Ranging from breathing difficulty, discoloured stool, bloody cough and chest pain, the trail of a chemical discharge has changed the course of life for the residents of Kapam community in Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State this August. For this story, SODEEQ ATANDA visited the community to speak with locals to uncover the detailed effects of the problem imposed on them by the government-owned Kaduna Refinery and Petrochemical Company.

Obinna Bright Anyanwu got a call from his wife that their daughter had become suddenly unwell at home on August 27 and his attention was urgently needed.

Anyanwu returned home, panicking. Covenant, his daughter, was having chest pain, breathing difficulty and general restlessness. With his wife, Anyanwu took the girl to a clinic in Kapam, a community in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State, where they reside.

Before the sudden illness, Covenant had left the house to withdraw some money for her mother within the community on the same day. On her way, she heard some people talking and complaining about a chemical release from the Kaduna Refinery and Petrochemical Company. Kapam is one of the communities hosting the plant.

The girl, a senior secondary school finalist, returned home and developed some respiratory issues that made her parents spend some money at the clinic on her treatment.

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Covenant was not alone in the chemical-inflicted crisis. Several other victims, including children and pregnant women of Kapam Community, found themselves in a similar emergency medical crisis forced on them by the refinery on August 27.

In Kapam, one could not but see the encouraging effort by the residents who have turned their backyards and every available piece of land into farming fields, cultivating different species of food crops for income diversification and home consumption.

As it is often said, necessity is the mother of invention. FIJ learnt that the constant kidnapping of people on their farms in Chikun LGA forced many residents to embrace home farming. FIJ’s sources narrated how some of their neighbours were kidnapped from their farms and killed despite ransom payment. The LGA has been in the eye of the storm over the years with increasing kidnap cases.

“So, tell me how you will not farm at home if you have a vacant piece of land around you,” said a resident, narrating how a woman and her children were abducted, and the husband was killed in the presence of his family in the forest.

On the one hand, these farming fields have become a ghost of their former self, with the released substances turning green plants to yellow and killing trees, ultimately hampering food safety and security. On the other hand, the chemical pollution left several livestock casualties behind: goats and sheep died once they ate poisoned grasses, but there were no human fatalities.

Although the acidic chemical was released into the atmosphere on Tuesday, August 27, residents only started grasping the full weight of the crisis when their green plants started dying on August 28. At first, some of them thought children had poured pesticides on the plants in the backyard. But news soon started spreading in the community that every potato, groundnut and other plant were manifesting the same signs.

“Usually, I work on my backyard farm once I wake up every morning. I have different crops and fruit trees in my compound, such as plantain, yams planted in sacks, oranges, guava and pawpaw,” said Bassey Akpan, a 67-year-old retired civil servant and the chairman of Kapam Community Development Association.

“It was on August 28 that we started noticing changes in our plants. I questioned my children and they said they did not splash chemical water on them. In the end, I discovered it was a general problem.”

Serving as a major landmark in the local government, the inland refinery was built in 1980 with a plate capacity of 110,000 barrels per stream day, focusing its supply line to the north of Nigeria. Throughout its productive years until 2003 when it was left lifeless, the refinery’s performance was far below its capacity. But the government continued to pour trillions of naira into maintaining it and paying workers’ salaries year-on-year.

In February 2023, the federal government gave a contract to refurbish the oil plant for $740 million to Daewoo Engineering and Construction Nigeria Ltd., a South Korean firm, with a 21-month completion period. The company was still working at the plant when it released the noxious chemical, though its workers were forced to take about five days off work after the pollution occurred, according to the residents. FIJ observed the presence of the company’s staff while in the community.

DISCOLOURED POOPS, BLOODY COUGHS

After inhaling the polluted air, some people began having runny stomachs, visiting conveniences regularly to poop. While some people were experiencing respiratory problems, others, strangely, had discoloured poops for days, FIJ was told during group and individual interviews with locals. This could indicate a drop in the quality of their health.

Weeks after the pollution, its chilling effects were yet to go away. As of September 24, John, a primary school student, was still having stool discolouration. The teenager explained that he had been feeling unwell since the incident as he had been frequenting the toilet.

“My parents are not home. I began having green and blue stools after the chemical was released. Even this morning, my stool was discoloured. I presented myself for treatment when a medical team from the refinery came, but I was not treated,” John told FIJ.

Peace Sunday, a women leader who led the womenfolk on a peaceful protest, told FIJ during an interview on September 21 that she was still seeing blood in her coughs.

“Even as I speak with you, my coughs still come out with blood,” she said. “I know my neighbours whose stools have changed colour. Some became hospitalised after heavy vomits, particularly children. Our lives have been undermined in terms of health, livelihoods and safety just because some people at the refinery failed to do their job properly.”

DASHED HOPE: DEAD LIVESTOCK, POISONED PLANTS

As residents worry about their health, they said no human casualty had been recorded due to the pollution. However, livestock and other domestic animals have lost their lives to it. The animal death toll, they added, continued to increase as more animals ate poisoned grasses.

“Our hope has been dashed,” said Akpan. “We were supposed to start harvesting our maize and other crops this month and yams by November. All have been destroyed now.”

Nearly every homeowner had a farm field in their backyard or around their homestead. FIJ spotted at least 20 types of cash and economic crops on these fields, all of which had been poisoned and rendered useless. These crops and fruits included maize, soybeans, beans, yams, rice, guinea corn, pepper, banana, plantain, noni, mango trees, tomato, avocado, moringa trees and groundnut.

While these losses affected almost everyone, they cut deeper for some than others. Akpan, Akinola Olunawoade and John Atabo could be seen as three jolly friends. They copied the idea of planting yams in sack-made beds from social media and decided to replicate it in their compounds with plans to use their success stories from the initiative to scale down the knowledge to willing neighbours. Their farms were already blossoming before the hazardous substances from the refinery ruined them. Now, the farms are dead. Olunawoade led the pack with 1,500 sack yams while Akpan planted 80.

Taking FIJ around the farms, Olunawoade said, “People have asked me to quantify my loss, but I find it difficult to do. How do I start? This type of farming is expensive. You have to buy everything you need if you want a good output. We buy a lot of materials to make it happen, including bags, soil, yam seeds, stakes and organic fertiliser. When you now consider inflationary factors, it becomes even more difficult to evaluate.

“I planted 1,500 pieces of yams in my backyard alone, excluding tomatoes and peppers. Outside the backyard, I have other portions of land where I had groundnut, maize and potato. All of these died overnight because of the refinery’s activities.”

Akinola Olunawoade’s sack-based backyard yam farm. Video Credit: Sodeeq Atanda/FIJ.

Upon his retirement from a refinery in Warri, Akpan started gardening in his compound, providing his family with fresh garden fruits and vegetables. His garden had become a beneficial asset to community members who plucked fruits from it and even took houseplants for replantation in their home gardens. But this incident had made him lose the thrill of home gardening, particularly owing to the fact that the soil had been contaminated.

“This is a noni tree. I got it and some genetically modified seeds when I travelled to Israel. I brought this mango tree from Benue and planted it here. I am saying this to show you how intentional I was when I was planning my garden. Now imagine the pain I feel after their destruction,” Akpan explained.

Atabo is an agroecologist and climate change activist who planted jatropha curcas in front of his house for carbon sequestration. He explained that he needed it for environmental detoxification because of emissions from the refining plant. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, jatropha curcas is a source of biodiesel and could absorb carbon dioxide from the environment as well as help in preventing soil erosion on degraded land, ultimately helpful in climate change mitigation.

“These are jatropha curcas plants, locally called igi lapalapa. It is a plant beneficial to the land and environment in view of global warming,” the agroecologist explained, gesturing towards the plants. “So I domesticated it knowing that I needed to detoxify my environment because of chemical emissions from the refinery. As you can see, the pollution did not affect it, but other plants were not spared.”

With each passing day, the pollutants continued to penetrate deep into the plants. However, some plants and flowers had started growing new leaves, resiliently fighting off the impact of the chemical on them.

While the true extent of the pollution on the people and their environment remains known, Abu Sunday, a professor of soil science in the Faculty of Agriculture at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, said the food crops still remained unsafe for consumption.

The residents also told FIJ that the company’s management had advised them to stay away from eating the affected crops. However, this was not enough to stop some families from eating their crops in the face of hunger.

“The chemicals can kill plants when they come in contact with them, not necessarily through the soil. The exodus released has to be investigated. But some pollutants, especially if they contain some oil, a lot of carbon or heavy metals, can be toxic to the plants when they are uptaken. And some [pollutants] would remain in the farm produce. So when humans or animals eat the produce, it would eventually affect their health. This is apart from direct inhalation. These chemicals can stay for a long time in the soil and continue to have side effects,” Sunday explained.

Adamu Bussa, an indigene who had a farm in front of his house near the UBE Primary School, a public school, described the chemical release as an attack on their food system which forced families to harvest and eat from their poisoned crops. His statement was also buttressed by the agroecologist earlier mentioned.

“Many of us are primarily farmers; farming is our livelihood; When this chemical killed our farms, we felt directly attacked by the refinery. Our food sovereignty has been jeopardised. Although we have been told not to eat these crops, I can confirm to you that some of us have started eating these poisoned crops. Even if it would kill us, let us have something in our stomach first,” Bussa said on September 24.

Atabo was worried that desperate families could resort to harvesting the poisoned crops for sale in places far away from Kapam to make money, making the problem course through other parts of the state and even beyond.

“Only a few families could withstand the temptation not to eat or harvest those crops, but poor families could go ahead to sell their crops to people on the street and markets. NEMA promised to give us relief materials, but they have not fulfilled that promise,” he said.

Multiple residents said some personnel of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) visited the community and assured them of food supplies. But when called for comment, Manzo Ezekiel, the disaster management agency’s spokesperson, told FIJ on September 27 that he was unaware of the promise, saying, “We don’t go to communities and make such promises”.

WHAT CHEMICAL WAS IT?

Both Daewoo and the refinery management did not respond to a list of questions on the name and type of spilled pollutants and how long it would remain in the atmosphere, soil and plants.

FIJ sent emails to the two companies on October 2 and another message to the NNPC spokesperson Femi Soneye on WhatsApp on October 3. Soneye also declined FIJ’s WhatsApp audio call multiple times.

However, a report of an investigation into the incident obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA) showed that the chemicals involved were two: hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, lasting for 48 hours before its was stopped.

According to the report, Mustafa Sugungun, the managing director of the refinery, said the discharge was accidental.

“Accidental Discharge: KRPC’s Managing Director, Dr. Mustafa Sugungun, stated that the chemical discharge was accidental. The discharge point has since been secured to prevent further leakage,” the report of the assessment done on September 9 stated.

However, members of the community said Sugungun told them during a meeting that the refinery had been discharging such chemicals before. “The managing director said that was not the first time they would release such chemicals. I know he said it because I was there,” said Akpan.

A video showing the chemicals dissipating into the atmosphere from smoke stacks.

Sugungun also told the residents that the chemical had been left unused for a long time, saying it was being used to produce detergents.

According to Akpan, the director said “they used to sell the chemical to Lever Brothers Nigeria, a laundry soap producer, in Lagos. But since the company shut down, they stored it somewhere in the refinery”.

Although there has been no word from the refinery about the substances and their properties, a 2012 report by the National Refineries Special Task Force could provide a link between what Sugungun said and what chemical was spilled. According to the report, the refinery was segmented into two: fuel and lubes plants. The lubes plant, particularly, was producing “linear alkyl benzene (LAB), a vital raw material for (the) production of detergents, as well as other industrial solvents”.

Based on the paragraph above, benzene was possibly among the pollutants. Exposure to benzene is harmful as it could cause leukaemia, a cancer of the blood, said the American Cancer Society. “Eating foods or drinking fluids contaminated with high levels of benzene can cause vomiting, stomach irritation, dizziness, sleepiness, convulsions, and rapid heart rate,” the group wrote in a website post.

“I have observed that many children have bow legs in this community and that is a sign of calcium deficiency. Now, there are some pregnant women inhaling this chemical. With this in mind, imagine the condition of babies coming in the next few months,” Atabo worried.

Time and again, research has shown that the refinery’s activities have contributed a significant amount of harm to the community. A collaborative research authored by Vivan Ezra Lekwot and others in 2014 found higher concentrations of liquid gases and metals in soil properties than the national permissible limits.

Another such research by Louis Buggu and two others in 2020 discovered that River Rido, a river close to the refinery, had an unacceptable volume of pollutants from the refinery with consequences on aquatic life. Specifically, the research found that the values of these heavy metals were greater than the tolerable limits prescribed by the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Despite these existing studies, the NESREA said the outcome of its investigation was positive, saying it found traces of “hydrogen chloride between 0.3 mg/L and hydrogen fluoride at 1.03 mg/L low” in the soil, water and plant samples collected, which “are relatively low” and within the parameters recommended by the agency.

According to the United States’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, exposure to hydrogen chloride could be corrosive to the eyes, nose, skin, mucous membranes, and respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, with children having greater potential to be more vulnerable than adults because of their body weight ratio.

Consistent with FIJ’s findings, the NESREA 13-man team “noted significant discoloration of local crops including maize, sorghum, and soya beans, leading to premature death of plants and degradation of the environment. The investigation into the chemical emissions from KRPC has revealed significant environmental impacts on the Kapam community”.

The regulator recommended “a detailed plan for remediation of affected lands and support for impacted farmers should be developed” by the refinery. Nevertheless, members of the community mentioned that nothing had been done in this regard.

SCATTERSHOT INTERVENTIONS

Women, both young and old, from the community blocked the refinery’s entrance on August 30 to protest. They expressed their concerns, with some shedding tears and rolling on the grounds with placards on their hands demanding compensation and environmental remediation.

In response, the management called a meeting where the issues were discussed. According to Akpan, the major commitment made by the refinery authorities was a medical intervention for the residents. The day after the meeting, some health workers visited the community to diagnose the affected residents and treat them accordingly.

“My wife and children were all sick. Everybody was sick in the community. So, we told the refinery to bring their medical team to treat our people and know the effect of this chemical on our people,” said Akpan.

The medical team collected blood samples, gave medicines and administered injections on some people. Against the expectation of the residents, the health exercise only lasted two days leaving the vast majority of the people unattended to.

WHERE ARE THE BLOOD TESTS?

Although the issues of discoloured poops were yet to go, the real issue to these community dwellers was the result of the blood samples the medical team collected. After the medical team stopped their two-day operation, the residents said they approached the managing director for the outcome of the blood test and the safety of the atmosphere. But they were told that “the atmosphere is now clean” and the tests “showed typhoid and malaria symptoms”.

Many people told FIJ that they were not treated. The primary school boy earlier mentioned said, “I went to the primary school where they were treating people for two days, I was not attended to. I am still purging and coughing.”

Akpan said efforts to get the medical team to return and treat more people were frustrated as the management of the refinery said the community had to write a formal letter of request if they still needed the team.

Prior to the medical intervention, the immediate response of the refinery was the supply of 100 cartons of milk to the community, FIJ’s found. Each carton had 24 pieces. The community lamented that this was ridiculously low compared to the population affected.

“The milk was vandalised because of displeasure. What we expected was that they would do a house-to-house contact to distribute whatever it was they wanted to give us, which by the way would not solve the underlying health problems this has created for some of us. How do you expect the whole community to share 100 cartons of milk? It would not even scratch the health problems on the surface,” Altine Kyon, a lecturer at the Kaduna State Polytechnic, said.

Despite the requests for the results of the tests, the refinery management had failed to release it. And the residents would not believe the blank interpretation that there was no problem.

“I asked the managing director for the results. He simply said just malaria and typhoid were detected. If that is the case, it is fine. But give us the results. After all, it was our blood that you collected. We are not going to believe you. We need an independent interpretation. But they have not release it since then,” said Akpan.

RUMOURED COMPENSATION

FIJ learnt that, aside from the meeting which took place on the refinery’s premises, the management had not visited the community to interface with people and take inventory of their losses and complaints to be able to determine appropriate provisions.

Days following the meeting, some residents were told to submit their names and bank account numbers, but got no official information from the refinery who sanctioned the collection and for what purpose.

Kyon explained that she was not at home when her son called her that some people were requesting her account number. She directed her son to give out the bank details. Weeks after, she heard nothing of the payment or the reason her details were collected.

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When the rumours began flying around that the refinery leadership had started engaging some indigenous community leaders who had no property in the community for possible compensation, the affected residents became uncomfortable.

To avert a situation of money getting into the wrong hands under non-transparent system, more than 500 residents submitted a signed petition to the Kaduna office of the Public Complaint Commission (PCC), a federal organ created to redress citizens’ complaints against administrative injustice.

“We want the commission to assist us to plead (with) the government and the NNPC Kaduna not to pay our compensation to any third party. We suffered as a result of the dangerous chemical. Therefore, they should compensate us as individuals that suffered the losses,” their petition stated.

Following the petition, the PCC transmitted the community’s demand to the NNPC, stating that it was interested in the negotiation and compensation process.

This story was produced with support from the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) under the Collaborative Media Engagement for Development Inclusivity and Accountability Project (CMEDIA) funded by the MacArthur Foundation.