Amnesty Demands Region-Wide Niger Delta Audit, Superfund Cleanup

Amnesty International is demanding a comprehensive audit of every environmental incident across the Niger Delta — not just Ogoniland — plus a superfund, financed by fossil fuel companies, large enough to clean the region to international standards.

The call came in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, at the presentation of Nigeria: Lifting the Lid, a report Amnesty published jointly with a coalition of Nigerian and international environmental and human rights organisations. The document now heads to the President: Amnesty says it will write to the Federal Government shortly, sending a copy of the report to ensure he "receives it and acts on it."

What does the report actually allege?

The report raises concerns about alleged collusion between oil company employees and operators involved in oil bunkering and other illegal activities — conduct Amnesty says warrants further investigation. It also documents Shell's activities in the Niger Delta over the past 60 years and the company's responsibilities for environmental damage.

Eva Pastorelli, a campaigner with ReCommon, said the report shows senior Shell officials in Nigeria were aware of the situation on the ground.

"Through evidence-based proof, we have shown that all levels of the company could be held responsible for not doing things or not having done things," Pastorelli said. "So, I think this is the first chapter of what could come next regarding Shell's responsibilities in the Delta region."

Her assessment of multinational operations in the region, she added, revealed a lack of environmental justice, environmental degradation and human rights abuses. She called for the companies to be held accountable and made to pay for the damage caused by their operations.

Why the Ogoniland-only approach falls short

Isa Sanusi, Amnesty International Nigeria's Director, framed the current remediation geography as the core flaw in Nigeria's response. The clean-up exercise, he argued, must extend beyond the ongoing work in Ogoniland to the rest of the Delta.

"We want the Nigerian government to audit all environmental incidents, not only in Ogoniland but across the entire Niger Delta," Sanusi said. "If you do it only in Ogoniland without extending it to the rest of the Niger Delta, you are doing it the wrong way."

He also pressed the Federal Government for continuous and effective oversight of the fossil fuel industry and for "a real, tangible clean-up of the environment" in the near future. On financing, his logic was blunt: "There is no way you can just clean one small place and think that you have done a clean-up for the whole of the Niger Delta. They deserve a good environment."

Does divestment let operators off the hook?

That question may decide the report's practical impact. Dr Celestine Akpobari, Team Lead of the Mideekor Environmental Development Initiative, urged Amnesty to investigate the divestment of multinational oil companies — particularly the transition of Shell Petroleum Development Company into Renaissance Africa Energy Company.

His claim: international oil companies polluted the Delta through decades of operations and are now exiting without remediating, under the guise of divestment.

"This issue of divestment is a problem," Akpobari said. "Ogoni will not be cleaned up until all other parts of the Niger Delta are cleaned up because we are linked together. Ogoni is not an island."

He was direct about who should pay. "Those who left under the guise of divestment must return to clean up their mess. Who are they leaving the mess for?" The goal, he said, is to restore the environment so communities can return to fishing.

What happens next

Three moves now sit on the timeline: Amnesty's letter to the President, the government's decision on a region-wide audit, and the pressure on Shell and other divesting operators to capitalise a superfund. Whether the Ogoniland model gets scaled Delta-wide — or the audit stops at the region's most famous cleanup site — is the milestone to watch.