Human Ecosystems: Okoroba-Nembe
- Okoroba Dredging: Map Overview and Key to Activity and Figures
An ERA Commentary on the Shell Dredging statement
The statement is remarkable on a number of points:
- The community had to wait six years before Shell removed dredging spoil blocking the Oghobia Creek. Shell claim that this is because of "funding constraints". Funding constraints during a time when Shell was able to commit huge sums of money to such projects as a multi-million dollar concert hall in Lagos, high expatriate salaries, the transfer of staff from Lagos to Port Harcourt and Warri, US$2 million to the Niger Delta Environmental Survey (the fees to the managing agents alone would have paid for the de-blocking of the Oghobia Creek), and the costs of a fruitless Public Relations campaign in Europe to off-set the bad publicity about their actions in Nigeria.
- ERA maintains that the problem of the Oghobia Creek was ignored by Shell because it did not care about the problems which its activities had brought to Okoroba. As Attachment 2. (Report on Blocked Creek During the Okoroba-1 Location Preparation), suggests, Shell merely and belatedly responded to bad publicity:
- In the course of the location preparation works, the creek junctions with the slot were blocked by dredge spoils. This caused a disruption of the natural water flow... There followed numerous and sustained (inter) national outcry against this perceived environmental devastation of an ecosystem. There has previously been a joint SIPM/SPDC inspection to this location mid-1995.
- The statement says "dredging operations were preceded by a baseline environmental study" not, as would have been required by an environmentally conscious operation, a full Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). In any event an environmental survey or an EIA are useless if mitigations required to offset adverse environmental impacts are not built into the design. Clearly the design of the Okoroba dredging took no account of environmental impacts, otherwise the problems arising from the blocking of the Oghobia Creek would not have occurred.
In fact the dredging design was deplorable because as Attachment 2 points out:
- Due to access creek/channel re-siltation (from surrounding deposited dredge spoil), it is recommended that the routes and identified stretches as in the map be dredged.
- The post-impact assessment seems not to have been considered until 1996, following the "numerous and sustained (inter) national outcry". We doubt that such an assessment was built into an initial environmental monitoring programme.
- Also if EIAs are to done properly they must involve local people (all local people, not just the Council of Chiefs) who are seriously helped to understand the environmental implications of mining activity in their locality. It is not enough for Shell to do a sort of Public Relations exercise to persuade people to accept something which may not actually be in their interest in the long term, in exchange for a small amount of money now.
- The statement refers to the "community" requesting extra dredging work, but what it means is that a Shell team which had no management authority (SPDC team promised to pass their requests to Management) met with some Chiefs. However
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