Far from US Gulf, Nigerian youths mop up oil spills

BODO, Nigeria, Tuesday

Using two large yellow tubes to funnel polluted water into his small wooden boat, Nigerian teenager Daniel Muukor helps to “mop up” the latest oil spill in the creeks of the Niger Delta.

But Master Muukor is not part of Nigeria’s federal response effort to contain the spill — the 15-year-old is stealing the oil to sell on the black market.

The only evidence of a clean-up effort in the creeks of Bodo is an abandoned orange containment boom the length of two canoes floating nearby, which residents say was placed there by oil company workers, not the government.

No robotic submarines to contain the spill, no high-profile government investigation into the cause, and no compensation handed out to affected communities.

This is Nigeria, not the United States.

Daily news coverage of the US government’s all-out fight to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the country’s largest environmental disaster, only reminds Nigerians of the type of arsenal rich countries have at their disposal.

“In the US, they have a response from the government. But in Nigeria, there is no response,” said Mr John Nyiedah, assistant secretary for the town’s main youth group.

“They keep saying they will come today, they will come tomorrow. But they never come.”

Millions of gallons of oil have poured in the US Gulf since an April 20 offshore rig blast killed 11 workers and blew out a BP Plc well.

The spill has soiled 190 kilometres of US coastline, imperilled multi-billion dollar fishing and tourism industries and killed birds, sea turtles and dolphins.

President Barack Obama has pushed BP to compensate spill victims, while US lawmakers have accused the firm of taking risky shortcuts on its blown-out well.

In the Niger Delta, home to Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry and thousands of miles away from the US Gulf crisis, oil spills have been left to fester for decades, polluting the air, soil, and water of impoverished communities.

No one knows for sure how much oil has seeped into the rivers and creeks of the Niger Delta, but environmentalists say the ecological impact over time in one of the world’s largest wetlands is much worse than in the United States.

“The oil spills in the Niger Delta are more than what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Alagoa Morris, field monitor for Environmental Rights Action in Bayelsa state.

“Some Nigerian spill sites are allowed to spew crude oil into the environment for up to two months.”

But President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration disagrees, saying its oil spills are much smaller than in the United States and are usually clamped within a few days.

“The kind of situation we have in the Gulf of Mexico, we haven’t had that in 10 years in Nigeria,” Environment Minister John Odey said.
“It is a fallacy for some people to compare the spill in the Gulf of Mexico to what happens here.”