More than 300 villagers were killed on July 10 in Adeje, near Warri, in Nigeria's Niger Delta region, in a oil pipeline explosion. It was the latest in a string of disasters in the oil-rich region.
In May, 27 residents of nearby Okwadjeba village died in a similar explosion. In the worst incident, more than 1000 people were incinerated in Jesse in October 1998 as they collected fuel from a punctured petrol pipeline.
Eyewitness accounts said that most of the victims of the Adeje explosion were school children collecting leaking petrol in pans and buckets.
There were fears of further disaster following reports on July 12 that youths had returned to the scene of the accident to scoop more fuel from the pipeline, used to ferry refined petroleum products from Warri to northern Nigeria. Though the fire sparked by the explosion at Adeje had been put out, another fire was reported to have ignited along a pipeline route at the neighbouring village of Ugbomro.
Like the Jesse disaster, establishment press, radio and TV reporters have branded the victims at Adeje "vandals", "scavengers" and "saboteurs". Without evidence, the press and the Nigerian government have claimed that the pipe had been deliberately punctured. The underlying implication is that the victims deserved to die.
The real "vandals" and "saboteurs" in southern Nigeria are the giant multinational oil conglomerates, their Nigerian business collaborators and the pro-Western regime that rules Nigeria. Around US$12 billion worth of oil flows out of wells in southern communities — mostly to the United States for heating oil — and fills the bank accounts of Western oil companies, the deep pockets of the corrupt Nigerian elite and the vaults of the International Monetary Fund and Western banks.
However, the people of the Niger Delta remain desperately poor and the region undeveloped. Basic services like education, health care, running water and paved roads are non-existent or neglected. It is little wonder that people take enormous risks to collect leaking petrol that they are unable to afford to buy.
Nigeria's oil has made members of the elite billionaires. Part of this massive wealth has come from deliberately running down oil facilities, skimping on maintenance and making shoddy repairs.
Delta Governor James Ibori described the explosion as an "avoidable holocaust". "There is technology today that can monitor these pipelines so that in case of any break or cut on the line, it would simultaneously indicate at the control room and then you switch off the product supply to the affected pipelines", the Pan African News Agency reported Ibori as telling officials of the Pipeline Products Marketing Company. The company's executive director of operations, Matthew Omang, confirmed the existence of such devices and said the company planned to install them "in future".
The claim that the leak that led to the latest catastrophe, and all those that have devastated the fisheries and agriculture in the Niger Delta region, are the results of sabotage by local people is an attempt to hide the real source of the devastation: negligence and deliberate neglect of oil facilities, and the failure to enforce environmental regulations and standards, so that the Nigerian elite and the Western oil companies can hoard more loot.
BY NORM DIXON