Niger Delta locals say remediation work is slow and appeal to the government to hasten the restoration of the polluted environment.
Port Harcourt, Nigeria – Prince Gbosidan still remembers April 12, 2009. Vividly.
It was the day fire from a big oil spill spread to his hometown Deeyor-Kira from an oil facility in neighbouring Kegbara-Dere and destroyed his farmlands.
“Before the spill, you can plant within four to six months and you will get a good yield,” the 49-year-old father of four told Al Jazeera. “But now, we are living in abject poverty because our livelihoods have been destroyed. I have stopped farming because there is no point farming when you don’t get anything.”
In the mid-1970s, when Gbosidan started farming alongside his father, in Deeyor-Kira in Nigeria’s oil-rich Rivers State, yields were bountiful and people from neighbouring communities came to buy huge yams at his village market, he said.
But harvesting enough to meet his family’s daily needs is difficult these days, he said, because of the spill and subsequent incidents.
For decades, crude oil from the Niger Delta accounted for an overwhelming majority of Nigeria’s export earnings. But pollution from repeated oil spills continues to endanger the lives of the 30 million residents of the region which spans nine states and has a coastline of approximately 450 kilometres (280 miles).
Between 2011 and 2021, there were 9,870 spill incidents, which released a combined 466,214 barrels of oil into the environment, according to data from the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), which is responsible for monitoring and responding to oil spills in Nigeria.
About 16,000 infants in the Niger Delta died within the first month of their life in 2012 because of oil spills, according to a 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal by researchers at the Swiss Institute for International Economics, University of St Gallen.
Life expectancy in the region is now 41 years, 10 years lower than the national average.
