As it passed above the Niger Delta in 2021, a satellite took an image. It showed acres of land, scraped bare. The site, outside the city of Port Harcourt, was on a cleanup list kept by the United Nations Environment Programme, supposed to be restored to green farmland as the Delta was before thousands of oil spills turned it into a byword for pollution. Instead the land was left a sandy “moonscape” unusable for farming, according to U.N. documents.
That failed cleanup was not an exception, records obtained by The Associated Press show. Previously unreported investigations, emails, letters to Nigerian ministers and minutes from meetings make clear that senior U.N. officials were increasingly concerned that the Nigerian agency in charge of cleaning up crude oil spills has been a “total failure.”
