A trial is unfolding in UK courts, closely connected to millions of Brits — who remain blissfully unaware, despite desperate bids by the challengers for coverage.

Niger Delta civilians are accusing a UK corporation of devastating their habitat, livelihood, culture and bodies. It’s the corporation that supplies 10% of UK fossil fuels and delivers a fifth of its gas to our workplaces and homes.

And yet, if the story of Shell oil spills in the Niger Delta appears at all, it does so as a faraway feature under the ‘World News’ tab.

Oil spills in the Niger Delta have seen bursts of fantastic coverage, with the Guardian and BBC World Service leading the charge. But the victims are as frustrated by international media as they have been in their decades-long fight for justice.

The worst leak Lazarus Tamara remembers was in 1968, a decade after Shell first drilled for oil in the region. “There was oil everywhere,” he said on this week’s Media Storm podcast. “Our cultural heritage has been completely destroyed as a result.”

Tamara joined the fight in 1990, alongside Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose high-profile hanging as an activist in 1995 saw Nigeria expelled from the Commonwealth for over three years. Shell ultimately paid a $15.5 million settlement to families of victims of summary execution and alleged crimes against humanity in the Delta, though the company has always denied liability for Saro-Wiwa’s death.

Tamara took up his comrade’s mantle as one of the leaders of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). “It was out of that desperation that the movement was born,” he told us.

Dr Emem Okon fights her battle through academic research, laying down evidence of the poisonous impact of oil pollution on women’s health, fertility and rights.

“It is very important for the world to know the effects of hydrocarbons on women,” she said on Media Storm, citing her own early-onset menopause as well as the local blood samples she tested, which delivered hydrocarbon levels thousands of times above WHO’s permissible limit.

The resulting infertility, miscarriages, and stillbirths are more than just physical in impact, she said. “This causes confusion, misunderstanding, conflict within the family.”

“People were blaming the women for being promiscuous, of having their wombs removed, and all kinds of unfounded allegations,” she continued. “It’s traumatic. But before the research, people were not linking this to pollution, because we live with pollution — we drink polluted water, we inhale polluted air.”

Dr Okon appeared at Shell’s AGM this week, held at Heathrow (which feels random until you remember the airport has an injunction against climate activists, enabling the meeting to go ahead without disruption).

Tamara, meanwhile, has spent the week in court. While in the UK, they visited the Media Storm studio, to assess our national media’s coverage of climate and environmental news.

“People here in the UK — when we talk about the Niger Delta — they say, ‘oh it’s far away, 6,000 miles away’,” Tamara warned, “until it comes to them.”

While the media often fails to connect ‘UK stories’ of heatwave hosepipe bans and Net-Zero job losses with stories from the frontlines of climate destruction, Shell’s CEO does not. During the AGM, reported Dr Okon, Shell’s boss attributed continued exploration in Nigeria to shareholder demand at home. These stories are one.

The media is equally disconnected in the language it uses to report on climate issues, they went on. Six years ago, the Guardian updated its style guide to include the terms ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate emergency’ rather than climate change. But aside from the Associated Press, who advise the terms only sparingly, no competitors have followed suit. Dr Okon argues this terminology should be the norm.

To us, what is happening is a crisis, it’s an emergency. So we feel that the media are not really giving the picture of what communities are experiencing, perhaps because they’re not directly impactedDr Emem Okon

“I think what the Guardian have done is something that others need to follow,” Tamara agreed. “But the others won’t do that — because they are pro-business.”

The Guardian (like Media Storm) has a funding model that is unusual for the sector, depending on reader donations and philanthropic foundations.

Most media rely on corporate advertising or content partnerships, such the Daily Mail, whose ‘news’ story this month about Amazon launching a rival service to Shein and Temu was peppered with advertisements allocated by Amazon Ads. In other words, the article — listed as ‘news’ by the Mail — directly earns revenue from the company it claims to journalistically report on.

Perhaps this is why the reporter abstains from asking how Amazon is able to compete with Chinese competitors, ignoring widespread claims of labour and environmental exploitation.

Another issue is our media’s attention span. Climate justice trials drag on for decades. “Is it that there is media fatigue?” Dr Okon asked. This year marked the start of the Ogale and Bille v. Shell case, ten years after the communities first filed a complaint. But snail-paced climate justice is incompatible with a fast-paced, short-term media cycle — for whom news must be new or be worthless.

“I was interviewed by the BBC Africa in December,” said Dr Okon. “So before we came on this trip [for the UK trial], I reached out. But somebody said they had interviewed me in December, so they have no intentions of covering this further. That is not encouraging.”

Tamara said he has to correct members of the British public passing by the courtroom that, no, the matter was not resolved years ago. “The press should assist us to constantly remind the population that these companies have not shifted an inch from their original position, which is driving the Ogoni people to extinction.”

“Let me use this forum to appeal to the international media, that they should not give up on the Niger Delta”, pleads Dr Okon. “We still need them to put pressure on the big corporations and the Federal Government of Nigeria to address all the challenges we have experienced as a result of the oil economy.”

“Indigenous people are crying all the time that their environment has been destroyed, they cannot live the way they used to live before, and it’s all caused by these fossil fuel companies and extractive companies that are on the land”, Tamara added. “Listen to them, or one day it will be you.”

Nationalisation is the only way to fix the crisis in the water industry


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Left Foot Forward.
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Despite the damning evidence the government is clinging on to private ownership of water, which has fleeced customers for 36 years.




This week, US private equity conglomerate KKR withdrew its possible £4bn bid for Thames Water, a company that supplies water and wastewater services to 16m customers in London and the South East of England. Perhaps, it escaped a disastrous takeover. Since privatisation in 1989, Thames Water has secured at least 187 criminal convictions. KKR has been sanctioned over 217 times for predatory practices in the US since 2000 and paid financial penalties of $678m.

Thames Water’s woes were deepened by the 2006-2017 private equity ownership led by a consortium controlled by Macquarie. Financial engineering, low investment, profiteering, asset-stripping, tax dodges and borrowing money to pay dividends were the norm as Macquarie extracted average annual average returns of between 15.5% and 19% a year.

The government is obsessed with private ownership and is hoping that someone will rescue Thames Water. Meanwhile, Thames Water’s £19bn debt pile has increased by another £3bn, borrowed at interest rate of 9.75%. It is paying £200m a year to business advisers and nearly a one-third of its customer’s bills service company debt.

Other water companies operate with similar business models. The entire water sector in England is now controlled by companies with over 1,135 criminal convictions. Due to leaky pipes, more than 1 trillion litres of water a year is lost. In 2024, companies dumped raw sewage into rivers, seas and lakes for 3.62m hours. Asset-stripping is rife. In the 35 years before privatisation, almost 100 reservoirs were built. In the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built. Thames Water has sold-off at least 25 reservoirs since the 1980s. Southern Water is due to decommission 43 of 93 reservoirs by 2030, and may possibly add two. Since privatisation companies have paid nearly £85bn in dividends and billions more in debt interest. They have accumulated debt of around £70bn and gearing/leverage ratio of 85%, sustained by high customer bills. In the last decade, directors collected £112m in bonuses and incentive payments

.Despite the failure of water privatisation the current Labour government, just like its Conservative predecessor, is opposed to public ownership. It counters public calls for nationalisation with a number of blunt tools. These include expressing faith in market solutions, promises of heavy fines for sewage dumping, ban on undeserved dividends and executive bonuses, and claims that public ownership is unaffordable. Such tools lack substance and cannot provide stability, and are a vote loser.

There can be no durable market-based solution to the crisis. Companies have a monopoly on the supply of clean water and disposal of wastewater. There is no competition. There are no substitute products and services. Customers are captive and cannot switch to any alternative product or supplier.

Water infrastructure needs an investment of at least £290bn over the next 25 years. Any corporation would want returns and that would mean even higher debt, interest payments and bills. In public ownership there would be no dividends. Instead money would be reinvested, just as £85bn already extracted would have been invested in the absence of privatisation. Borrowing by the government is always cheaper than borrowing by any company and that again would save billions for reinvestment. Any continuation of private ownership will inevitably repeat the follies of the last 36 years.

A game of obfuscation with fines is being played. On 28 May 2025, Ofwat announced a penalty on Thames Water of £104.5m for sewage dumping events going back a decade. The press release also referred to a £18.2m fine for breaching dividend rules. On 4th June 2025, a penalty of £15.7m was announced on Northumbrian Water for sewage dumping going back to 2013. Except, these fines were not new. The above fines for sewage dumping were first announced on 6 August 2024. The Thames Water fine for breaching dividend rules was first announced on 19 December 2024. As part of PR, the fines are being spun to create the impression that the government is being tough. Water companies are permitted to negotiate the amount and timing of penalties, a privilege not available to any citizen.

The fines are being used to correct the infrastructure neglect by water companies. The notice relating to Northumbrian Water stated that the money would be used to install smart sensors and monitors at sewage stations and improve the environment. This forced investment will obviate the need for companies to invest. It will improve their balance sheet and regulatory capital value (RCV), enabling them to extract higher returns from customers. This policy is akin to a motorist knowingly driving with faulty brakes and bald tyres and threating public safety. When caught s/he admits guilt and is fined £1,000, but the judge immediately hands the money back to the driver to enable him/her to buy new brakes and tyres. There is no penalty and no deterrent. Yet that is the government policy.

Customer anxieties are being soothed with claims that companies won’t be allowed to extract excessive dividends. The policy is unlikely to yield the claimed objectives. Water company accounts do not disclose distributable reserves, which govern the amount of dividends which can be paid. The focus on dividend payments in cash neglects the fact that shareholders can extract returns in other forms. These include share buybacks, bonus shares, excessive interest charges on intragroup and related party loans and spurious intragroup transactions; for example artificial management fees and other charges. There is no evidence that Ofwat can deal with financial engineering.

Following implementation of the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 the government has promised to ban unfair bonuses to senior executives overseeing poor environmental and customer outcomes. Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Anglian Water, Wessex Water, United Utilities, and Southern Water bosses are not permitted to receive bonuses with immediate effect. Thames Water has already indicated that it will circumvent the rules by rebranding bonuses as “retention payments”. More cat and mouse games are inevitable. Companies can reward executives with share options, generous perks and pension contributions. Within a group of companies, executives can be offered multiple directorships to ensure that they collect their loot. The most effective reform would have been to appoint employee and customer elected directors to the boards of companies and Ofwat, and empowering them to vote to executive pay. But democratising corporations and regulators is not on the government’s agenda.

Ministers oppose public ownership by claiming that it would have a high cost. They do so without ever explaining the cost of leaving the industry in private hands, which includes lack of investment, sewage dumping, debt pile, health hazards, profiteering, financial engineering, asset-stripping, water insecurity and high household and business costs. Ministers claim that water nationalisation would cost over £90bn. They amplify a 2018 report by Social Market Foundation, commissioned by water companies. This report is described by a former government adviser as having “virtually no intellectual substance “ and added that renationalisation itself would be “relatively easy, as with the revenues from the water bills, the government would have sufficient income to pay for the assets it acquired”.

Ministers now say that “if the whole industry was nationalised, shareholders and debt holders would need to be compensated, which could cost over an estimated £90 billion [this is based on Ofwat’s Regulatory Capital Value 2024 estimates]”. This does not stand up to scrutiny either. Regulatory capital value (RCV) is an accounting exercise and does not show market value of companies. In any case, it is grossly inflated as companies have capitalised parts on interest payments and repair and maintenance expenditure. To acquire control, no one has to buy debt and the £90bn tag has no relevance.

The Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 seeks to avoid the chaos from sudden collapse and ensure that the government puts water companies into temporary nationalisation. Companies would be restructured i.e. shareholders would be mostly wiped out and lenders will take a big hit. The government’s intention is to restructure any company brought into temporary nationalisation and then hand it back to the private sector. This can’t solve the problem as we would return to all the chaos of the last 36 years.

Under the Water Act 1991, the government can forcibly acquire control of companies, especially as they have routinely violated their terms of their licence to operate. Their shares are almost worthless. Amounts owed to creditors can be replaced by a government bond, repayable over x number of years. The cost of acquiring companies can be added to the government debt, if the government so wishes. It can instead be loaded to the entity itself, as private equity does for its acquisitions. The cost can be funded by public bonds issued to savers.

Despite the damning evidence the government is clinging on to private ownership of water, which has fleeced customers for 36 years. Profit motive is the key cause of the problems, but the government does not want to eliminate it. Instead, it is implementing policies to control executive bonuses and dividends, and levy heavy fines for sewage dumping. These are unlikely to deliver stability or public satisfaction.


Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.