Oil provides the majority of Nigeria's export earnings

The oil companies say they clean up spills and pay compensation, but the areas of swamp the pipelines pass through are so isolated and communications so poor, that it may take days before the companies even know about a leak, and by then a lot of damage can be done.

No share of spoils

What irritates the people of the Niger Delta far more than individual leaks is the knowledge that the oil pouring out of the ground of their homeland provides almost the whole of Nigeria's export earnings and its government income. And yet, they feel, they get nothing back.

A village living next to a well producing oil worth many thousands of dollars a year may have no clean water supply, no passable road, no electricity, no clinic or school.

In theory a percentage of the government's oil revenues are ploughed back into the producing areas, and that percentage has risen in response to growing discontent. But residents complain that the money may get as far as the state capital, even the local government headquarters, but it stops there and they never see the benefit.

Growing protests

And so, more and more, they have been turning to direct action, and direct action against oil installations in the swamps.

Saro-Wiwa led Ogoni protests

Local anger was most famously mobilised in the Ogoni area by opposition politician Ken Saro-Wiwa, but in all parts of the Delta protesters have blocked access roads, occupied production platforms and-on occasion-sabotaged pipelines.

The agitation has had some effect-Nigeria's new draft constitution proposes raising the proportion of revenues which go back to the prodcer areas from three to thirteen percent. This would actually be a huge sum of money, and has raised eyebrows in the rest of the country.

Nigerians from elsewhere point out that the oil industry was originally devloped with money earned from groundnuts from the north, coal from the east, tin from the middle belt and cocoa from the west.

They challenge the notion that it's the Delta's oil, and that the Delta should get most of the benefit. But the oil companies welcome the proposal. A spokesman for one of the major production companies said that ploughing more of the revenue back into local development would ease their task in more ways than one, by lessening social tensions in the oil-producing areas.