FEATURE-Nigerian oil dispute flares into full-scale revolt

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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L19575118.htm

KEGBARA-DERE, Nigeria, June 28 (Reuters) - Crude oil seeping from a gnarled steel wellhead forms a lake the size of a soccer pitch near the Nigerian village of Kegbara-Dere, but these oilfields have not exported a drop in 13 years.

The Ogoni tribe kicked Royal Dutch Shell out of this part of the Niger Delta in 1993 protesting that they had received nothing in return for four decades of oil production. Today, the same grievances are fuelling a revolt across the entire oil heartland of Africa's largest producer.

"If Shell never comes back, we would have lost nothing," says Young Kigbara, a member of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, surveying the pungent pool of oil and an abandoned pumping station nearby.

"We are better off without oil production."