
Murder is Bad – Even in Nigeria
On Monday morning, Shell’s “Grassroots Employee Empowerment Division” emailed 71,900 employees. But that division doesn’t exist.
On Monday morning, Shell’s “Grassroots Employee Empowerment Division” emailed 71,900 employees. But that division doesn’t exist.
Finally after fifty years of the Nigerian government playing softly, softly with Shell, is the country about to start playing hard-ball with the oil giant? The country’s oil regulator has asked Shell to pay a whopping $5 billion fine for a spill off the country’s southern coast last December. Late last year there was a … Read More
Reports coming out of Nigeria this morning are that the country’s President Goodluck Jonathan has sacked senior oil officials from the state oil company NNPC in the interests of “greater transparency and accountability.” Jonathan has come under intense pressure to clean up the country’s oil industry. We have known for a while that theft and … Read More
Seventeen years ago I was one of many protestors at Shell’s AGM in London at the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Centre that lies in the shadow of Big Ben, near London’s Parliament. There were two issues facing the oil giant that day: in Nigeria the Ogoni playwright, Ken Saro-Wiwa, lay in a disgusting and degrading humid … Read More
And so it goes on. It might be a different day but the ongoing vortex of violence, pollution, protest and conflict continues in the Niger Delta. The oil giant, Shell is at the middle of this vortex, as it has been for decades, with the company unwilling to take adequate steps to stop the violence … Read More
Often the story of Shell’s atrocities in Nigeria has focused on its complicity in the death of the Ogoni Ken Saro-Wiwa, or the human rights abuses that were committed in the mid-nineties. But now a great new report from the oil industry watch-dog Platform, and published in coalition with a number of NGOs, has looked … Read More
Just before dawn yesterday, activists from Friends of the Earth in the Netherlands scaled the front of Shell’s headquarters in the Hague and urged the company to “clean up” its operations in Nigeria. Some activists were dressed as oil-smeared birds. Others held pictures of polluted land or hung plastic strips appearing to smear Shell’s corporate … Read More
One of the main concerns of the Ogoni activist and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa was the collusion between Shell and the Nigerian Government. We already know that this collusion went from the top levels of the government to routine logistical and financial support for the military. Saro-Wiwa once said that one of their protests was “anti-Shell, … Read More
To mark the 15th Anniversary of the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, we are exposing the public relations tactics that Shell employed to counter criticism of its operations in the country. The evidence is contained in documents collected for the landmark trial last year of Wiwa versus Shell, but they were never made public … Read More
Nigeria was once Shell’s jewel in its crown. But for so long it has been the thorn in its side. Whether its pollution, collusion, corruption, bribery or false accounting, Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary has been accused of them all. So many of the group’s problems keep coming back to Nigeria. The company settled out of court … Read More