I’ll never forget seeing the vast, charcoal wasteland left from a devastating oil spill in the village of Ebubu, in the heart of Ogoniland in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. The oil from a pipeline belonging to the Anglo Dutch oil group Shell had burst three decades before my visit, destroying the community’s streams and aquatic life. The contamination had not been cleaned up in 1999 and I could not fathom how locals could survive in an environment covered in tar. The waterways were still polluted and the village was eerily hollowed out.

A prominent Ogoni activist, Nyieda Nledi Nasikpo, told me that Ebubu was what he imagined a nuclear holocaust would look like, 30 years later. Chief Nasikpo is a member of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), founded by the late Ken Saro-Wiwa. From his nearby jail cell, Nasikpo witnessed the 1995 execution of his friend Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists by Nigeria’s then military government. Saro-Wiwa, whose murder by hanging shocked the human rights world, had long tried to shame Shell and British Petroleum into compensating the Ogoni people for destroying their crops and livelihoods. He accused the oil companies of committing ecological genocide. Between 1976 and 1991, more than two million barrels of oil polluted Ogoniland in 2,976 separate oil spills. In 2021, half a century after the spill, Shell finally agreed to pay the community $111 million in damages. In neighbouring Bayelsa state, a commission of experts said the rush to extract billions of barrels of oil in the Niger Delta over the last 60 years has resulted in a catastrophe and an environmental genocide. “Thousands of oil spills, unrestricted gas flaring, and frequent releases of toxic contaminants have poisoned people’s farmlands, the water they drink, and the air they breathe.”

Shell has faced mounting legal scrutiny for years, with courts ordering the company to pay plaintiffs billions of dollars in damages. Shell awarded $15 million to plaintiffs for an oil disaster in 2004 in Goi that left families “eating, drinking and breathing the oil.” In the fishing town of Bodo, villagers sued Shell for two massive oil spills that caused the biggest loss of mangrove habitat in the history of oil pollution. In 2014, Shell agreed to a $83 million settlement but the Bodo community alleges that the clean-up has not been effectively carried out.

The issue of environmental justice—which Saro-Wiwa courageously fought for—is relevant today in light of Shell’s decision to sell its onshore oil and gas operations in Nigeria, the continent’s biggest oil producer. In March 2025, Shell finalized the sale of $2.4 billion in onshore and shallow-water assets in Nigeria to a consortium of Nigerian companies called Renaissance. Shell cited community unrest, sabotage of its pipelines and a commitment to green energy as reasons for the departure. Some have hailed the company’s exit as a sign of economic decolonization. But critics such as Amnesty International say the sell-off amounts to an attempt by Shell to avoid responsibility for cleaning up its mess and could shield the company from future liability associated with hundreds of other spills. It appears that the Nigerian consortium can only be sued in Nigerian courts.

“Shell’s exit is just a way of running away from the damage the company has caused. It’s a way of protecting itself from being held to account for everything that has happened in the Niger Delta,” Isa Sanusi, the director of Amnesty International in Nigeria, told me.

Sanusi said Nigeria’s government regulator, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), hired two international consulting firms—Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and S&P Global—to scrutinize Shell’s bid to sell its assets. In July 2024, before the sale was authorized by the Nigerian government, Amnesty warned of the potential for a conflict of interest after it discovered that BCG and S&P Global regularly receive lucrative consulting contracts from the oil giant. “The report ended up being a total rubberstamp of the deal,” said Sanusi, adding that the sale did not clarify Shell’s outstanding environmental liability in Nigeria.

The average lifespan in the oil-rich Niger Delta is 41 years, 10 years less than the national average. In the Ogale and Bille communities, residents have reported an increase in the prevalence of cancer and are suffering from a host of strange diseases. Midwives in Ogoniland have reported babies born with deformities that locals believe are connected to oil pollution. A German study found that oil spills in the Niger Delta may have caused the death of some 16,000 infants in 2012.

The Nigerian government, eager for profits from oil revenues, has treated residents in the Niger Delta as economically dispensable, according to Amnesty. “People’s lives have been completely destroyed by the actions of these oil giants. It’s so unfortunate that the Nigerian government has prioritized oil and profit over the livelihood and well-being of the Nigerian people. This has to stop.”

Meanwhile, amid the onshore exit, Shell has coincidently increased its investment in deep water oil and gas operations off the coast of the Niger Delta, amid concerns over environmental risk and sustainability. In December 2024, Shell and its partners pledged $5 billion in funds for a deepwater oil project known as Bonga North. In 2011, a production ship known as the Bonga, which is owned by Shell, spilled some 40,000 barrels of oil into the Atlantic Ocean. The oil slick spread over 1,776 square kilometres and Shell’s subsidiary in Nigeria was fined $3.6 billion by regulators, an amount the company is appealing.

Sanusi said Shell’s shift to offshore operations certainly “opens a new frontier for the destruction of the environment,” but should not distract from the company’s culpability for poisoning Nigerian communities for decades.

The lawsuits may force Shell to finally confront its legacy in Nigeria but the damages it has awarded victims so far are relatively small compared to the company’s annual earnings. Despite weaker oil and gas markets last year, Shell paid its investors a total of $22.5 billion in profits in 2024, and its CEO’s pay package was $11 million. The company can well afford to financially compensate for the grievous harms it has done to the Nigerian people. More importantly, it has a legal and ethical responsibility to do so.

Judi Rever is a journalist from Montréal and is the author of In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.