As it passed above the Niger Delta in 2021, a satellite took an image. It showed acres of land, scraped bare. The site, outside the city of Port Harcourt, was on a cleanup list kept by the United Nations Environment Programme, supposed to be restored to green farmland as the Delta was before thousands of oil spills turned it into a byword for pollution. Instead the land was left a sandy “moonscape” unusable for farming, according to U.N. documents.
That failed cleanup was not an exception, records obtained by media show. Previously unreported investigations, emails, letters to Nigerian ministers and minutes from meetings make clear that senior U.N. officials were increasingly concerned that the Nigerian agency in charge of cleaning up crude oil spills has been a “total failure.”
The agency, known as Hyprep, selected cleanup contractors who had no relevant experience, according to a U.N. review. It sent soil samples to laboratories that didn’t have the equipment for tests they claimed to perform. Auditors were physically blocked from making sure work had been completed.
A former Nigerian minister of the environment told the news agencies that the majority of cleanup companies are owned by politicians, and minutes show similar views were shared by U.N. officials.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
There have been thousands of crude oil spills in the tidal mangroves and farmlands of the Niger Delta since oil drilling and production began in the 1950s. Reports and studies document what is widely known here: People often wash, drink, fish and cook in contaminated water.
Spills still occur frequently. The Ogboinbiri community in Bayelsa state suffered its fourth spill in three months in November, harming farm fields, streams and the fish people rely on.
“We bought the land in 2023; we have not harvested anything from the farmland; both the profit, our interest, everything is gone,” said Timipre Bridget, a farmer in the community. “No way to survive with our children again.”
Many of the spills are caused by lawbreakers illegally tapping into pipelines to siphon off crude oil they process into gasoline in makeshift refineries.
After a major U.N. survey of spills more than a decade ago, oil companies agreed to create a $1 billion cleanup fund for the worst affected area, Ogoniland, and Shell, the largest private oil and gas company in the country, contributed $300 million. The Nigerian government handled the funds and the U.N. was relegated to an advisory role.
To oversee the work, the government created the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, or Hyprep. It first addressed sites that were supposed to be easy to clean, like the one outside Port Harcourt. Then it would move on to complex ones, where oil had sunk more deeply into the ground.
But a confidential investigation by U.N. scientists last year found the site outside Port Harcourt was left with a “complete absence of topsoil” and almost seven times more petroleum in the subsoil than Nigerian health limits.
The company that performed that work has since had its contract revoked, Nenibarini Zabbey, the current director of Hyprep, who took over last year, told the news agencies.
The head of operations when the contract was awarded, Philip Shekwolo, called allegations in the U.N. documents “baseless, mischievous and cheap blackmail.”
Shekwolo, who used to head up oil spill remediation for Shell, said by email he knows more about tackling pollution than any U.N. expert and insists the cleanup has been successful.
But the documents show U.N. officials raising the alarm about Hyprep with Nigerian officials since 2021, when Shekwolo was acting chief.
A January 2022 U.N. review found that of 41 contractors allowed to clean up spill sites, 21 had no relevant experience. Not one was judged competent enough to handle more polluted sites.
They include Nigerian construction companies and general merchants. The websites of two construction firms, for example, Jukok International and Ministaco Nigeria, make no mention of pollution cleanups.
In the minutes of a meeting with U.N. officials and Shell, Hyprep’s own chief of communications, Joseph Kpobari, is shown to have said bad cleanups happen because his agency hired incompetent companies. The U.N. delegation warned that despite their inadequate work, these companies were being rewarded with contracts for tougher sites.
Zabbey denied in an email this admission took place. The cleanup of the simple sites was not a failure, he insisted, because 16 out of 20 had now been certified as clean by Nigerian regulators and many returned to communities. Hyprep always complied with guidelines when issuing contracts, Zabbey said, and their monitors were U.N.-trained.
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