Your story “Pipeline leaks mar delta village”...like so much reporting on oil spills in Nigeria, fails properly to convey the highly complex situation in the Niger delta...In the case of Bodo, it is deeply regrettable that both before and since those two operational spills occurred, much more oil has been spilt as a result of illegal activity...Our clean-up teams were able to deal with the initial operational spills, but subsequently they have been prevented by local communities from reaching sites that were reimpacted by this illegal activity to begin clean-up and remediation work. This could be because those communities hold a misguided belief that more spilt oil, irrespective of the cause, equals more compensation...[I]t is the legal process...and the cynical games played by lawyers in both countries, that has prevented the swift payment of compensation in this case, and has certainly delayed clean-up operations