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The new 1,400 km East African Crude Oil Pipeline and resulting oil boom in Uganda could bring significant problems to the region. We only have to look at Nigeria and its 60 year spiral of pollution, corruption and violence to know that often oil is a curse rather than a blessing.
Of course Shell knew about climate change too. As Ken Saro-Wiwa once noted, instead of acting responsibly, Shell chose to inflict "genocide" against the people of the Niger Delta, instead. It has continued that path ever since, by continuing to burn oil and gas. And the rising waters of the Niger Delta are part of that crime.
It is sixty years ago this year that the oil giant, Shell, first found oil at Oloibiri in Ijawland in the Niger Delta, after fourteen years of searching.
The news from earlier this week that Ken Wiwa, the son of the Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, has died at the young age of forty seven, is a devastating shock to anyone who knew him.
Some twenty one years after the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists, there is some hope that finally, finally, the oil polluted Ogoniland in the Niger Delta will begin to be cleaned up from decades of exploitation.
The serial offender Shell is being sued. Again. The oil giant finds itself in a court in London today for the second time in five years for its ongoing chronic pollution problems in the Niger Delta.
For decades the tranquil Kenyan island of Lamu has enchanted travellers to the country. The iconic old town, which is the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, is a maze of narrow alleyways and streets with stunning traditional architecture, which feels like you have been transported back in time.
Veteran anti-oil campaigners were gifted an early Christmas present at the end of last week when a Dutch appeal court ruled that four farmers could sue Shell in the Netherlands for compensation caused by oil pollution on their land in Nigeria.
Every year today is the one day that I dread. Even now twenty years on, today does not feel like any other day. It is not a normal day. It was twenty years ago today that the world watched in horror when the Nigerian junta murdered the writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni.
If they knew him at all, the world knew Oronto Douglas as the former attorney for the writer, playwright and Ogoni human rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa.
