The Price of Oil

Taiwo Hassan

As the Nigerian government pushes to restart oil production in Ogoniland, decades of pollution, dispossession and broken promises cast a long shadow over the future.

On Thursday 12 June 2025, the two million inhabitants of Ogoniland woke up to surprising news. The Nigerian president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as part of activities to commemorate “Democracy Day”, the annual celebration of Nigeria’s emergence from military dictatorship, announced a posthumous pardon for the Ogoni Nine, a group of activists including the poet Ken Saro-Wiwa who were executed in 1995 by the military junta for protesting oil pollution from Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta. Not only that, Tinubu also announced that Ogoniland would be offered several new and ambitious developmental projects, including plans for a new university, a road construction scheme and a promise to accelerate the clean-up and restoration of the environment, something which had been stymied by widespread corruption over the previous eight years.

Could this, many wondered, represent a genuine step away from the extractive practices of the Nigerian state that have blighted the land for the past half century? And did the official pardon of the Ogoni Nine after three decades amount to a real effort to account for the grave injustice done on behalf of the country’s extractive industries? Activists were skeptical. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. This part of Nigeria has been blighted by the long history of state failure and corporate greed that have turned the oil-producing Niger Delta into one of the most polluted areas on Earth.

Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa and Ogoniland, an area of around 1,000 sq km to the immediate west of the city of Port Harcourt, was one of its earliest sites of extraction. Commercial drilling operations began in the region in 1958, two years after oil was first found in the country. In the decades since, the oilfields of Bomu, Bodo West, Tai, Korokoro, Yorla, Lubara Creek and Afam are estimated to have produced around $30 billion in revenue for multinational oil companies like Shell and the Nigerian state.

With the oilfields came destruction, too. Between 1976 and 1991, more than 2, 976 separate oil spills occurred in Ogoniland, leading to the release of more than two million barrels of oil into the community’s land, streams and creeks. The consequences have been catastrophic and long lasting, while the many promises of clean-up have not been kept.

Such was the extent of this pollution that by the early 1990s many of the region’s farmers were unable to work their land. Nor could locals fish: the area’s marine life, once a common source of protein, has become ever scarcer as the oil has contaminated the Delta’s ecosystem.

“All wildlife is dead,” the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the activist group founded in 1990 by Ken Saro-Wiwa and Ogoni chiefs, wrote in the Ogoni Bill of Rights that year.

The ecology is changing fast. The mangrove tree, the aerial roots of which normally provide a natural and welcome habitat for many a sea food—crabs, periwinkles, mudskippers, cockles, mussels, shrimps and all—is now being gradually replaced by unknown and otherwise useless plants. The health hazards generated by an atmosphere charged with hydrocarbon vapour, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are innumerable. The once beautiful Ogoni countryside is no more a source of fresh air and green vegetation. All one sees and feels around is death. Death is everywhere in Ogoni. Ogoni languages are dying; Ogoni culture is dying; Ogoni people, Ogoni animals, Ogoni fishes are dying because of 33 years of hazardous environmental pollution.

The publication of the bill of rights opened the floodgate of resistance in Ogoniland. On January 4, 1993, less than three years after MOSOP’s founding, around 300,000 Ogoni, over half of the population of the region at the time, defied a government ban on public demonstrations to turn out for a mass protest against extraction. One of the movement’s demands was an end to gas flaring, the environmentally harmful practice used by oil companies to cheaply dispose of natural gas brought to the surface while drilling for oil. Between 1958 and 1990, constant gas flaring by Shell severely damaged local biodiversity, charred mangrove forests and reduced agricultural fertility in Ogoniland, while toxic substances released into the atmosphere caused widespread respiratory problems, cancers and skin infections among the Ogoni people. Other demands made by MOSOP included the control of Ogoni affairs by Ogoni people, the use of Ogoni economic resources for local development, adequate and direct representation of Ogoni people in Nigerian national institutions and the right to protect the Ogoni environment and ecology from further degradation.

This latter demand, for political autonomy and control of economic resources, has been the cornerstone of the Ogoni resistance. Despite the centrality of the Niger Delta to the Nigerian economy, the relationship between the Ogoni people and the broader Nigerian federation, dominated by the country’s three major ethnic nationalities, the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, has long been fraught. Under British rule, the Ogoni were forced into the administrative division of Opobo, a situation that continued even after the Ogoni Native Authority was created in 1947 and which granted the Ogoni people some limited autonomy. This was to prove short-lived, however: in 1951, nine years before Nigeria’s independence, the British colonial power forced the Ogoni people into the country’s Eastern Region, an administrative unit dominated by the majority Igbo people, under which they suffered administrative neglect and marginalization even as the revenues from the sale of oil taken went into state coffers started to flow, paying for massive infrastructural projects everywhere except the land from which it originated. It was not until 1967, and under the exigencies of the Biafran war, that a new administrative bloc, Rivers State, was created to accommodate the Ogonis, along with the Ijaws, Itshekiris and other minority ethnic groups in the Niger Delta. Even this did little, if anything, to improve the situation of the Ogoni.

By this time, oil production had become increasingly central to the Nigerian economy. So long as the black gold kept flowing, the people of the Niger Delta would need to be kept quiet. With the execution of the Ogoni Nine in 1995, the military regime under President Sani Abacha managed to quell the movement, but it was not able to make Ogoniland conducive for further oil exploration. Intense and widespread protests in the region continued, and Shell withdrew their staff fearing backlash from locals.

Since then, no crude oil has been extracted from the land of the Ogoni people, and their bold example of resistance has since been taken up by other communities in the Delta. In the early 2000s, the wider Niger Delta erupted into conflict as many of the region’s youth took up arms against the oil companies. Oil production facilities were sabotaged, oil installations bombed and foreign oil workers were abducted. The ensuing crisis led to the inability of the Nigerian state to meet its OPEC quota and resulted in a substantial loss of oil revenue. It was not until 2009 that Nigeria, after a decade of large-scale military action and widespread repression that had failed to curb the violence, was able to implement an Amnesty Programme under which militants agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for government support.

Petro-developmentalism

So why has the Nigerian state decided that now is the time to restart oil production in Ogoniland? The answer lies in the catastrophic cul-de-sac into which the past six decades of capitalist development have plunged the country.