TAX THE EXTERNALITIES:

Ken Henshaw is the executive director of We The People, a nongovernmental organisation based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Henhaw works closely with local communities to expand civic engagement and organise around environmental and ecological justice.

In this transcribed interview between Henshaw and journalist Freddie Stuart, Henshaw discusses the history of British colonialism in Nigeria, the legacy of the multinational oil company Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta, and the local indigenous front-line communities demanding reparations for the destruction caused by crude oil extraction. [...]

FS: Can you tell us about the growth of oil extraction in the Niger Delta in the 1950s, and how the new oil economy took on these same colonial patterns of commerce you just outlined? In particular, can you talk about the role of multinational corporations in creating and maintaining these neocolonial systems of oppression?

KH: In the early 1940s it was discovered that Nigeria was a promising place for oil extraction. Drilling licences were awarded by the colonial authorities, with the first given to Shell, which was the first to discover crude oil in commercial quantities.

From the start of the extraction, there was no conversation with the local communities in the Niger Delta, where the crude oil was deposited. The conversation existed only between the colonial authorities and oil companies owned by the colonialists.

The agenda was not to find ways of tapping this new resource to impact the people of the Niger Delta in any meaningful way. The conversation was how this resource could be channelled out of the country to contribute to the economy, welfare and development of Britain and Europe. While it's fashionable today to say that before any resource project is established you need to have prior and informed consent of the people - that never happened here. Oil extraction was always an imposition from without. An imposition against the people. And that's why the people feel they have been completely alienated from the oil industry in Nigeria.

When Nigeria became independent in 1960, the oil companies had to enter a relationship with Nigeria's government to sustain the same relations of production and extraction. In this new relationship, the same level of protection was extended by the Nigerian security forces, judiciary and ruling elite to the oil companies over and above the interests of locals.

FS: In 1992, the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa said, "The Ogoni have been gradually ground to dust by the combined effort of the multinational oil company, Shell, the murderous ethnic majority in Nigeria and the country's military dictatorships." Can you outline how this relationship exists today, and what role the international community has played in perpetuating this dynamic?

KH: In the 1990s, the Ogoni ethnic nationality, located in a part of the Niger Delta where some of the largest oil fields are owned and extracted by Shell, demanded a better deal from the Nigerian government and the oil company. They simply said that we have not seen any benefits from oil extraction in our community. On the contrary, what we have seen is a system of environmental destruction that denies the people their livelihoods. The people are fishermen and farmers, and oil extraction has polluted our farmlands, made it impossible to put seeds in the ground and for those seeds to germinate at the right time and produce food for the people. We have fishermen who can no longer go fishing because the rivers are dead with no form of aquatic life.

By 1990, the Ogoni people had become completely destitute because of oil extraction. The environmental rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa demanded to redefine that relationship [between local people and the oil company]. The people were simply saying, "listen, you either clean the mess you've made here, or you stop extraction so that we can see if our land can heal."

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