Crude World (12 page)

The king’s canoe neared Elem Sangama—a sister village to the king’s Oru Sangama—and the first impression was of a paradise in the delta. Elem Sangama had a water tower, school buildings, a health clinic, several dozen market stalls, a town hall, electricity poles and paved walkways. It was a Hollywood-ready example of what a thriving African village was supposed to look like, at least from afar, and this was thanks to Shell, which paid for all of the construction. It was the
sort of project oil firms publicize in annual reports and advertisements about their roles as good corporate citizens. If only there were more of these projects, one thinks, there wouldn’t be so much violence in the delta.

The reconstruction of Elem Sangama was yet another lesson in rot, because almost everything Shell built was unused and unusable. The water tower and the pipes connected to it were dry because pumps had never been installed. The market stalls were empty because the village did not have enough goods or money to justify a market; the only commerce was conducted in a tin shack selling beans and beer, and the shack, a few steps closer to the huts where the villagers lived, had not been built by Shell. The health clinic was empty and padlocked because Shell had not provided medical equipment, medicines or, for that matter, a doctor or nurse. The electrical lines were filled with electricity only occasionally because Shell had donated a gas-powered generator but no gasoline (the same problem as in the king’s village). A village leader who showed me around was unimpressed when reminded that Shell executives said it was not their responsibility to provide everything the village needed.

Street in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

“But is it their responsibility to take our resources?” he said.

Shell’s upgrades included signs for the footpaths it had paved, although a poor village in the Niger Delta was not in need of asphalt paths or painted signs for them. It was an almost mocking touch that the path in front of the health clinic was called SPDC Road, which stood for Shell Petroleum Development Company, and it was stranger still that a sign on the waterfront said “Sea Side Lane,” evoking a vista of blue water, whereas the actual waterway was an oil-ridden creek. The signs were announcements of Shell’s dominion and disregard.

Before leaving Nigeria, I made an appointment in Lagos, the former capital, with Chris Finlayson, who, depending on one’s point of view, was a liar, truth teller, environmentalist, polluter, puppetmaster, puppet, devil in pinstripes, honest executive—the list continues. Finlayson was the director of Shell’s operations in Nigeria.

Shell’s headquarters, in the center of the city’s business district, had a moldy look, an organic consequence of an equatorial climate that accelerates decay in cement and flesh. Finlayson’s upper-floor office had excellent views that highlighted the distant horizon but not the dreadfulness of life below. Finlayson, whose physique is well-rounded, had the congeniality of a decent man who’d won a modest lottery. He motioned to a conference table; there we joined his spokesman, whose cell phone interrupted us with a rap song about murder. The get-acquainted chatter touched on a photo on one wall that showed a small passenger jet. Finlayson moaned theatrically, saying it was one of many Shell used to fly its employees around the country. The company maintained its own fleet because commercial airlines in Nigeria were unreliable and unsafe. The cost of operating these planes, Finlayson groaned again, was enormous.

Shell presents itself as a saddened bystander to social collapse. The company and its executives often stress their regret over the misery and their desire to make things better. To an extent, their concern is genuine, as is their frustration, because their development efforts can
incite
violence, as communities that do not receive aid become jealous of communities that do. While in Lagos I was told of a health clinic in the
delta that Chevron had built and equipped. It was burned down by an adjacent community. Chevron rebuilt the clinic, and it was burned down again. There was no third effort.

A cascade of reports over the years has shown that good-faith development efforts are overshadowed by day-to-day practices that have helped make the delta as violent as Chechnya and Colombia. One such report, entitled “Peace and Security in the Niger Delta,” noted that Shell’s facilities and operations relied on the protection of law enforcement agencies that used “jungle justice,” which means murder and torture. Shell was also criticized for engaging in bribery by awarding no-work contracts to front companies owned by local leaders. “The manner in which [Shell] operates and its staff behaves creates, feeds into or exacerbates conflict,” the report states. “After over 50 years in Nigeria, it is therefore reasonable to say that [Shell] has become an integral part of the Niger Delta conflict system.”

The report was remarkable not for what it said, which was a standard critique of the company, but for who said it: Shell. The company, wishing to understand what had gone wrong and how to correct its problems, had commissioned a confidential study, which had leaked out shortly before I arrived in the country. The ninety-three-page document confirmed everything the company had denied or avoided for years—and then some. In the wake of the report’s publication, the task of damage control fell to Chris Finlayson.

“Ninety-eight percent of what was in that report was good stuff,” Finlayson said. “The one negative point”—he was referring to a prediction that violence may force Shell to abandon its wells in the delta—“we probably don’t agree with. But we accept that we have to improve. I’m not going to dissemble. We accept that we can always do better, and that’s what we are trying to do.”

This is what is supposed to happen—a company acknowledging and correcting its errors. But Finlayson’s we’re-sorry-and-we’ve-learned-our-lesson narrative has been repeated by Shell executives since the killing of Saro-Wiwa in 1995. My visit to Sangama had introduced me to a fresh example of the company’s dissembling.

I reminded Finlayson of the army attack, just a month earlier, on
King Tom’s village, adjacent to the Soku gas plant operated by Shell. King Tom had told me that Shell provided money, food and other support to soldiers who guarded Soku and who were involved in the assault on his village. I mentioned to Finlayson that this would seem to align Shell with a brutal military attack.

Finlayson responded quickly.

“We do not pay for troops, we do not provide any arms or other lethal support. It is not right for commercial companies to do so.”

Does that mean a ban on “nonlethal” support for troops?

“We do provide accommodations and we do feed troops when they are protecting our operations. We do obviously request protection where we feel our operations are under threat.”

It seemed an odd distinction, to pay for everything but the soldiers’ bullets and then deny any responsibility for violence committed by the soldiers. Finlayson knew this was an awkward position for a multinational that wished to be viewed as politically neutral. Like any multinational, Shell would like to be known as a good corporate citizen, not as the funder of military pogroms.

Finlayson’s hale demeanor had gone somber. I mentioned that King Tom had said that company helicopters had flown into the plant to evacuate workers a few hours before the attack. If Shell had advance knowledge of the attack and had failed to warn civilians who were in the line of fire, its silence would seem to prove, once more, the king’s charge that Shell was an accomplice to the army attack.

Finlayson selected his words slowly, as though each one was run through a filter before leaving his lips.

“We had intelligence that government activity was increasing in the area. We had no idea where the activity was going to be, but we knew that the area around the gas plant was at risk. We took the action of protecting our own staff and flying people out. But we don’t know what the military are going to do, we don’t know where they’re going to do it.”

The Soku plant, which was part of a multibillion-dollar gas project, consisted of high-pressure pipes and tanks filled with flammable and explosive materials—mainly natural gas. It is difficult to imagine that
the army would not let Shell know of an imminent attack that would present grave risks to the Soku facility and the workers there. And it is almost unimaginable that Shell would not contact the army to ask about rumors it had heard of military activity that would involve the detonation of a considerable amount of munitions along the fence line of one of the largest gas installations in Africa.

I rephrased the question.

“The military did not tell you ahead of this attack to do what you needed to do to evacuate the plant?”

The voice of Shell replied firmly.

“No, definitely not.”

Once it has started, rot is hard to stop, whether in a body or a nation.

The truce in late 2004 allowed Asari to live openly in Port Harcourt, where he even had a police escort when he went about town. Asari told me it would not last, and that Nigeria would get more violent, sicker. He evoked South Africa when it was ruled by a minority white regime. “I’ve been to South Africa,” he said. “I have been to Soweto. Everywhere I went, I said to South Africans, ‘We can switch positions. Apartheid was one hundred percent better than what is going on in Nigeria.’” Asari was known to wield a fine quote, but his point was germane. Nelson Mandela was freed by his white jailers. Saro-Wiwa, the delta’s emancipation leader, was hanged by his Nigerian captors. And less than a year after Asari warned me that worse was to come, security forces arrested him on charges of treason. His followers responded by occupying oil facilities and warning, in a particularly vibrant statement, of “grave mayhem” in which their enemies would be fed to vultures. A new rebel group announced itself, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), and embarked on a campaign that was far more violent than the one led by Asari. In MEND’s first months, more than sixty Western oil workers were kidnapped. Car bombs, which were all but unknown in Nigeria, were detonated against military and oil targets. To placate the rebels, the government eventually released Asari from jail. The violence continued, fiercer than before. Nigeria’s decomposition seemed unstoppable.

Until the drillers arrived, the Oriente region of Ecuador was an undisturbed rain forest inhabited by indigenous Indian tribes, mainly the Cofán, Huaorani, Secoya, Siona and Quichua. Tens of thousands of Indians were sprinkled through a lush expanse of trees and streams in an area as large as Rhode Island. No roads penetrated very deeply into the area, so the Indians lived in relative seclusion, except for occasional explorers, who did not all have the benefit of surviving their explorations. But in the early 1960s, the absence of roads did not stymie a new sort of visitor. These were American geologists who used helicopters to drop into the Oriente, and when they found what they were looking for the government awarded Texaco a twenty-eight-year concession to extract the region’s oil.

The world offers a multitude of environmental disasters created by extractive industries that dig for oil, gold, silver or other minerals. Calling these events “tragedies” may not be right, because the word implies a course of events that went in an unexpected direction, like an early death, a sudden landslide, a plane crash. Mineral ecocides have happened often enough and predictably enough to be cast as the order of things. In countries too weak to control powerful industries that tend to behave responsibly only if they are required to, the invasion of bulldozers and other machines of extraction is a disaster foretold. The unexpected twist in the story of the Oriente is that an unprecedented lawsuit might provide a measure of justice.

• • •

Quito, the capital of Ecuador, sits atop the Andes, more than nine thousand feet above sea level. Driving east from the city, one passes a succession of high-altitude valleys that have the stark grandeur of an Ansel Adams photograph, albeit with an occasional llama. The winding two-lane road, with flimsy guardrails that wouldn’t halt a tricycle, descends to the Amazon basin in ill-mannered serpentines. As the terrain flattens, the cloud forests of the Andes morph into a steamy infection of shacks, cattle, farms and people. Curving alongside the highway is a thick pipeline filled with petroleum that is used as an elevated walkway by kids and adults who don’t want to get stuck in the mud along the road. They walk, literally and magically, on a path of oil.