When it passed over the Niger Delta in 2021, a satellite captured an image. It showed acres of land, scraped bare. The site, outside the city of Port Harcourt, was on a United Nations Environment Program clearance list. It was planned to be restored to green farmland like the Delta was before thousands of oil spills made it a byword for pollution. Instead, the land was left as a sandy “moonscape” that was unusable for agriculture, according to UN documents.
That botched cleanup was no exception, according to data obtained by The Associated Press. Previously unreported investigations, emails, letters to Nigerian ministers and minutes of meetings reveal that senior UN officials were increasingly concerned that the Nigerian agency responsible for cleaning up crude oil spills has been a ‘total failure’ .
According to a UN investigation, the agency, known as Hyprep, selected cleaning companies that had no relevant experience. It sent soil samples to laboratories that did not have the equipment for tests they claimed to perform. Auditors were physically blocked to ensure the work was completed.
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A former Nigerian environment minister told the AP that the majority of cleaning companies are owned by politicians, and minutes show similar views were shared by UN officials.
It wasn’t meant to be.
Thousands of oil leaks in Nigeria’s Niger Delta
Since oil drilling and production began in the 1950s, thousands of crude oil spills have occurred in the tidal mangroves and agricultural lands of the Niger Delta. Reports and studies document what is common knowledge here: people often wash, drink, fish and cook in polluted water.
Spills still occur regularly. The Ogboinbiri community in Bayelsa State suffered its fourth spill in three months in November, damaging fields, streams and the fish on which the people depend.
“We bought the land in 2023; we have not harvested anything from the farmland; both the profit and 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 tap crude oil that they process into gasoline in makeshift refineries.
After a major UN investigation into spills more than a decade ago, oil companies agreed to set up a $1 billion cleanup fund for the hardest-hit area, Ogoniland, and Shell, the country’s largest private oil and gas company, contributed $300 million extra. The Nigerian government managed the funds and the UN was given an advisory role.
To monitor the work, the government has created the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, or Hyprep. It first focused on locations that needed to be easy to clean, such as those outside Port Harcourt. Then it would move on to more complex issues, where the oil had sunk deeper into the ground.
But a confidential study by UN scientists last year found the site outside Port Harcourt had a “complete absence of topsoil” and almost seven times more oil underground than Nigerian health limits.
The contract of the company that carried out that work has since been revoked, Nenibarini Zabbey, the current director of Hyprep, which took over last year, told the AP.
The head of operations when the contract was awarded, Philip Shekwolo, called the allegations in the UN documents “unfounded, mischievous and cheap blackmail.”
Shekwolo, who previously led oil spill cleanup for Shell, said by email that he knows more about tackling pollution than any UN expert and insisted the cleanup had been successful.
But the documents show that UN officials have been raising alarms with Nigerian officials about Hyprep since 2021, when Shekwolo was acting chief.
Systemic problems with contractors
A January 2022 UN study found that of the 41 contractors allowed to clean up spill sites, 21 had no relevant experience. Not one was deemed competent enough to deal with more contaminated sites.
Among them are Nigerian construction companies and general merchants. The websites of two construction companies, for example Jukok International and Ministaco Nigeria, make no mention of pollution cleanup.
Minutes of a meeting with UN officials and Shell show that Hyprep’s own communications chief, Joseph Kpobari, said poor cleanups are taking place because his agency has hired incompetent companies. The UN delegation warned that despite their inadequate work, these companies were rewarded with contracts for tougher sites.
Zabbey denied in an email that this confession had taken place. The cleanup of the plain sites was not a failure, he stressed, as 16 of the 20 have now been certified as clean by Nigerian regulators and many have returned to communities. Hyprep always complied with guidelines when issuing contracts, Zabbey said, and their monitors were UN trained.
Questionable laboratory tests
Two sources close to the cleanup efforts in the Delta, who spoke anonymously for fear of loss of business or employment, said the test results held up by Hyprep as evidence of the cleanup could not have been real because when officials visited the labs, they discovered that this was not the case. have the equipment to perform these tests.
In a letter to its customers, a laboratory in Britain often used by Hyprep acknowledged that its tests were flawed and unreliable for most of 2022. The UK Laboratory Accreditation Service confirmed that the laboratory’s permission to carry out the tests had been suspended twice.
Zabbey defended the cleaning agency in a statement to the AP, saying it is now monitoring contractors more closely. Labs adhere to Nigerian and UN recommendations and are regularly monitored, he said, and the UN could have trained local lab staff if it had wanted to.
The UN cited another problem: contractors were allowed to assess pollution levels at their sites. No government agency established a baseline for what needed to be cleaned up at oil-damaged sites. This meant companies were monitoring their own progress and essentially handing over a ‘blank cheque’, UN senior project adviser Iyenemi Kakulu said in the minutes of a meeting in June last year between the UN, Hyprep and Shell.
No audits of the Nigerian Cleaning Agency’s accounts
The UN warned the Nigerian government in a 2021 review that spending at the cleanup agency was not being tracked. Internal auditors were seen as ‘the enemy’ and ‘demonized for doing their job’. Shekwolo’s predecessor as head of Hyprep blocked new financial controls and “physically prevented” auditors from seeing whether work had been done properly before contractors were paid, the UN ruling said.
Zabbey also said this has changed since that review: the audit team is now valued, he said, and the accounts are now audited annually, although he provided only one cover letter for the audit. In it, the accounting firm asked what steps had been taken to ‘correct the identified weaknesses’.
Shekwolo referred the AP to the Nigerian president’s office, which did not respond to a request to show how the money is being spent. Environment Minister Iziaq Salako’s office declined an interview.
An Environment Minister is trying to take action
Sharon Ikeazor was born in Nigeria, educated in Britain and worked as a lawyer for decades before entering politics. In 2019, she was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Environment. She was well aware of Hyprep’s perceived shortcomings and was determined to address them.
“Not a single good solution was implemented,” she told the AP in a telephone interview. “The companies had no authority whatsoever.”
In February 2022, she received a letter from senior UN official Muralee Thummarudy, which experts said contained unusually strong language in diplomacy. It warned of “significant opportunities for malpractice within the contract award process” in Nigeria’s oil cleanup work. Ikeazor fired Shekwolo as acting head of Hyprep the following month, explaining that she felt he was too close to politicians.
The “majority” of cleaning companies were owned by politicians, she said. The few competent companies “wouldn’t get the big jobs.”
One of Shekwolo’s roles, Ikeazor said, was to assess who had the authority to award contracts. Ikeazor said Shekwolo’s former employer Shell and the UN warned her about him, something Shekwolo says he was unaware of.
When she hired a new Hyprep supervisor, she had him review every suspicious contract awarded over the years and investigate the cleaning companies.
“That sent shock waves around the political class,” Ikeazor said. “They all had interests.”
“That’s when the battle started,” she said.
It was a short fight and she lost. She was replaced as Environment Minister and Shekwolo was rehired. He had been away for two months.
Shekwolo says the only politicians he had close ties with were the two environment ministers he served under. He was never given a reason for his removal, he said, suggesting that Ikeazor simply didn’t like him.
The UN cuts ties
Last year, the UN Environment Program cut ties with Nigeria’s oil spill agency, saying the five-year consultancy project was over. The last support ended in June.
Ikeazor said the real reason the UN withdrew was frustration over corruption. The two sources close to the project agreed that the UN was left-wing because it could no longer be associated with the Nigerian cleanup organization.
Zabbey responded that he believes the UN has merely changed its objectives and moved on.
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Associated Press reporter Taiwo Adebayo contributed from Abuja, Nigeria.
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental reporting receives funding from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s Standards for Working with Charities, a list of supporters, and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
