Reporting on living near a gas flare in the Niger Delta
A key area where the oil industry impact on community health, which is rarely spoken of in Nigerian media.
The militancy and unstable political climate in the Niger Delta makes it difficult for foreign journalists to access remote areas.
As a result, one area of the health and environmental crisis in the region remains chronically under reported. Since the 1950s, communities have lived beside gas flares — huge flames coming out of oil extraction sites which burn off excess fumes from wells.
In order to change that, we have launched the On Our Radar project, with backing from Code for Africa’s ImpactAFRICA fund. Using these resources, On Our Radar has been able to increase its reporting from gas flaring regions by working with a network of citizen reporters living in the region.
On Our Radar originally trained a group of citizen reporters in the Niger Delta back in 2014. We used our map of gas flaring sites in the Niger Delta to identify which reporters were closest to gas flaring sites.
Using a set of interview questions on the health impacts of gas flaring, two reporters set out to report from remote villages to find out how people are affected by this practice. The reporters recorded the interviews and sent them via WhatsApp at the end of their reporting day.
For Okonta Emeka Okelum, the lead reporter on this project, it was the first time he had been so close to a gas flare. “You can’t believe it when I got close to the flare site, I felt first hand the heat, and it was like my skin was being pierced with some kind of needles or tips of broom sticks,” he wrote on Whatsapp after his first visit.
He met members of local communities who told him how they have been affected by the noise, light and emissions from flow stations. Residents complained of coughing and headaches, and a number of farmers said the advent of flaring in their community in the past few years severely impacted their crop yields.
As Okelum’s research went deeper, he grew increasingly shocked at the lack of medical provision for affected communities. Interviews with doctors and medical staff reveals that health data needs to be captured and analysed systematically.
Since that first stage of reporting, the focus has been on refining these findings, conducting more in-depth reporting by going back to initial interviewees. We transcribed the interviews then looked for stories which depicted the impact of gas flaring on a human level in two specific villages.
Thanks to this work, some key characters emerged which we will use to strengthen our pitch to various media outlets. One such character is a passionate teacher who works in a primary school. He told our reporter about how he has to shout over the sound of the flare because of the noise from the flow station. He also said he noticed increased lung problems among his students since the advent of flaring in his community. Another example is a farmer, father and former engineer, who has been monitoring the environmental impact of gas flaring in his village.
By building these stories, we aim to provide a raw account of what it is like to live near a gas flare.
Throughout this work, reporters with previous ties to communities they were reporting on were to draw more out from their respondents. These citizen journalists were also better placed to know who to speak to. In places where reporters did not have these pre-established ties with people living near gas flares, the interviews were shorter and smaller in scope.
Coordinating the outcome of the work of different reporters had its own challenges: how to collate the patchwork of different stories from all over the Delta? Each citizen reporter has their own style of interview, and each interviewee has a different story to tell. In order to structure the stories, a bulk of the work has been in transcribing the interviews, and then going through the transcriptions to find key quotes, stories and anecdotes which represented the experience.
Hearing these voices and broadcasting them to a wide audience is a crucial step in creating links between those who know little about gas flaring and those who live by the consequences of the pollution from a flow station. By sharing the stories of those living near a flow station — the people whose activities and health has been impacted — it raises awareness of the detrimental and hazardous effects of gas flaring on local communities. With additional reporting, we hope to find longer, more impactful narratives to communicate the challenges of living near a gas flare.
We are also working on obtaining professional camera footage of areas around gas flares in order to illustrate the challenges of farming, breathing and surviving beside an active flow station. Our hope that visuals, including, potentially, aerial views, of areas around gas flares will provide context to an audience who has never heard of gas flaring.
The final stage of this project will then to ensure the work get as wide a visibility as possible. We are in the process of building stories from the reporting and pitching them to a range of outlets.
Reporting for this story was supported by Code for Africa’s impactAFRICA fund.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of data journalism and civic technology laboratories, with labs in four countries and affiliates in a further six countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA’s labs also incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives, including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONEnetwork, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting(ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent.CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
