Delta youths threaten to shut Shell oil wells

Youths from the Isoko ethnic group in the violence-plagued Niger Delta threatened on Tuesday to close oil wells belonging to Shell, news reports said. The youths are accusing the Anglo-Dutch transnational of reneging on an agreement to develop Isokoland after 40 years in the community. On 16 December 1998, the youths shut down Shell's flow stations to force the company into action. Seizures of the company's flow stations have usually been credited to Ijaw youths, who have also kidnapped foreign and local oil employees. However, "Isoko youths are a force to be reckoned with," Ononiwu Chigozie, project field environmentalist at the Lagos-based Human Rights Law Service, told IRIN on Wednesday. Shell, he said, had often failed to honour deals it cut with Delta communities. The fact that it is mainly its facilities that have been attacked suggests that Shell is the biggest culprit in causing environmental damage and failing to aid communities, he added. "We in the environment community don't take them seriously," he said. However, a Shell spokesman in Nigeria told IRIN on Wednesday that the company does not enter into agreements as such but works with various governments - federal, state and local - by putting up half of the cost in implementing projects. "We have had cases when some of the partners do not bring their money," the spokesman said, "So projects are delayed. They are not abandoned." According to information Shell has posted on its website, its spending on communities in Nigeria increased by some 37 percent to US $43 million in 1998. Shell said it had made progress in key areas despite unrest in the Delta, and provided business credit support, improved welfare, health, education and agriculture. The spokesman in Lagos said Shell had undertaken community work because government was absent in many areas in the Delta, "although we are not a development agency.