Rivers State, particularly its capital Port Harcourt, had been enveloped in swirls of deadly soot. Rivers is full of life. Day life. Night life. And good life. But in tow has come killer soot. Toxic. Noxious. Carcinogenic. And herein is a cruel irony. Soot of death in Rivers of life.
Rivers is beautiful. A land mass of intriguing littoral charm. It’s where water, ocean water, meets earthen surface. A confluence of natural extremes. It’s among the top three producers of crude oil, the mainstay of the nation. It’s therefore Nigeria’s cash-point. A national cash-dispensing entity. With a rich repository of crude oil and gas, no sane Nigerian government messes with Rivers. Vast deposit of hydrocarbon has attracted big businesses to the state. Here, big cash from oil lubricates the hands of men.
Indeed, Rivers is beautiful. Its capital Port Harcourt is Nigeria’s undisputed Garden City. So named on account of its history of wide spread lush green gardens, well-manicured lawns and streets strewn with delicately cropped flora. In its early days, it was truly a Garden City, warts and all. Man and nature co-existed in untainted harmony. The gardens were green, unviolated. But it lost its lustre and allure in the intervening years. Greens morphed to greys. Exploratory activities of oil majors triggered a crude despoliation of both the once clean water and the rich loamy earth. The more they sank their proboscis into the subsoil to drill crude, the more the greens pale away. Silt and smudge seize the waters. And this has been on many decades.
Governor Nyesom Wike is a Port Harcourt boy. A true son of the soil. He knows the history of the Garden City. He witnessed in his younger years the unblemished sanity of Port Harcourt. He drank the natural water that barbed the state. Clean, atoxic water before the spills spoilt the multi-purpose nature’s brew. Wike had been working hard to reset the city. To restore its gardenness. In a bullish spell of urban renewal, Wike has expanded the historically narrow roads, planted more trees, built bridges to ease traffic, remodeled inner roads and byways. He has demolished shanties and shebeens planted in uncharted places.
Despite the governor’s effort to preserve the sanctity of life in Rivers, a pall of death has seized the space. A swirl of soot from incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. In a crude application of chemistry, the soot-makers, all merchants of death, have continued to torture residents of the state. Soot is produced when tyres are burnt or when asphalt is subjected to heat. It melts and belches out soot. But there’s a much bigger source of soot. It’s from the burning of hydrocarbon (crude oil) to produce fuel and other by-products. In street language, it’s called illegal refinery. This is the type that has overwhelmed Rivers. It’s an illicit business by a cartel, a powerful syndicate of security operatives and their bosses, top government officials and some powerful civilians who loiter the corridors of power and feast therefrom. They are agents of death. Economic saboteurs. Clones of hell’s denizens. That’s why it has lingered in spite of public outcry. For over four years, soot has satiated the Rivers’ hemisphere and rain as droplets of death on the people.
The spread is insidious. Never noisome. It’s a silent operator. You’ll never know how much you have inhaled. You’ll never understand when and how it got into your home. But it’s there, arrogantly perching on every fabric, even those tucked into the deepest recesses of close-fitted wardrobes. So surreal, yet so real. And you wonder, why did it take so long to find out the powers behind this evil industry?
But it’s better late than never. Yes, it took so long to unearth the sooty mystery. But it’s far better than not finding out at all. First, the merchants of death sold a dummy to the public. They flew a kite claiming it was as a result of the illegal activities of some Asians. Many bought the tatty and trashy theory. Granted, some Asians have not been behaving well in Nigeria. Aided and goaded by some corrupt Nigerians, they have been known to engage in the most crooked and illegal deals. Illegal mining of minerals from Zamfara to Osun; illegal importation of all manner of contrabands, stealing of crude oil in the deep waters of Nigeria. And they’re artful tax dodgers too and sadistic employers and abusers of labour. In fact, they do brazenly in Nigeria everything they could not attempt in their respective countries.
Alas at last, there’s some comfort. A whiff of easiness. Wike has burst the bubble of the merchants of death. Days after the governor boldly accused security agencies of aiding and abetting the illicit business, arrests were made. The suspects were not strangers from space. They’re persons in government, security agents and others representing various interests. Their sponsors are veiled behind the comfort of their marbled homes. They’re big men and women who would not flinch to flaunt their wealth. They go by the moniker oil magnate; oil and gas tycoons. But in reality, they’re merchants of death, hawkers of evil broth. They don’t deserve to live. They have no stake in life. Neither should they be numbered among the living. They are killers whose minimum punishment is life-long tenancy in jail. They deserve to rot in jail just the same way they have subjected the lungs and other innards of Rivers’ residents to progressive corrosion.
Soot is not soothing. It’s corrosive. The average soot particle contains a number of carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) including arsenic, cadmium and chromium. None of them is a friend. None friendly to the human body. When inhaled beyond a threshold, they eat up the lungs, the bronchial system and everything connected to breathing in and out. It could lead to premature death, heart attack, stroke, acute bronchitis, severe cough and aggravated asthma especially among children. None of these diseases is a fancy for mortal man. None can help grow a strand of human hair. Rather, they kill the mortal being.
The illegal refinery syndicate in Rivers mirrors the stealing and perfidy in the nation’s oil and gas sector. Nigeria is only next to Mexico in global oil theft. In 2019, Nigeria was said to have lost 42.25 million barrels of crude to oil theft valued at $2.77 billion.
In the case of the soot-makers of Rivers, they did not only steal the crude, they also stole public health with very dire implications in the coming years. They deserve a place in prison at the very least. As for the security operatives directly or vicariously involved in the illicit deal, the least said, the better. But they have no place in the pantheon of patriots. They serve not the nation. They serve their belly.