Godwin Bebe Okpabi, the traditional ruler of the Ogale community in Ogoniland, has testified against Shell, a British multinational oil and gas company, in a London High Court.

Okpabi made his appearance in the UK court on Friday while carrying bottles of water drawn from Ogale with him.

“This is the water that Shell has left for my people,” said Okpabi.

“This is poison, and they are spending millions of dollars to pay the best lawyers in the world so that they will not clean my land.”

Before the monarch made his appearance, lawyers representing Shell had told the same court that their client should not be held responsible for an environmental catastrophe in Ogale, which had suffered from decades of spills and pollution from oil extraction.

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“A people have been completely destroyed: people’s way of life destroyed; people’s only drinking water, which is the underground water aquifer, has been poisoned. People’s farmland has been completely poisoned; people’s streams that they use [for] their normal livelihood have been completely destroyed,” Okpabi further said.

When oil first flowed from the wells in Ogoniland in 1956, it was a lush landscape of mangrove forests. Its sparkling watercourses were populated by fishes, crabs, oysters and other creatures. In that era, the land’s people were primarily fishers and farmers.

Five and a half decades later, scientists from the UN Environment Programme found extensive soil and groundwater contamination, mangrove roots choked with bitumen-like substances, surface water in creeks and streams covered in thick layers of oil in Ogoniland.

The fish had also fled or died and farmers struggled to grow crops in fields soaked with oil.

In Ogale, Okpabi’s domain, inhabitants drink from wells contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen, at levels more than 900 times the World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline.

Follow-up testing carried out in the same area in 2024 found even higher levels — 2,600 times the WHO guideline.

“There is a lot of cancer: young girls of 20 to 30 years old, 40 years old, developing breast cancer and other forms of cancer; a lot of strange skin diseases that we don’t know the cause of; low life expectancy, people just drying up and dying,” said Okpabi.

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“Even eye diseases. In some cases birth defects… Strange diseases everywhere in our lives.”

Okpabi claimed that the enduring effects of hundreds of leaks and spills from Shell’s pipelines and infrastructure have breached their right to a clean and healthy environment.

The hearing, which ended on Friday, was a “preliminary issues trial” heard by the court to determine the scope of the legal issues to be decided at the case’s full trial that is set for late 2026.

Although the case is being heard by a British judge in a UK court, it will apply Nigerian law.