invasion of "small African tribes" in Nigeria's Niger Delta by rampaging profit-at-any-cost multinational corporations with Shell as the lead villain.

In echoing the defiant views of Ken Saro-Wiwa before his death, the work effectively puts Shell on trial for perpetrating a variety of forms of violence and threatening the physical well-being of communities, their natural ecology and resources, the ethical injunctions that underlay their governance (and their existence) for centuries before Shell arrived, and their human rights, such as the right to enjoy silence and and periods of natural darkness. Shell's practices of prospecting for oil—by cutting fifteen-foot-wide clearings across natural vegetation—destroys biodiversity and indiscriminately violates sacred communal groves. The frequent use of dynamite for conducting seismic tests along these clearings produces enormous explosions, which kill animals, uproot huge trees, ruin buildings, block and pollute freshwater bodies, and create constant noise and vibrations. Shell's "obnoxious practice of flaring gas" (197) also causes much environmental damage, including the destruction of fauna such as butterflies, grasshoppers, moths, and birds—all of which play vital roles in the rhythm of ecological regeneration and stability; the ultimate harm caused by unceasing flaring of gas in the oil fields is likened by the authors to "modern day gas chambers" (205). In the authors' view the most devastating assault on communities, land, freshwater bodies, aquacultural resources, and human health, however, occurs in the oil producing areas of Niger Delta, where Shell's "old, rusty and corroded" pipelines leak oil and cause pollution over vast areas (196).

In response, local protest has grown over the last four decades. That has produced, in turn, an alliance between a reckless multinational corporation and a Nigerian state that employs violence against political protests by its own citizens—and collects rent from oil production in the process ($7 billion in 2002 alone). Such an alliance perpetuates terrorism against communities agitating for justice; seeking adequate compensation for damage to land, seasonal agricultural products, and permanent economic trees; demanding respect; and asserting the right to participate in decisions that affect cherished religious and traditional community governance norms. By inserting the gun into public administration within communities of the Niger Delta, this alliance between a powerful multinational corporation and a violent state has produced frustrated youths who all too often resort to counterviolence.

In making this case, the authors provide extensive documentation, exposition, and quantification of Shell's disregard for good governance through nonadherence to the legal provisions of international environmental treaties to which Nigeria is a signatory—and to which, as they point out, Shell adheres in its operations elsewhere in the world. Such treaties include the Petroleum Drilling and Production Regulation (enacted in Nigeria as far back as 1969 and 1973), and the 1980s regulations of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency which "spell out liability and penalties for spillers of hazardous substances, whether on water or land" (217). Yet Shell has repeatedly failed to "bear the cost of removal [or] replacement of natural resources damaged or destroyed" by discharges of oil from wells and leaking pipelines (217).

Noting that Shell invests heavily in sophisticated propaganda machinery that almost always...