I swore off reblogging but this definitely needs to be passed along.

elledark:

No need to worry .. its only Africa

If you read the newspapers or watch TV you could be forgiven for thinking that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the only situation in the world where the reckless greed of big oil companies, enabled by the failure of government regulation, has caused disaster. Not so.

Nigera is Africa’s main crude oil producer. It is also the country which counts the most oil spills in the world. Lets repeat that. The most oil-spills anywhere in the world. Once an ecological sanctuary, the Nigerian delta has become a no-fishing zone because of the toxic slicks that permanently poison its waters.

With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations.

To give some sense of scale, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico where BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig caused ecological calamity. The abuses in Nigeria, of course, stretch back for decades.

As recently as May this year, American oil giant ExxonMobil in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped and when local people demonstrated against the company they were attacked by oil-company security guards.

According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.

Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and environmental groups have pointed to the fact that the government is the main shareholder in most local oil consortiums which profit from the wests exploitation of local resources.

Khalifa Dikwa is a political science professor in north-east Nigeria. He says “The West has said nothing for the past 50 years because the damage caused by the spills are in Africa. Western governments are prepared to close their eyes if it’s in their financial interest. Here we say that the West is the mother of the 3 Ds: Disease, Disaster and Death.”

Compared to the roar of protest in the press over an oil spill that affected America, there is scarcely a whimper about the decades of oil company abuses in Nigeria. Why is it any of our business ? Well probably because its largely American oil companies who are responsible.

Still .. no need to worry .. its only Africa

Source

Ellie