Niger Delta oil fields

Since the arrival of the first investors moved in 1958, West Africa has been polluted by up to 1.5 million tons of crude oil. Many observers see the Niger Delta as the site of Africa’s greatest environmental disaster. Within decades, the often reckless exploitation of “black gold” and struggles over its control transformed the region into a social and ecological hotspot, with severe consequences for its more than thirty million inhabitants. Oil companies argue that more than seventy per cent of the ecological damage has been caused by sabotage operations and the illegal siphoning off of oil from the pipelines.