Good heavens. It seems the British government has been politely asked to investigate Shell’s activities in Nigeria, specifically a pipeline leak that has been dribbling crude into the Niger Delta since time immemorial. Or at least since 1970, which in corporate years is roughly the same.
The request comes from a group of concerned citizens, human rights lawyers, and possibly a ghostly choir of mangrove trees. They want Scotland Yard to look into the ‘gross negligence’ that turned a waterway into a Jackson Pollock painting of industrial sludge. But let us be realistic.
The Metropolitan Police, currently busy hunting down people with non-polite Twitter opinions, will likely file this under ‘Things That Would Require Telling BP They’re Bad’. And we can’t have that, can we? The British establishment has a soft spot for oil firms.
They’re like that uncle who smells of diesel and always brings cheap presents but is secretly funding your niece’s ballet lessons. Except here the ballet lessons are actually a toxic oil plume that has killed more fish than a nuclear submarine’s kitchen. Shell, for its part, has issued a statement so rigid with denial it could be used to patch the leak.
‘We operate with the highest standards,’ they insist, while the Niger Delta drowns in a petroleum rainbow. One wonders if the Met’s investigation would even bother to leave Heathrow. Perhaps they’d send a single community support officer with a notepad and a vague interest in geology.
The scandal, you see, isn’t just the pipeline. It’s the decades of indifference. It’s the legal games where Shell argues that Nigerian courts don’t have jurisdiction, British courts don’t want jurisdiction, and the Hague is too busy with war criminals.
Meanwhile, the oil keeps leaking. It’s a slow motion disaster, like watching a moose drown in a bog. Except the moose is a river.
And the bog is a multi-national corporation. So here’s my suggestion. Let’s do something radical.
Let’s actually investigate. Not with a press release and a handshake, but with the full force of a government that pretends to believe in justice. Let’s see Shell’s internal emails, their safety reports, their feckless risk assessments.
Let’s ask why a 50-year-old pipeline is still pumping when proper maintenance would require spending a fraction of their quarterly profits on something other than yacht insurance. Or, alternatively, we can accept that the planet is a sacrifice zone for corporate greed. But please, for once, let’s not pretend that asking for an investigation is the same as demanding one.
It’s like asking a fox to guard the henhouse and being surprised when there are no eggs. The real scandal is that we’re still surprised.
