Sophia Evans
Petroleum was first discovered in Nigeria’s Niger Delta by the multinational oil company Shell in 1958. Now the West African country produces 2.1 million barrels a day making it the world’s sixth largest oil exporter. Billions of dollars of wealth have been amassed by ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, TotalFinaElf, Agip, Shell, and successive military and civilian governments. They work hand in hand, bleeding the Niger Delta dry of its precious resource and putting their money into foreign bank accounts. Delta people know nothing but sorrow and poverty. There have been 4,000 known oil spills in four decades which have contaminated wide areas of the Delta and destroyed the livelihood of its inhabitants, mostly subsistence farmers, hunters and fishermen.
The Delta has turned parts of it into a wasteland, where land, streams, and creeks are totally and continually polluted, the atmosphere is poisoned, charged as it is with hydrocarbon vapours, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and soot emitted by gas which has been flaring 24 hours a day for over 45 years in very close proximity to human habitation. Acid rain and oil spillages have devastated the land. Wild animals and fish have left due to the noise, the unbelievable heat, the pollution, and the illumination affecting their site caused by these gas flares. This journey did not only show me the environmental damage caused by the oil companies but also that there is a sophisticated and unconventional war going on in which Delta people suffer oppression and tyranny, unable to speak up for their rights to continue as hunters and fishermen or even to be employed by the very people taking away their resources. It is a powerful combination of titanic forces from far and near driven by greed and cold statistics. How can this go on?
Link : Intreview Sophia Evans on photographie.com
