The Niger Delta crisis is coming to an audience of millions as BBC 2 screen the long anticipated and award-winning drama, ‘Blood and Oil’ on prime time television.
Guy Hibbert’s tense thriller (starring Naomi Harris (28 Days Later), Johdi May (Defiance) Patterson Joseph and David Oyelowo) follows two women as they investigate the circumstances that led to the deaths of four hostage oil workers and their militant captors in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
A fictitious oil company, ‘Krielson International’, stands in as a thinly veiled corporate giant, whose corrupt deals and failed development projects infuriate local communities.
Without giving too much away, the oil company, Krielson, and the Nigerian military are profiting hugely from illegal practice of oil bunkering, at the expense of local communities and ultimately risking the lives of their own workers.
It may sound like a thriller plotline, but it bears a striking resemblance to real life events in the Delta, and in particular one of the darker chapters of former President Obasanjo’s repressive rule of Nigeria.
As scholar and author Ike Okonta writes:
20th August 2006. On that afternoon, soldiers of the Joint Task Force, a contingent of the Nigerian Army, Navy and Air Force deployed by the government to enforce its authority on the restive oil-bearing Niger Delta, ambushed fifteen members of the MEND militia in the creeks of western delta and murdered them. The dead men had gone to negotiate the release of a Shell Oil worker kidnapped by youth in Letugbene, a neighbouring community. The Shell staff also died in the massacre.
Spokesmen of the Nigerian government had sought to represent the fifteen militias as ‘irresponsible hostage-takers’ in the wake of the slaughter. But those massed at the hospital that morning spoke only of heroes who had fallen in the battle for ‘Ijaw liberation.’
Okonta interviewed Oboko Bello, an Ijaw civil-society leader who traced a clear chain of command between Shell and the soldiers who murdered the boatful of MEND insurgents and Shell workers:
“Shell was in direct communication with the commanders of the Joint Task Force, even up to the time our young men set out in their boats to rescue the Shell worker in Letugbene. These young men were not hostage takers. They were Ijaw patriots, selflessly working to repair the damaged peace between the oil company and our people. For this they were ambushed and murdered by soldiers in the service of Shell.”
Then, as now, the Delta is betrayed by broken promises and military violence. With no end in sight to the devastation of the ecosystem and the ongoing exploitation of Nigeria’s oil, it is unlikely that the wider drama of the Delta’s will end as upliftingly as Hibbert’s movie.
i have just finished watching this movie,and i must say that i am really dissapointed in the producers of this movie.
if really and truely you wanted to act an historical movie about nigeria,why dont you do it properly?why would you go to another african country and claim you are acting it in nigeria and portray Nigerians like barbarians,or like monkeys and as an uncivilized country and people?nevertheless i wount blame you so much but could advice you,(1)on no account would you do things improperly,2,if you want to do a good finifhing do it well.
nice story line,nice ideas,nice concept but wrong locations.
cheers
i really feel bad about what the niger delta did to the foreigners but i must comment that where they killing them?i mean in real life?or it was all about ransome?not to get me misunderstood, am not saying the ransome thing was good but pls were they really killing them or this was all about selling amd making your movie?
@ Katherine, I wouldn’t want you to be disappointed by that fact. A lot of these movies that focused on Nigeria happen to make you feel that way. What is annoying is the way some of the facts in the movie are presented. While some are true, some are just at its extreme. Sahara, mentions a bit about Nigeria and didn’t even respect the Nigerian Army by using the normal Nigerian Army camouflage that we all know. Rising of the Sun… don’t even go to that one. Well, I am not disappointed, maybe a little bit annoyed at the way these producers give their stories to the world which will be seen as true by some majority. What I am contented with is the fact that the sentence that the story and characters is fictitious goes in the byline of the end credits but how many people even notice that. The movie as i see others which have been on the same track is just to tell us that we’re here and that our Nigerian producers and directors should wake up to the call rather than let these people give us a wrong notion every time. Enough of the “African Magic” nonsense.
just saw the movie….was seriously moved by it i must say….shows the highest level of deceit by the Nigerian Govt and how well they misinform the public…also how innocent lives are wasted for nothing…even lives of its own citizens. I personally think this movie should be shown in the cinemas…let our fellow Nigerians see this and understand the horrible power plays in this country. ‘Everyone is dealing in Oil bunkering’ even the so-called legit ones are all in the business of bunkering and the government receive fat bonuses and the masses suffer. No schools,No Clinics, No social amenity of any kind to the people in that region Yet so richly blessed. The Oil companies will continue to lie to the public about how much and what they give back to these communities after polluting their air,water and spill the oil on their crops.
Everyone who sees the movie will one way or the other think of how it can help these people cry louder..its a sad story…really sad…i weep for my country Nigeria….how did it get this bad? our leaders watched it go this way without doing nothing about it. we watched how greed and the extreme love for money put us in this kind of situation. GOD!!! Which Way Nigeria…Which Way to go………………………..