Monday Gboro stands in front of an oil spill in the Kegbara-Dere community, Rivers State, Nigeria. Photo by Luka Tomac/Friends of the Earth International/Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll never forget seeing the vast, charcoal wasteland left from a devastating oil spill in the village of Ebubu, in the heart of Ogoniland in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. The oil from a pipeline belonging to the Anglo Dutch oil group Shell had burst three decades before my visit, destroying the community’s streams and aquatic life. The contamination had not been cleaned up in 1999 and I could not fathom how locals could survive in an environment covered in tar. The waterways were still polluted and the village was eerily hollowed out.

A prominent Ogoni activist, Nyieda Nledi Nasikpo, told me that Ebubu was what he imagined a nuclear holocaust would look like, 30 years later. Chief Nasikpo is a member of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), founded by the late Ken Saro-Wiwa. From his nearby jail cell, Nasikpo witnessed the 1995 execution of his friend Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists by Nigeria’s then military government. Saro-Wiwa, whose murder by hanging shocked the human rights world, had long tried to shame Shell and British Petroleum into compensating the Ogoni people for destroying their crops and livelihoods. He accused the oil companies of committing ecological genocide. Between 1976 and 1991, more than two million barrels of oil polluted Ogoniland in 2,976 separate oil spills. In 2021, half a century after the spill, Shell finally agreed to pay the community $111 million in damages. In neighbouring Bayelsa state, a commission of experts said the rush to extract billions of barrels of oil in the Niger Delta over the last 60 years has resulted in a catastrophe and an

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