Dike Onwuamaeze
A New York Attorney and Solicitor of England and Wales with broad expertise in the financial services industry, Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu has thrown her weight behind the agitation for justice and an end to the climate crisis ravaging the Niger Delta region of Nigeria due to unconscionable crude oil exploration and extraction activities of internal oil majors.
Mos-Shogbamimu, who is also an author, public speaker and political commentator, largely laid the blames for the climate crisis in the region at the doorstep of Shell, insisting that now was the time for justice for Niger Delta people that had been paying huge price in their resistance to rapacious oil exploitation and extraction activities.
According to her, “in the Ogoniland of the Niger Delta alone over two million barrel of oil was split between 1976 and 1992,” adding that, “we don’t only demand an end to the climate crisis. We stand side by side with the people of Nigeria demanding justice now. We will never forget what you (Shell) have done.”
She argued that the type of care and concern Shell exercised at its oil extraction activities in places such as Norway by laying pipes under the ground, employing locals and enhancing environmental protection are “still entirely absent in the Niger Delta today.”
Mos-Shogbamimu in a short video documentary titled “How British Colonialism Created Racism and the Climate Crisis in Nigeria,” which she shared on her Twitter handle on September 2, said that “amidst a fossil fueled driven cost of living crisis for every Nigerian, Shell’s profit tripled in the last year alone.”
Taking a historical trip on oil exploration in the Niger Delta, she said that the British’s pursuit for oil began intensively from 1912, when Winston Churchill switched the British navy fleets from being coal to oil powered.
“So an increasingly insatiable need for oil led the British colonial government to grant an exclusive oil exploration license over Nigeria to Shell/D’Archy Exploration Company. This was the making of Shell and the beginning of the destruction of Niger Delta and its people. The lives of the people of the region were of no consequence whatsoever to British leaders.
“For Shell, the licence issued exclusively by the British in 1938 became a licence to print money, ruin economies and pollute the earth.”
She added that “while Shell rakes in the cash what the people got in return was a life expectancy of just 40 years. And they also got the blame.
“In the exact same way rogue police officers uses racist trope to frame innocent black men Shell regularly blames the people of the Niger Delta for the misery and criminality inflicted upon them.”
She, however, noted that “the people of the Niger Delta are fighting back. But their resistance has come at a huge cost. In 1995, nine members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) were hanged by the then Nigerian dictatorship. The British Empire and Shell have ruined lives in Nigeria.”
Going down memory lane, Mos-Shogbamimu said, “the creation of what we now call Nigeria came in multiple phases. By 1870, palm oil replaced the slave trade as the main business in the natural resource rich Niger Delta. British took territories around the lower and middle River Niger into the British Empire through the creation of a corporation called the Royal Niger Company. Then the RNC sold its territories in Nigeria to the British government for £865,000, the equivalent of £45 million in today’s money.”
But the popularity of palm oil as money spinner waned with the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta, which sadly has spelled doom for the region.
She added: “When it comes to African history, it is essential that we get our facts right. The Niger Delta is in the heart of Nigeria’s oil history for which it has paid a price. The creeks around Bodo village run thick with oil from an old Shell pipeline. The water is contaminated and peoples’ livelihood is totally destroyed,” adding that “everyone is welcomed to their opinions but not their own facts.”
A narrator in the video said: “Unfortunately the issue of race if we understand it is that it is a lot more insidious and it takes a lot more of a historical view to understand the difference between individual bias and structural racism and privilege.”
