Nigeria’s President Buhari is launching what would be the biggest oil clean-up exercise the world’s ever seen…if he’s really serious...

The president has already announced that the clean-up will follow a plan outlined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which in 2011 published the most detailed study to date of the spread and the scale of oil pollution in Ogoniland... President Buhari’s commitment to this issue is welcome. However, in years of campaigning, we have seen similar promises in the past, with little actually changing on the ground... For instance, in 1995, the year that Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed, Shell launched, with much fanfare, its own version the UNEP report...20 years later, Shell has still not published it, despite promising to do so...

[Now, in addition to the government,] Shell also needs to act. The company claims to have improved its response to spills... But last year, Amnesty International and the Centre for the Environment, Human Rights and Development, which is based in Port Harcourt, discovered that the company had made false claims about its clean-up of spills in four locations in Ogoniland.