Shell in Nigeria

Case Study: Royal Dutch/Shell in Nigeria

At the time of its emancipation from British rule in 1960, nationals and outsiders alike held high hopes for the realization of Nigeria’s strong, newly-independent economic potential. In recent decades, however, Nigeria’s oil-dominated GDP has emerged as the epitome of economic disparity and corruption. To that end, Royal Dutch Shell is a key partner in Nigeria’s majority-owned oil exploration and production activities, and the corporation’s ethical reputation has been questioned regarding policy positions and actions on two issues: 1) the degraded natural land conditions in the Niger Delta areas of oil production and natural gas burnoff, and 2) Shell’s lack of involvement, of not attempting to leverage their strong, historical economic relationship with the Nigerian government in order to help ameliorate the social, economic and political environmental conditions for the population.

Politically, the relationship between the Nigerian government and the populous worsened in the mid-1990s as the government executed a number of political activists, including the eloquent writer and world-renowned activist Mr. Ken Saro-Wiwa, with little regard for the activists’ legal due process. And as oil began to dominate the economic landscape to the exclusion of their formerly-exported agricultural products – yams, cassavas, fishing and cacao beans, frequent oil spills and encroachment onto farming areas attributed to Shell’s production activity rendered the large farming population segment unable to produce their agricultural goods and feed themselves. Socially, that meant that a large section of Nigeria’s population had been bitterly disenfranchised of their economic contributions; in response, Nigerian families are now poor and starving, the government is hugely corrupt with large percentages of oil profits and does not offer any assistance, and Nigerian youth are angrily resorting to violence and terrorism to gain economic advantage – sabotaging oil pipelines, kidnapping and/or attacking oil personnel, and firing weapons.

Although Royal Dutch Shell is not directly responsible for the Nigerian government’s corrupt and often violent responses to the worsening political, social and economic conditions of the populous, Shell has become a strong emotional target of the Nigerian people’s escalating discontent. The corporation cites having spent over 22 million dollars in 1995 to improve schools, health clinics and offer university scholarships, but on the whole their image in the media and press has stayed sharply negative – that of an uncaring and exploitative foreign