NIGERIA: An old Ogoni lady fills a jerry can with crude oil from a hole four feet deep beside the path to Biara, a village half-an-hour's drive from Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil capital.
For the past six months crude oil has been easier to find than drinking water in this poverty-stricken settlement in the land of the Ogoni people.
Dr Emmanuel, my guide, says the villager will stuff a piece of cotton rag in it and use it as a light. She is unlikely to have enough money to buy kerosene.
A few steps away in a tropical glade, a still pool of crude oil, constructed by some oil contractor to contain the latest oil pollution to hit the village, sits dead and silent.
A few paces further and a villager has just finished washing in a small lake which used to serve as Biara's source of drinking water.
The film of crude oil from a broken pipeline rendered it useless in the middle of the year and no one has remedied it. In Nigeria the polluter certainly doesn't pay.
A few paces on, a bank of sand lies blackened where someone has tried to burn off the more volatile oil, leaving tarry wastes. A couple of scorched palm trees bear testimony to the rough and unsuccessful efforts to clean up.
The most likely cause of the Biara disaster, according to Dr Emmanuel of the Centre for Social and Corporate Research, a non-governmental organisation financed by Trócaire among others in this city, was probably a corroded and worn out Exxon Mobil pipeline.
Although Igoniland is part of a Shell oil concession, Exxon Mobil oil pumps crude oil from wells at Eket through here to the tanker terminal at Bonny.
Sometimes the oil companies refuse to do anything about a spill, alleging that the pipes have been sabotaged.
Four decades of oil production have turned the delta of the River Niger into an environmental cataclysm: the locals suffer much and benefit little from the immense resources siphoned from here by the oil companies and successive Nigerian governments each more corrupt than the last.
Nearly 10 years have passed since the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni leader and his eight companions by a military dictatorship in Port Harcourt prison for their participation in organised protests about the raping of the Niger Delta by Shell and other oil companies.
Their execution, on the eve of an appeal, by the government of the kleptomaniac dictator Gen Sani Abacha made world news and Nigeria became a pariah state, expelled from the Commonwealth for a few years.
Meanwhile, as pollution increases, oil company promises of compensation prove empty as the population sinks deeper into poverty. The protests of the green lobby have fallen away. Shell, now joined by Agip, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, have stayed close to the corrupt heart of the government of Gen Olusegun Obasanjo, eager to promote West Africa as a more secure source of energy for the US than the tormented Middle East.
Shell clearly feels it can ignore whatever protests are voiced in Europe and the US. The company is running an aggressive campaign of press and television propaganda in Nigeria trying to portray itself as the common man's friend, paying for a €70 million programme of effective social assistance in the Delta.
Exxon has not even bothered to do that.
The hostility to Shell is even worse at the village of Umuechem on the other side of Port Harcourt. This was where oil was first discovered in Nigeria in 1959 and from where it has been exported from several dozen local wells. On October 30th, 1990, the villagers, who had seen their village damaged by Shell's activities and had received no benefit from the oil being pumped from under their land, were making a peaceful protest.
The company was alarmed, went to the state governor who sent the mobile police in. The next day 80 villagers were shot dead and 493 houses destroyed. (The ruins of one has been preserved as a memorial.)
"We feel betrayed by Shell," says Sam West Anyanwu, the secretary of the village council known as Scribe. The sentiments persist. The company claims to be promoting and financing six projects for the Umuechem, from a post office to a water tower, from a school to a cottage hospital.
In fact, not one of the projects works. The water tower is out of action, the standpipes are dry, the school lies deserted and the post office is engulfed by a wall of tropical vegetation.
The villagers walk a mile or more to the Shell pipeline installation to get clean water. Beside it lies the pit where a fire with flames 10 metres high has been raging uninterrupted since 1965 as Shell flares unwanted natural gas regardless of the pollution, the heat and smoke produced by this waste of natural resources.
"We have to rely on catching water off our roofs when it rains. Now even the roofs are polluted," says Scribe.
Meanwhile, profits from oil from Biara and Umuechem go to line the pockets of local mafias with strong links to politicians through a system called "bunkering". Taps are fitted to pipe lines, crude drawn off into road tankers to take it to lighters.
The vessels then rendezvous with pirate tankers at sea to transfer their cargoes and the stolen crude is exported to European and US ports where the stolen goods are not investigated.
Profits are split between local mafias, politicians and the authorities charged with regulating the oil business. In a recent operation by the Nigerian navy, crude valued at some €300,000 aboard eight vessels was intercepted at sea and 94 crew members, including Poles, Russians, Romanians and Georgians, were arrested.
It is unlikely the real brains behind the huge larceny will ever be brought to trial in Nigeria.
Neither, of course, will the oil companies, however much they add to the pollution of the Niger Delta.