Toting babies and stirring cooking pots, village women have been occupying a Shell Oil installation in a peaceful demonstration for jobs and other benefits amid surging ethnic violence in Nigeria’s restive oil delta. At least 20 people have been killed in the Niger Delta since mid-July in attacks allegedly linked to tribal competition for oil revenues. Meanwhile, about 80 local women have set up house in Shell’s Amukpe pipeline station, after a peaceful takeover in early July. The female occupiers, village women aged 25 to 60, were demanding the company’s Nigerian subsidiary keep its promises of jobs and other benefits for villages in the swampy, forested Niger Delta, a region the size of Scotland. The women captured the station by driving out workers and changing the locks, protest leaders said. Their action came in response to the company’s moves to build a chain-link fence around the station — preventing the women from drying the vital local staple, manioc, in the heat of gas flared as an unwanted byproduct of oil. Full Story
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