Category: Colonialism

Halting the Disastrous Exploitation of the Niger Delta

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

Junk Foods and the Politics of Hunger

Food occupies a central place in our culture. It plays a key role in religious/social activities, and is a major marker of the passage of times and seasons. It is a celebration. Food unites people and families and marks one’s acceptance in a home, family,  or community. Food is not just an object thrown into the stomach to quench hunger. 

Not surprisingly, food varieties mark the peculiarity of ethnic nations and cultures. A tour of food varieties in a nation tells tales of the diversity of peoples in such nations. 

Over time and due to cross boundary interactions, certain foods have been adopted across nations. In Nigeria one can find restaurants serving amala,  ofe nsala, banga, afang soup and edikangikong virtually anywhere you go to. Internationally you are likely to find Chinese or Indian curry in most countries. And, the idea of an English breakfast is taken for granted.  The spread of food and the adoption of some have been spurred by commerce, colonialism and other factors.

Food and humanitarian aid were weaponized during the Biafra-Nigerian war and deeply impacted the diet and wellbeing of the people in the then Eastern Nigeria. I recall seeing that after the war, families ate less nutritious foods and those who were lucky ate more of eba made from cassava, the poor man’s crop. That was clearly attributable to displacement, blockages, destruction of livelihoods and other causes of poverty occasioned by the fratricidal war. Distended bellies were not signs of overeating, but often of kwashiokor.

Knowing that food is the anchor on which our culture is built, we must remind ourselves that for our people agriculture is a way of life, not just a business. Any policy or law that prohibits seed sharing is basically aimed at disrupting solidarity in our communities and replacing our communal power structures with ones built on exploitation, profiteering, poverty and hunger.

Food travels. Tastes are cultivated. Taste buds adjust to what is fashionable. This has birthed the fast or junk food and the related junk culture.  Fast foods caught on quickly because humans have become addicted to instant gratification. We want freshly made food but cannot wait for it for 30 minutes at the restaurant. So we all make a quick dash for the “food is ready” shop. To ensure the food is attractive the fast food outlets are brightly coloured, brightly lit and totally surrounded by music so loud your wrist watch warns that staying there for extended periods will lead to permanent hearing impairment. To keep you from pondering the food set before you, there are big screens in every direction offering you soccer, wrestling, music, violent news and war movies. Distracted and deafened we gulp the foods, enjoy the colours and sounds and go  away with a load of heavy metals, colourings and other loads in our guts.

When top politicians make a show of eating junk foods, and gulp litres of sugary beverages, they send a powerful but wrong message that obviously deviant junk culture is hip. 

Our worries do not end with fast foods. We are equally assailed by the rush of Frankenstein foods produced through genetic engineering. Many of such products are imported without queries into Nigeria. Some of the genetically modified (GM) crops are already in our farms, markets and dining tables. Those approving them swear they are safe for human consumption. We are served doses of insecticide as the GMOs are fabricated to kill certain pests. If junk foods birth junk culture, certainly genetically modified foods will produce transgenic cultures.

The biggest factor pushing these food cultures around the world is geopolitical in nature. Hegemonic control of cultural products go beyond movies and sink their claws into our food systems. Poverty, wars, debt, cultural manipulations open the way for food colonialism to take root. It is a power play arena and requires conscious efforts to halt, overcome and reverse. 

Decolonizing our food systems requires that we liberate our tongues and taste buds. It requires that we recover lost varieties. It requires that we reject GMOs. It requires that we preserve and share indigenous seeds and celebrate our foods. It requires that we expose the underlying market forces driving and influencing food system governance solely to their benefit and to the detriment of small holder farmers who feed the world and the attendant environmental and socio-cultural impacts.

We must critically examine the root causes or main drivers of hunger in Nigeria/Africa and resist its weaponisation to entrench a culture that does little or nothing to improve food systems but instead maximise profit for a handful of enterprises.

Who benefits from Hunger? Is hunger solely a question of productivity? Does hunger persist because farmers are not producing enough, even though in climes like Nigeria almost half of food produced goes to waste? How do global market relations and policies affect the rights of local food producers or their power to compete? These are pertinent questions that require deliberate attention and responses if our governments are serious about addressing hunger or food insecurity.

This session of our Sustain-Ability Academy brings to fore these questions amongst others and recommends critical recalibration of our food systems to ensure fairness and justice, resilience and sustain-ability.

Remarks at the Sustain-Ability Academy on Food, Power and the Politics of Hunger hosted by Health of Mother Earth Foundation and the Centre of Politics, University of Port Harcourt on 19 March 2026.

Crimes of Colonialism

The African Union (AU) has “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations” as its theme of the year 2025. This theme arose from the Accra 2023 Reparations Conference. In line with the theme, the government of Algeria and the African Union co-hosted a conference on Crimes of Colonialism: Towards Redressing Historical Injustices through the Criminalisation of Colonialism in Algiers on 30th November and 1st December 2025.

Working towards fair reparations for harms and the exploitation suffered by Africans and peoples of African decent over the past four centuries has been a key concern for the AU and the Organization for African Unity (OAU) before it.  The first Pan African conference on reparations held in Abuja, Nigeria, in April 1993 resulted in the first collective position of African political leadership as captured in the Abuja Proclamation on Reparations. That declaration stated that “the issue of reparations is an important question requiring the united action of Africa and its Diaspora…” being “fully persuaded that the damage sustained by the African peoples is not a ‘thing of the past’ but is painfully manifest in the damaged lives of contemporary Africans from Harlem to Harare, in the damaged economies of the Black World from Guinea to Guyana, from Somalia to Surinam.” The Abuja Proclamation called “upon the international community to recognize that there is a unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to the African peoples which has yet to be paid – the debt of compensation to the Africans as the most humiliated and exploited people of the last four centuries of modern history.”

A number of conferences have since been held on reparations and on racism as well. The Algiers conference on the Crime of Colonialism can be said to have stood on the shoulders of those earlier endeavours. I participated on a panel that focused on the Environmental Impacts of Colonialism at this conference. Delegates included ambassadors, ministers of foreign affairs, and experts drawn from across Africa and the diaspora.

Algeria was praised for hosting the historic and strategic conference aimed at seeking a recognition of the crime of colonialism and seeking reparations as the basis for sustained peace and healing.  The conference advanced Africa’s position on crimes of colonialism as systemic violence and exploitation that, alongside slavery, qualify as crimes against humanity. A call was made for a declaration of an African Day for the remembrance of the victims of transatlantic enslavement and colonialism. It was also noted that colonialism has not ended and that there are still 20 colonies in the Caribbean besides those in Africa and elsewhere. 

My notes from the event included the fact that colonialism was not a civilising process but one of wanton extraction, exploitation, humiliation and abuse of rights. It embodied the great crimes against humanity including those perpetrated in Congo, Cameroon, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, and other places. References were frequently made to the nuclear tests that the French carried out in Algeria during the colonial days. The contributions of Frantz Fanon, author of “The Wretched of the Earth”, an internationalist African anti-colonial activist and revolutionary were acknowledged. The impacts of colonialism on education, economy and other spheres of life were stressed and disruption of African or Africa’s? culture was highlighted as the destruction of the glue that holds African peoples together. 

The high-level ministerial panel on the topic From Recognition to Codification: Criminalising Colonialism in International Law showed that colonialism is a system and not an event and cannot be successfully fought without strategic plans. Such plans and actions must include ways of bringing back African systems of governance through education. Discussions around the human and generational impacts of colonialism underscored the health and genetic effects of nuclear tests as well as intentional spread of disease, displacements and other acts of violence. 

Permit me to share some points I put across on the panel on Environmental Impacts of Colonialism. The first point was that colonialism and neocolonialism will not end except coloniality is erased. The persistence of colonialty of power and knowledge reinforces the continuation of colonialism in new forms. These produce extreme and destructive exploitation. And we must not forget, as Kwame Nkrumah stated in his book on Neocolonialism, that the worst form of imperialism is exploitation without responsibility. This mode of rapacious exploitation persists on the continent.

Another key point is that colonialism was birthed and nourished by extractivism. It was all about controlling the colonies or sacrifice zones to the benefit of the colonizers’ home territories which were considered sacred and untouchable.  Colonialism extracts nearly anything: labour, data, cultures, minerals, finance and is virtually insatiable. Colonialism’s emphasis on land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural destruction frequently resulted in ecocidal practices as they were extensive, intentional, persistent and often irreversible. The fact that the environmental crimes are continuous and persistent can be seen in the ongoing degradation of the Niger Delta where oil and gas has been destructively extracted from colonial times to the present. Other examples include extraction of gold in Obuasi in Ghana, coal in Whitbank in South Africa, oil in the Sudd, South Sudan, gas in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, colonial extraction of so-called critical minerals in DR Congo and the notorious extraction of uranium in Niger Republic. 

The environmental impacts of colonialism also appear through carbon colonialism which is also manifesting as a continent-scale land grab. The time has come for the halting of colonial extraction in all ramifications and a recognition of the ecological/climate debt being owed Africa, as part of the needed reparations. In other words, climate finance should be approached from the platform of ecological and climate debt.

To get off the rut, the AU should produce a model law on Rights of Nature to be adopted by all African nations. Secondly, the AU should promote the codification and utilisation of African environmentalism built on African philosophies, culture and cosmology. The AU should also recognize and promote grassroots initiatives for halting expansion of fossil fuels sacrifice zones and towards resource democracy using the Ogoni example in Nigeria and the Yasuni experience in Ecuador as examples. Finally, the map of Africa requires urgent review with the abolition and erasure of divisive, thoughtless, colonial boundaries, as those were mere demarcations of zones of ownership, control and exploitation by the colonialists. 

Coming away from the conference I kept ruminating on a strong advice offered by Eric Phillips, Vice Chair, CARICOM Slavery Reparation Commission. He said, “We must not be prisoners of our past, but architects of our future.” It was a call for action for all, but the tasks rest especially on African political leaders. Will they rise to the occasion and show leadership?