His Royal Highness King Godwin Bebe Okpabi of Ogale Kingdom in the Niger Delta has told the High Court in London that Shell has left his people with undrinkable water because it has been contaminated by their activities.

The Guardian UK reported that the monarch also took along bottles of water drawn from the wells of his homeland to the court.
“This is the water that Shell has left for my people,” said the ruler of the Ogale community in Ogoniland, Nigeria. “This is poison, and they are spending millions of dollars to pay the best lawyers in the world so that they will not clean my land.”
However, Shell denied responsibility as its lawyers dissociated the company from the decades of oil spillage that has plagued the Niger Delta.

After proceedings in court, Okpabi addressed newsmen to create awareness of the plight of his people.

“A people have been completely destroyed: people’s way of life destroyed; people’s only drinking water, which is the underground water aquifer, has been poisoned; people’s farmland has been completely poisoned; people’s streams that they use [for] their normal livelihood have been completely destroyed,” he said.

When the Niger Delta region was visited by the UN Environment Programme to investigate the industry’s effects, they found extensive soil and groundwater contamination, mangrove roots choked with bitumen-like substances, and surface water in creeks and streams covered in thick layers of oil.

Farmers and fishermen struggle to get food as crops fail to grow, while fish can hardly be seen swimming in the contaminated rivers.

In Okpabi’s domain, people drank from wells contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen, at levels more than 900 times the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline.

He said, “There is a lot of cancer: young girls of 20 to 30 years old, 40 years old, developing breast cancer and other forms of cancer; a lot of strange skin diseases that we don’t know the cause of; low life expectancy, people just drying up and dying. Even eye diseases. In some cases, birth defects … Strange diseases everywhere in our lives.”

Okpabi’s case is represented by the London law firm Leigh Day, which states that the pollution violates the community’s fundamental rights.

Denying responsibility, Shell revealed that its subsidiary in Nigeria, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), works with the government to prevent spills.

“We strongly believe in the merits of our case. Oil is being stolen on an industrial scale in the Niger Delta. This criminality is a major source of pollution and is the cause of the majority of spills in the Bille and Ogale claims,” a spokesperson for the company said.

However, Okpabi lamented that while the legal proceedings linger, “people are dying at home.”

“I’m not a lawyer, but as I sit down in the court and I see all the arguments going on, Shell trying to bring up arguments as if to try to see how they can wheedle their way out [of it], it’s very painful. But I trust the judicial system here.”