Transcript: Shadows and Light—Oil, Power, and the Niger Delta

The following is a transcript of the OSI multimedia piece Shadows and Light: Oil, Power, and the Niger Delta. Asume Issac Osuoka, director of the NGO Social Action, and photographer Ed Kashi provide the narration.

Osuoka: It is a very sad irony that communities in the Niger Delta that sit atop huge oil and gas deposits have gotten nothing really in return. Rather than any wealth or benefits. What the community members have been getting is impoverishment, diseases, death, destruction of their livelihoods.

Kashi: Where we rounded another corner, and there was a woman who had come, and she had a piece of coconut, and there were like seven or eight children just around her screaming, and she was breaking off little pieces for them because they were hungry and that might have been sort of the first food they had had that day.

Osuoka: Pipelines and flow lines crisscross the landscape. At every moment as we speak a pipeline that is old and corroded has given way and is spilling crude into the fragile environment.

Fishes just disappear. Fishing was the mainstay of the local economy. In the 70s, fishes were everywhere. It was so easy, just get to the stream, and you just catch, you know, father and their sons and mothers just go to the stream in the morning and just catch fishes for the day. But I tell that today all that is gone.

Kashi: You have the oil works butted up against where the people live. And the smoke and the fumes that come from those flares are quite noxious.

Osuoka: Government has made so much promises and failed over the past decades and they would not believe that a government can deliver, can be of service anymore. And it is difficult for the people to trust the oil companies because for 50 years the oil companies have only brought so much hardship.

Kashi: America takes 20 percent of Nigerian oil. That means virtually every time you put gas in your tank or you turn on a light switch you are burning Nigerian fuel.

Osuoka: The Nigerian government has been receiving over $50 billion dollars annually from oil and gas exports. This increase in revenues has not resulted in any development in the Niger Delta.

The Nigerian government does not depend really on the taxation of its citizens. It depends on the rent from oil companies. It is the Nigerian people that have sustained the Nigerian society and Nigerian economy.

There are huge potentials for development if revenues from petroleum can be utilized for national development and improve healthcare, the roads, education.We will not fulfill this potential if citizens and communities do not participate in how government prioritizes projects and development decisions.

We need to put more pressure, mobilize, strengthen citizens to ensure that there's more justice in the way revenues and budgets are managed. And until these issues are addressed at the constitutional level, at the political level, then whatever settlement of groups and individuals that is going on will not achieve everlasting peace.

Because peace can only be founded on justice.