The Niger Delta region, an important wetland and coastal ecosystem, is home to Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. Nigeria’s oil boom took off during the 1970s. It relied on the expertise of large transnational corporations, including: Total (France), Exxon-Mobil (USA), Royal Dutch Shell (UK & Netherlands), Chevron (USA), and Agip (Italy). These multinational companies constructed oil and gas drilling platforms around the Niger Delta.
Linked to these platforms, pipelines around the Gulf of Guinea transport oil to large tankers that ship it to Europe and the USA, where it is refined to produce petrol and other oil-based products. Transnational companies make far higher profits from refined oil. To keep more oil profits within the country, the Nigerian government has set up the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to form joint ventures with TNCs.
Map of Nigeria with principal ethnic groups and oil & gas resources. Credit: Le Monde, Paris
Environmental Impact of Oil in Nigeria
The Niger Delta region has experienced a range of environmental damage caused by the oil industry. Farmland has been damaged by leaking oil pipes, meaning crops no longer grow in some areas. Oil pollution from tankers and damaged pipelines kills fish in the sea and the delta. When gas is burned off from the oil, greenhouse gases are released, contributing to climate change. The process also causes respiratory problems for local people.
According to the Guardian, 40 million liters of oil are spilled in the Niger Delta each year compared to 4 million in the US. In the Niger Delta, the contamination of fish and crops has destroyed livelihoods, destroyed local employment opportunities and pushed many into militancy. Life expectancy in the Niger Delta is ten years below the national average.
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A 2018 Journal of Health and Pollution study found that more than 12,000 oil spill incidents occurred in the oil-rich region between 1976 and 2014. Pipeline corrosion and tanker accidents caused more than 50 per cent of them. The study said other incidents have been caused by operational error, mechanical failure, and sabotage, mostly from militant groups.
The government has established laws to protect the environment from oil exploration.
Crude oil spill in Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil producer.
The Ogoni Struggle and Shell's Response
One of the most thoroughly-documented and long-standing cases of corporate abuse in the world is that of Shell petroleum's decades-long conflict with the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta. As a multinational oil company, Shell has subsidiaries across the world, with extraction sites from Australia to Venezuela. While Shell has made billions off of these enterprises, many of the communities in which they operate have been left impoverished and contaminated. The Ogoni case is so extreme that Amnesty International has called upon the UK, Dutch and Nigerian governments to initiate a criminal investigation into their activities there.
The Ogoni region is a highly oil-rich area in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, populated by approximately 500,000 members of the Ogoni People. Since the Shell Petroleum Development Company discovered oil in Ogoniland in 1958, the region has been plagued with serious environmental degradation resulting from the over 100 oil wells in the area. Since 1990 the Ogoni have been engaged in a struggle with the government of Nigeria and the Shell Company to maintain their rights as the original inhabitants of the land. The nonviolent Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) has been met with violence on the part of the government as well as the assassination or imprisonment of many Ogoni leaders. Yet the Ogoni people have managed to force Shell Oil to withdraw from the area and have raised substantial international awareness of their situation.
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When the Ogoni people of Nigeria organized in protest of Shell’s oil operations in the Niger Delta, Shell worked with the Nigerian military to crack down on the Ogoni. Nigerian soldiers used deadly force and massive, brutal raids against the Ogoni people throughout the early 1990s to repress a growing movement against the oil company. This crackdown culminated in the torture and execution of acclaimed writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders, known as the “Ogoni Nine,” on November 10, 1995.
KEN SARO WIWA OF OGONI | THE FIGHT FOR THE DELTA`S SOUL #history
As the case opens, Saro-Wiwa and his codefendants have just been found guilty of inciting murder in a trial that international observers have criticized as deeply flawed. Saro-Wiwa, an environmentalist, writer, businessman, television producer, and human rights activist, has been a vocal critic of not only the Nigerian government but also Shell.
Legal Battles and Accountability
In several lawsuits brought against them in British and Dutch courts, the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has argued that it was not responsible for the oil spills and other violations committed by its Nigerian subsidiary. On the contrary, Shell argued it could not, in law or in fact, be held responsible for the actions of its subsidiary. Lawyers for the plaintiffs launched an appeal, based inter alia on a 2012 European Court of Justice ruling that the Shell parent company “…in fact exercised decisive influence over their joint subsidiary’s conduct”. They also cited a 2015 Dutch Court of Appeal ruling that found, “Considering the foreseeable serious consequences of oil spills to the local environment from a potential spill source, it cannot be ruled out from the outset that the parent company may be expected in such a case to take an interest in preventing spills ….
The case of the Ogale and Bille communities against Royal Dutch Shell is not the only lawsuit in which Shell has used this litigation strategy. The Bodo community’s legal claim is being brought against Renaissance Africa Energy Company Limited (RAEC), which was formed after Shell divested from its Nigerian subsidiary Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC) in March 2025.
We took Shell to court in the United States to seek accountability for surviving victims and the families of those killed.
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One interesting facet of this case is the type of harm they are attempting to remedy: the 45,000 farmers seek damages for the broad effects on their community of over 50 years of repeated spills, widespread contamination, and the effects of that contamination on the health and livelihoods of the residents of that area. Generally, this type of generalized harm can be difficult to address through legal mechanisms because of difficulty in showing causation, or who was at fault, exactly when the wrongdoing occurred.
But this is also the crux of the problem: the Ogoni people, and the people of the Niger Delta more generally, have been victims of such a long-standing abuse that nearly every aspect of their lives has been negatively impacted: from their individual incomes, the economy in general, the natural environment, their health and the future of their children. This case looked at the whole picture and attempted to challenge that harm.
The Goi Oil Spill: A Case Study
On 10 October 2004, Eric Dooh received an urgent call from one of his father’s employees: the waterway surrounding their houses was running black with oil. Near the outskirts of Dooh’s village of Goi, a pipeline built by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1960s carried oil from inland Nigeria to an offshore terminal where it would be barreled and exported around the world. Dooh suspected the pipeline had sprung a leak. He attempted to alert the pipeline operator, but both Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary had largely abandoned oil operations in Goi a decade earlier in response to local uprisings.
On that day, Shell’s community relations officer was unavailable, Dooh recalled. He reported the leak to a nearby police station instead. It wasn’t until the next day that officials climbed onboard a helicopter, ascended over Dooh’s village situated on the banks of the Oroberekiri Creek in Nigeria’s southern Niger Delta region, and confirmed what villagers already knew: oil was spreading and not letting up.
Later that day, the situation in Goi went from bad to worse. Oil spilled into a local farmer’s house and connected with a cooking fire. The village, its oil-seeped creek and the surrounding mangrove forests erupted into flames. Nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest surrounding the village of Goi were destroyed in the fire.
Nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest surrounding the village of Goi were destroyed in the fire. Photograph: Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images
On 12 October a team of investigators - made up of locals, government officials, and employees for Shell’s Nigerian offshoot, Shell Petroleum Development Company - located the source of the leak: an 18-inch hole in an exposed portion of the pipeline. They temporarily plugged the split pipeline with wood chips and later sealed it with a clamp, but over the course of the three-day leak, the operators never shut off the flow of oil at its source. By then, more than 23,000 litres of oil had spilled and nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest had burned, poisoning the land and fishponds that were the lifeblood of the village.
Shell would later argue in court that locals brought the disaster upon themselves; the leak was the work of saboteurs, they claimed. Vandalism and theft are common in the region, but so too is old and abandoned pipeline infrastructure that’s prone to leaks. Dooh and his father, Barizaa, who was the chief of their village, attested the oil spill was the result of a poorly maintained pipeline.
Two years dragged by before government agencies began clean-up efforts around Goi. “We were eating, drinking, breathing the oil,” Dooh said. By 2010, six years after the initial leak, Goi was still too polluted to sustain its residents. The Nigerian government ordered them to abandon their homes and permanently evacuate Goi. By then, most of the villagers, including the Dooh family, had already moved away, scattered across nearby towns.
Goi was so contaminated with crude oil that six years after the spill, the village was deemed unlivable. Photograph: Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images
Recent Developments and Shell's Departure
Today, the oil industry in Nigeria faces a reckoning with Shell at the helm. According to Amnesty International, the oil company has come under “unprecedented legal scrutiny” in recent years for its negligent and criminal practices in the Niger Delta. Several lawsuits are ongoing while others have culminated in courts ordering Shell to pay plaintiffs billions of dollars in damages. The mounting pressure has Shell considering a rapid departure from the region’s oil market.
In early August 2021, the company announced it would sell off all remaining onshore oilfields in Nigeria, citing challenges with community unrest, sabotage and a company-wide refocus on promoting green energy. But locals and lawyers see the move as Shell ducking its responsibility to clean up after itself. A court in March barred Shell from selling any more assets in Nigeria while the company appeals against a ruling in which it was found liable for a 2019 oil spill and ordered to pay affected communities nearly $2bn in damages.
Families were forced to permanently abandon their homes because of the extreme pollution surrounding their village. Photograph: Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images
“It is incomprehensible to imagine that if these spills and this level of pollution occurred in North America or Europe that it would be allowed to happen,” said Mark Dummett, the director of Amnesty International’s global issues programme.
In 2008 there were two massive oil spills, caused by poorly maintained Shell pipelines, in a creek close to the Bodo community. Crude oil continuously leaked into the water for five weeks on each occasion. On 11 October 2024, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of Nigerian communities over alleged pollution by oil giant Shell. The Court of Appeal heard the Shell Nigeria oil spill appeal on 8 October 2024.
The Fight for Justice Continues
Eric Dooh and his neighbors were among the hundreds of thousands of Niger Delta residents who had suffered from spills in the half century after Shell discovered oil in the region. Dooh and his father set out to put an end to the industry’s legacy of environmental pollution, corporate greed and human rights abuses. But seeking justice and compensation for their losses was not for the faint of heart.
For one, they would be going up against a multibillion-dollar, multinational conglomerate with a team of experienced lawyers at their disposal. Then there was fear of arrest and reprisal. Government security forces provided security for oil companies and often responded violently to protests and uprisings against oil pollution. In 1995, the Nigerian government hanged nine environmental activists, who became known as the Ogoni Nine, named for the Indigenous Ogoni people, who spoke out against Shell’s pollution.
Accountability was hard to come by. But Dooh and his family had lost everything: their village, their thriving chicken farm and bakery, their fishponds and livelihoods. They wanted Shell to pay.
Eric Dooh showing his hand covered with oil from a creek near Goi, Ogoniland, Nigeria. Photograph: Marten van Dijl/EPA
“It is shameful that it has taken so long and required legal action to get the companies responsible for this environmental destruction to face their responsibilities. We hope that this long-overdue trial will provide the affected Bodo communities the justice and remediation they have fought for and deserve.
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