According to a report by the Associated Press that cited leaked United Nations papers, the federal government agency established to carry out the Ogoni cleanup operation in Rivers State “failed” to fulfil the mandate for years, even though $1 billion had been provided for the project.
The location, outside of Port Harcourt, was on the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) cleanup list and was meant to be turned back into lush farmland, just like the Delta was before thousands of oil spills made it synonymous with pollution.
Rather, the AP report noted that the land was left a sandy “moonscape” that could not be used for farming, according to UN files. The news agency was able to obtain emails, letters to Nigerian ministers, and meeting minutes that revealed senior UN officials were growing increasingly worried that the Nigerian agency had been a “total failure.”
According to a UN review, the organisation, the Hydrocarbons Pollution and Remediation Project (HYPREP), sent soil samples to labs that lacked the necessary equipment for the tests they claimed to conduct and chose cleanup contractors with no relevant experience, the AP reported.
Additionally, auditors were physically prevented from verifying that the work had been finished, and a former Nigerian environment minister told the AP that most cleanup firms are owned by politicians. UN officials also voiced similar opinions in their minutes.
Since oil drilling and production started in the 1950s, there have been thousands of crude oil spills in the Niger Delta’s farmlands and tidal mangroves, and crude leaks continue to happen regularly today.
The largest private oil and gas business in the nation, Shell, made the greatest contribution to the $1 billion cleanup fund for Ogoniland, the worst-affected area, which was established by oil corporations following a significant UN survey of spills more than ten years ago.
The UN was reduced to an advisory function, and the Nigerian government was in charge of the advisory.
The government established HYPREP, which was initially designed to handle locations that were thought to be simple to clean, such as the one outside Port Harcourt, to supervise the operation. It would then proceed to more complicated ones, where the oil had been more firmly ingrained in the earth.
The site outside Port Harcourt, however, had a “complete absence of topsoil” and nearly seven times more petroleum in the subsoil than Nigerian health standards, according to a confidential examination conducted by UN scientists last year, according to the AP story.
The current Director of HYPREP, Nenibarini Zabbey, who took over last year, told the AP that the company that did that work has subsequently had its contract revoked.
The accusations in the UN records were described as “baseless, mischievous, and cheap blackmail” by Philip Shekwolo, the chief of operations at the time the contract was given.
Shekwolo, who previously oversaw Shell’s oil spill cleaning efforts, told AP via email that he is more knowledgeable about combating pollution than any UN specialist and that the cleanup was effective.
However, the documents reveal that since 2021, UN representatives have been warning Nigerian officials about HYPREP. Of the 41 contractors authorised to clean up disaster sites, 21 lacked the necessary experience, according to a UN review conducted in January 2022. None were deemed capable of managing more contaminated locations.
They consist of ordinary merchants and construction enterprises in Nigeria. For instance, there is no mention of pollution cleanups on the websites of two construction companies.
The UN team cautioned in the minutes of a meeting with UN authorities that these companies were receiving contracts for more difficult areas despite their subpar work.
The cleanup of the basic sites, however, was not a failure, according to Zabbey, a HYPREP director, who emphasised that 16 of 20 had received clean certification from Nigerian authorities and that many of them had returned to their communities.
Zabbey said that Hyprep’s monitors were UN-trained and that they always followed the rules while awarding contracts.
When officials visited the laboratories, they discovered that they lacked the necessary equipment to conduct the tests, so the test results used by HYPREP as evidence of cleanup could not have been authentic, according to two people close to the Delta cleanup efforts who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity out of concern for their jobs or businesses.
