The Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence (NDAC) provides the platform for analyzing the challenges of the region, building an understanding of our shared struggles and outlining an array of actions that must be taken to resolve the crisis. NDAC starts from the premise that there is a solution to every challenge. We also believe that the surest way to get out of a pit is to stop digging further. NDAC also insists that we never forget that oil and gas are not renewable resources and our best interest is to secure the integrity of our environment and the array of gifts of Nature. Oil wells will eventually dry out. The world will either exhaust it or move to another energy source.
Besides, every oil well has a lifespan usually known during the exploration stages, and before commercial drilling and extraction. This means that the oil companies know the number of years a particular oil well will have a good and economically viable yield. When an oil company enters a field and/or community they already know how much oil and gas is available in that location, how much they would extract and how much petrodollars will flow into their coffers.
Entry into such a location is primarily governed by the profit they would make from a particular well or field. Oil companies plan when they enter and when to abandon communities and oil wells located there. In other words, they knew that they would abandon Otuabagi in the Oloibiri oil field by the 1970s when they were entering the community in the 1950s. They intensify exploitation within the lifespan of the field, make as much profit as possible within that time including by offloading environmental costs on the people and the environment while at the same time devising ways of managing the expectations of the community by dangling before them carrots that are never accessible and by other devious methods.
Today, several oil wells are out of service in the Niger Delta, but they haven’t stopped polluting. This reality requires that every oil well in the region should principally be seen and treated as a crime scene. To do otherwise means leaving the wells as ticking time bombs that expose communities to grave dangers as they explode at will.
It is important to note that oil wells can explode, erupt and spill oil at any stage of exploitation depending on whether they are secured or not, and whether the operators duly exercise requisite duties of care according to best practices and in line with regulations. We have seen oil wells which had been drilled and plugged erupt and spill massively with attendant socioecological harms as was the case of Shell Petroleum Development Company’s (SPDC) Ibibio 1 well located at Ikot Ada Udo, Ikot Abasi Local Government Area, Akwa Ibom State, in 2007. It is important to note that the oil well had been developed and corked and left for over 50 years while it continued to pose deleterious threats to the environment.
The first economically viable oil wells in the Oloibiri oil field continue to leak today even though Shell left them in the 1970s and the Nigerian government designated them as part of an oil museum. As we speak they are still leaky and exposing the Otuabagi communities to great environmental and health harms.
The Ororo-1 Oil Well at Oil Mining Lease (OML) 95 located in shallow waters off the coast of Awoye in Ondo State blew up during development processes on 15 May 2020 and the well has been spilling and burning for 6 years now. The oil well was first drilled by Chevron oil company but was shut off in the 1980s with a steel plug due to pressure issues, according to reports. The well was thereafter awarded as a marginal field to Guarantee Petroleum and its partner Owena Oil & Gas Ltd (an Ondo State company) in 2003 but the award was revoked in 2019 because the company had not developed and brought the field to full production before expiration of an extension period that elapsed in April of that year. At the time of the explosion it was estimated that the inferno could be extinguished within six weeks by drilling a relief well. However, six years afterwards nothing has been done with regulatory agency and responsible companies hiding behind a legal fig leaf that does not hide the crime against the people and the planet. The fact that Owena Oil and Gas Ltd or anyone else filed a suit against the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), now replaced by agencies including the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), over the revocation of their lease does not obviate the duty of care of the government to secure our environment and peoples.
While on this, there is another oil well fire raging at the Alakiri, Ofiomina-Ama in Okrika Local Government Area in Rivers State since 2024 and has been on for two years now, almost becoming a dubious tourist attraction and exposing the community and the environment to deadly harm.
We can cite a disturbing pattern of locations experiencing repeated oil spills and fires without required attention to rectify the situation and restore the environment. Examples abound in Ikarama community in Bayelsa State; Kpean in Ogoni where repeated eruptions in the Yorla oil field remain unattended to and many others.
The extreme oil and gas pollution in the Niger Delta is not isolated or unknown. Gas flares, illegal in Nigeria since 1984, remain as giant furnaces across the region with new ones coming up like the ones recently lit right within Ikot Ebekpo community in Onna LGA of Akwa Ibom State.
These environmental horrors have been documented in major reports in the Niger Delta over the years, including the Niger Delta Environmental Survey (NDES) commissioned by SPDC and carried out from 1991to 1997, but whose final results were never released publicly. That report confirmed the role played by oil exploration and extraction activities in soil and water contamination, loss of vegetation and biodiversity. It also noted the poverty into which the region sinks while oil activities externalize the wealth.
We also have the report of the Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland paid for by the polluters and published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011. One of the key recommendations of the UNEP report is the decommissioning of oil infrastructure as well as environmental risk assessments of abandoned “assets.”
A third milestone report aptly titled An Environmental Genocide — Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria, was issued by the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission in 2023. This report showed such widespread and reckless destruction of the Bayelsa environment that a state of emergency ought to have been declared immediately the findings were out. This is yet to happen. Happily, members of the BSOEC and others have not given up and now works as an International Working Group (IWG) to ensure that a recovery plan among other actions are put in place for the Bayelsa environment and that of the wider Niger Delta.
The report of an assessment of The Impact of Oil Extraction on Women’s Health in the Niger Delta with a focus on the women of Otuabagi was published in 2024 by Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre. The report showed the alarming presence of 15 out of 16 petroleum hydrocarbons tested for in the bodies of the participating women.
These reports all underscore the extreme harms abandoned or operating oil wells pose to our peoples. This ought not to be so. And this state of neglect, debasement and contamination of our lands and waters are inexorably leading to extermination or expanded environmental genocide unless something is done, and done urgently. This is the core reason we are gathered in this 5th NDAC. The first NDAC held in this same hall five years ago produced a Manifesto whose demands must be fulfilled. We are especially happy that we have in our midst today political leaders who can lead this process and community leaders who will support them to ensure the exploitation of our lands and people without care is halted.
The focus of this fifth NDAC draws our attention to critical gaps in the governance of the petroleum sector in Nigeria. We stress that the end of an oil well is known right from the first moment they spurt. That end may only be extended by technological developments that may increase the viability of extraction from such wells.
The knowledge that oil wells do not produce in perpetuity led to regulations requiring oil well decommissioning at the end of their useful life. Decommissioning is a key regulated process for safely shutting down oil and gas wells by safely plugging them before abandoning the wellbore. This process helps to isolate hydrocarbon zones, and this is then followed by the dismantling of surface infrastructure, remediating the sites and restoring them.
Decommissioning and abandonment are the final rites required on every oil well when economically viable operations cease. Oil companies know this. NUPRC rules require this. The abandonment doesn’t mean oil companies pack their suitcases and leave, or simply change their names in dubious legal gymnastics to avoid accountability and shirk responsibilities as we are seeing in Nigeria. Abandonment is a technical exercise that happens after the wells are properly and permanently plugged to ensure the integrity of the environment and protect ground water. This process also involves the killing of the wells by controlling pressures at such wells. Abandonment includes the dismantling and removal of wellheads, production platforms and other surface equipment.
These are critical regulatory and moral matters which cannot and should never be glossed over. It is time for a clear audit of all oil wells in the Niger Delta. Knowing that it will take more than a lifetime to restore the environment of the Niger Delta it is clear that clean up, remediation and restoration of the region must begin now and this should be the most urgent political action by government. After losing so much we must wake up to insist on a census of all the wells and an enumeration of which is considered viable and which must be decommissioned, dismantled and the environment remediated and restored.
It is time to replace aged pipelines, remove the well heads that although termed Christmas trees bring no joy but death and destruction.
Intergenerational justice demands that we wake up and perform our duties for generations yet unborn. It is our duty to see the future, eliminate the perils erected by altars of capital and halt the perpetuation of colonial exploitation that ignores our people and territories.
We cannot ignore the decades-old neglect and active assault our people and environment have been exposed to. The Willinks Commission report of 1958 laid out the socioeconomic challenges of the region in simple and understandable language. The NDES report, the UNEP report and the BSOEC report all show the unconscionable state of our environment. Remedying this goes beyond the throwing of cash at the problem in the name of development. While development is vital, such must be defined by our peoples, and must start from a complete overhaul of our mindset. It is time to reject exploitation and processes leading to extermination. As we say in Akwa Ibom State, we have to Dakada. We have to Arise!
The NDAC Manifesto captures it all, says it all, sets out a road map and NDAC 2026 is our space to draw the lines, drive in the pegs and ready ourselves to work to give us a chance to survive.
It is our time to collectively Arise. Welcome.
Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey at the 5th Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence held in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, on 14 May 2026
