<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/07/nigerian-king-faces-shell-london-high-court-decades-oil-spills>
"His Royal Highness King Godwin Bebe Okpabi has carried bottles of water drawn
from the wells of his homeland in the Niger delta to the high court in London.
It stinks. “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.”
For the past three and a half weeks, lawyers for Shell have argued at the high
court that their client cannot be held responsible for an environmental
catastrophe in Ogale, which has suffered from decades of spills and pollution
from oil extraction.
For most of that time, Okpabi was there too, watching proceedings in court 63,
a nondescript room lined with empty bookcases. Between hearings, he met
journalists and activists to spread word of the health crisis his people face.
“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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
