Follow Us on Google
• Ijaw stakeholders brainstorm on damning environmental
report on Niger Delta
By Omoniyi Salaudeen
It is damning and alarming. Thirty million people are under threat in Niger Delta. The reason penultimate Wednesday, stakeholders from Bayelsa State converged on Muson Centre, Lagos.
They were to deliberate and re-awake the consciousness of the relevant authorities to the environmental degradation as well as socio-economic impact of oil exploration activities on the Ijaw people and the Niger Delta region as a whole.
The roundtable, organised at the instance of a coalition of Ijaw interest groups followed the recent launch of the report of the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission set up by the immediate past administration of Seriake Dickson to, among other things, recommend remedies to the devastation caused by the oil and gas industry on the environment, social economy and human lives.
Participants insisted that other states must emulate Bayelsa, noting the similarity of the situation in other parts of the oil-rich region.
And understandably because of the startling findings of the report, especially the staggering figure of human losses, mostly infants, arising from air pollution, toxic contaminants and its far-reaching recommendations, the discussion provoked a renewed call for an urgent action from all the oil-producing states.
A keynote speaker, communication expert and former commissioner in Rivers State, Dr. Tam George, could not hide his sentiment: “This is an existential problem. I think the state government has a very serious role to play in revamping and updating environmental laws within their states.
“Where there is a failure on the part of the Federal Government, I think we need to active domestic environmental laws to give impetus to the action of the state government. The kind of problem we are facing requires that we go back and review some of these laws and update those structures that can impose sanctions where necessary.
“Bayelsa is just the focus today. But all the things we are saying here have resonance in all the states that constitute the Niger Delta.
A lot of the things we are saying here apply to Rivers where I am from. It applies to Akwa Ibom State, Imo State and the rest of nine other oil producing states. This is a matter that has direct existential impact on over 30 million people.
“And we are not as helpless as we tend to believe. There are UN conventions to which Nigeria is a signatory that ultimately protect the waterways and the sources of livelihood of indigenous people.
“Where the government at the state and federal level refuse to act, I think we have sufficient knowledge and capacity to activate those international conventions to protect the indigenous people. We want greater environmental protection. We want greater protection of the indigenous people that are affected by the kind of environmental problems we are seeing.”
Secretary, Ijaw Elders Forum (IEF), Lagos, Pastor Efiye Bribena, who read the joint statement on behalf of the coalition, quoted the report entitled, “Environmental Genocide: The Human and Environmental Cost of Big Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria,” as putting the number of infants killed by pre-natal exposure to oil spills within a month of birth at 16,000 and the volume of oil spillages in the last 50 years at 110-165
million gallons:
“This amount is 10-15 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez spill (11 million gallons) that devastated the Alaskan coastline in 1989. These
indices of pathology are a threat to the continued existence of the Ijaw indigenous nationality and the physical integrity of our homeland, and could therefore provoke any affected population into self-help where the governments, regulators and justice systems that should secure and rescue them have either failed them or in some casesm appear to be in collaboration with the genocidal polluters.”
Coalition chairman, Chief Amagbe Denzil Kentebe, said: “What we are doing here today calls for an urgent action. And we hope that those responsible, the state government, the Federal Government, the IOCs, the international community will see this as a challenge. If not, we
know what to do.”
A former governorship aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state, Anthony George Ikoli, expressed dismay over the years of neglect. He described Niger Delta as an ungoverned space due to lack of visible presence of government:
“This report presents an opportunity to re-awake the consciousness of all the organs of government to act in unison to put a stop to the continuing nightmare in the Niger Delta region.
“The statistics and recommendations present an unending nightmare. And it calls for a collective human response not just in Bayelsa or
Nigeria but the international committee as well because a segment of humanity is being wiped out daily and nothing is being done.
“The Nigeria state will not rest, and indeed, may go into pieces, if step is not taken to remediate the genocide or the killing of the Ijaw people. It is an affliction on humanity. It is real time holocaust.
What is happening now is unjust, unfair and inequitable. “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has made the elimination of oil theft a cardinal agenda of his government. While oil theft elimination is good, what is better would be elimination of pollution that eliminates
our people.
“To eliminate oil theft and not to remediate the environment or place the welfare of the people in whose territory you are mining as part of your policy smacks of lack of care for the people. We should not be seen as a place for mining wealth for the sustenance of others.
“Our lives matter. The time has come for the owners of oil to call upon the conscience of the world for a collective action against the
on going genocide in the Niger Delta region.”
Mr. Ebilate Macyoroki, lamented: “The problem we are talking about is beyond Bayelsa. I am from Delta State and the problem is more pronounced in Delta State than any other state. Yet, the state government only collects money from oil corporations but never bothered about the impact of oil exploration on the environment.
“The first call is to the various state governments to wake up to their responsibilities. It is a national problem it is a Niger Delta problem. Let us tap on the report and call on all the state governors to emulate Bayelsa State.”
The coalition also recommended Bayelsa State to present an immediate demand to the President to promulgate a Niger Delta-wide Environmental
Remediation Programme and to impose stern sanctions within the state’s power, including revocation of rights of way and land leases over operational sites of repeated or egregious environmental breaches.
Groups that coalesced to form the coalition included IEF, Ijaw Nation Forum (INF), Embasara Foundation, Ijaw Women Connect (IWC), Ijaw Professionals Association (IPA), Ijaw Diaspora Council (IDC), ERA Niger Delta Resource Centre, Yenagoa, Bayelsa NGO Forum and Environmental Development Agenda.
