Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has described the recent N45.7/billion ($110 million) indebtedness judgment against Shell for the oil company’s oil spill in Ejama-Ebubu community of Rivers State as a rip-off.
The environmental group said that the N45.7 billion full and final settlement for an oil spill that occurred in the area in 1970 amounted to nothing, given the present economic situation and the fact that the community first pressed for compensation in 1991.
This was just as it commended the people of Ejama-Ebubu community in Eleme Local Government Area of Rivers State, for their resilience in the last 30 years until Shell agreed to pay the compensation.
ERA/FoEN, in a statement issued from its headquarters in Benin on Friday evening and made available to newsmen, applauded the people of the Ejama-Ebubu community for their steadfastness in the pursuit of justice, remediation and restoration of their destroyed environment as well as the compensation for the losses they had suffered.
It will be recalled that in 1970, oil spilt from Shell’s facilities polluted the community’s environment and Shell neither cleaned, restored, nor compensated the community for the losses they had suffered as a result.
The community had in 1991, dissatisfied with the failure of Shell to remediate and restore their environment, filed a case before Nigeria’s Federal High Court of justice, and the court, in 2010, awarded compensation to the community in the sum of N17 billion, which the oil company refused to pay.
Shell proceeded to the Supreme Court, which in November 2020, rejected Shell’s last-ditch bid to set aside the 2010 compensation award. The judgement debt of N17 billion had after 11 years of Shell’s intransigence ballooned to N180 billion.
Executive Director of ERA/FoEN, Dr Godwin Uyi 0jo, stated that the consent judgement recently announced by the Federal High Court, in which the indebtedness of Shell was drastically reviewed downwards to N45.7 billion, remained a major dubious rip-off of the community by Shell, which continued the orchestrated strategy of taking communities through long harrowing legal obstacles to deny them justice.
The group regretted that it took 30 long years before Shell finally bowed to the will of the people and the dictates of justice.
ERA/FoEN in its statement noted that it was only when Shell was cornered as in the present case that it turned around to make an offer for full and final settlement of all claims by communities without admitting any wrongdoing.
The environmental group added that the same scenario played out in the case of Saro-Wiwa and others vs Shell in New York in 2009, Bodo vs Shell at the industrial court in London 2016, adding that Shell’s refusal to accept responsibility implied that the company was yet to learn any lesson from its wanton destruction of the environment and therefore unwilling to make changes to its clean-up operations from frequent oil spills and destruction of livelihoods.
Mike Karikpo, Director of Programmes of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, stated, however, that the N45.7 billion compensation agreement “is a bitter-sweet victory as the agreed compensation payout by Shell is merely a fraction of what the company owes the Ejama-Ebubu community. Shell has gotten away again with shortchanging the people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.”
“ERA/FoEN, calls on communities in the Niger Delta region impacted by reckless oil extraction to demand full accountability from every oil company”, it admonished.
“As the short-lived age of oil comes to an end soon, it is imperative that all oil impacted ecosystems across the country should be cleaned, restored and adequate compensation paid to communities and individuals whose livelihoods were impacted,” the environmental group submitted.
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