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From Ighomuaye Lucky, Benin
Edo State governor, Godwin Obaseki, yesterday, said over $150million has been spent in addressing the erosion menace in the state just as he said the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) will not be allowed to work in Edo “if they do not share their plans with the state government particularly erosion plans
Obaseki, who said this at the New Festival Hall, Government House, Benin City during the metamorphosis of EdoNEWMAP to EdoFEWMA, attributed most of the environmental challenges to poor land management and decrease in forest areas.
The governor, equally fauted contractors for not disclosing their plans to address erosion problems and hinted that Federal agencies, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) will not be allowed to work in Edo “if they do not share their plans with the state government particularly erosion plans, because they are giving us more trouble to our environment.”
“Over the last 10 years, we have spent over 150million dollars trying to repair what we have damaged ourselves. We should ask is this the way we should continue to go? Can we not prevent some of these things that are leading to environmental challenges we have?
“Majority of the cases are all man-made. You have a contractor, who was given a contract, he decides to begin construction, he doesn’t share the plan, he doesn’t tell how the water will be terminated.
“He does his own, collect his money and leave the problem with the communities. That is a major cause of the problem we are having with erosion control.
“So, as a government, we will insist, going forward, that no agency, not federal, not local, will undertake projects without coming to register with FEWMA because you just can’t come to the state to say you have a contract, you begin to work and not let us know the extent of engineering drawings and you are going to deal with issues of erosion control”,he said.
He Continued “As you know in Edo State, over the years, due to neglect we are now witnessing many challenges that we didn’t see before, particularly gully erosion.
“The way we have lived in the last 20 years or more, I don’t think we should continue that way; we behave as if our environment does not matter, nobody cares about land management.
“Communities sell and do not care about planning. People build where they should not and the water that should flow through a natural path do not have a way to go and goes where it shouldn’t and begin to wash away the land. As a government, this has become our priority.
“Our number one priority is our environment because we cannot continue to behave the way we are behaving now. If our forefathers had behaved this way, we will not be living here. We can hardly see trees and this means the land cannot hold water if there are no trees.
“So, the environment is a very serious area of focus which we must pay attention to and it is because we have not being paying attention to the environment that is why we have the challenges we have today,” he added.
The governor, while assuring the new agency of the state government’s support, explained that NEWMAP was conceived as a world Bank project to help state government with environmental sustainability and erosion control.
According to him, this program started 10 years ago when the world bank made some money available through the federal government to states on a concessionary basis like soft loans, which will be paid back after 20 years at a very low interest rate of less than 1percent.
“The state government will now put their counterpart funding into the fund and identify communities that have serious ecological and environmental challenges and going into those communities with very adequate designs to help them solve their environmental problems, particularly flooding and gully erosion control.
“NEWMAP has become a true success story. It was a World Bank assisted program and the money has finished, the program has finished but the problem they are trying to solve has not finished.
“This is why we are saying let us continue it even though we are not getting as much loans but the learnings we have received, training we have given our people and the capacity we have built in is very useful and unique and we want to use it help resolve these problems across the state,” he stated.
Tom Obaseki, chief executive officer, EdoFEWMA, said a total of 23 states participated under NEWMAP in the last 10 years and Edo came top in achievements, accounting for 17 per cent of the overall success.
He said as part of the programme, the state constructed over 40km of secondary drains to check flooding adding that this excluded over 400km constructed by other ministries and agencies; over 14kms of primary storm water culverts, drains and over 4km of earth storm water channels.
Obaseki said this is more than what has been done by any other government in the history of the state.
