"Why Shell's Bodo oil spill still hasn't been cleaned up", 8 Jan 2017

In January 2015, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay £55m in compensation to thousands of residents of Bodo, a fishing community in the Niger Delta. Their livelihoods had been devastated by two oil spills in 2008-09 that had been caused by corroded Shell pipelines. But in Bodo...things have not progressed as planned...The promised clean-up operation has yet to begin...Although Shell insists some preliminary work did take place soon after the spills...it argues that it has been unable to get the community’s backing to access the site safely and conduct a proper clean-up ever since...A series of futile meetings over subsequent months saw different sets of community representatives come and go, making changing demands...[Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), external relations manager],  Igo Weli insists: “We are doing our best. We have got our contractors, we have got the money, the partners, we are begging [for access], we are talking to partners and calling state government to help us.”...Both sides are keen to suggest that lessons should be learnt from Bodo when it comes to the best way of dealing with other cases...