UNEP Report: Ogoni still groans two years after

[Mirror]

Two years after the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issued a damning assessment of the Ogoni environment, the people are forced to continue wallowing in the toxic broth that their lands and waters have been made to become. Ogoniland was once supported by productive farming, fishing and related activities. That was so up till the moment the oil rigs began to puncture holes in the land and crude oil began to be spilled on lands, forests and rivers. The air that was clean changed when gas flares belched like dragons out for the kill.

Today, 20 years after Shell got excommunicated from Ogoni, thick hydrocarbon fumes from sundry pollutions hang in the air. From the late 1980s, the Ogoni people raised alarm over the wholesale destruction of their environment. They followed this by careful and robustly peaceful protestations.

With the Ogoni Bill of Rights of 1990 they catalogued their demands for environmental, socio-economic and political justice. Although the Bill of Rights was presented to the Nigerian government, till date there has not been a whisper by way of response to, or engagement with, the document. The Bill of Rights became an organising document for the people and also eventually inspired other ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria to produce similar charters as a peaceful way of prodding the government into dialogue and action.

The Bill noted that although crude oil had been extracted from Ogoniland from 1958, they had received NOTHING in return. Articles 15-18 of the Bill illustrate some of the complaints of the people. Highlights include:

. That the search for oil has caused severe land and food shortages in Ogoni – one of the most densely populated areas of Africa (average: 1,500 per square mile; national average: 300 per square mile.)

. That neglectful environmental pollution laws and sub-standard inspection techniques of the federal authorities have led to the complete degradation of the Ogoni environment, turning our homeland into an ecological disaster.

. That the Ogoni people lack education, health and other social facilities; and .

That it is intolerable that one of the richest areas of Nigeria should wallow in abject poverty and destitution.

This Bill of Rights was the precursor to the Kaiama Declaration of the Ijaws, lkwerre Rescue Charter, Aklaka Declaration for the Egi, the Urhobo Economic Summit Resolution, Oron Bill of Rights and other demands of peoples' organisations in the Niger Delta.

The UNEP Report presented to President Goodluck Jonathan on 4 August 2011 completely confirmed the claims of the Ogoni people. The report found that without exception, all the water bodies in Ogoni was polluted by the activities of oil companies – Shell Petroleum Development Company (Shell) and Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

The UNEP report revealed that the Ogoni homeland had indeed been turned into an "ecological disaster," as the Bill of Rights asserted. We remind ourselves that the UNEP Report made recommendations that most of us saw as low hanging fruits that government could easily have responded to assuage the pains of the people and commence a process of restoring the territory to an acceptable state. The apparent inaction is nothing but a squandering of opportunities to rescue a people and for impactful political action.

A total clean up of Ogoni land will take a life time or about 35 years at the least. That is the length of time UNEP estimated it would require to clean up the water bodies in the territory. And it would require an additional five years to clean up the land. How is that a lifetime? Well, life expectancy in the Niger Delta stands at approximately forty-one years.

At the eve of the first anniversary of the presentation of the UNEP Report, the Federal Government hurriedly cobbled up an outfit incongruously named Hydrocarbons Pollution Restoration Project (HYPREP). The project was set up basically to hoodwink the Ogoni people into thinking that action was being taken to implement the UNEP Report.

A year after the setting up of HYPREP under the Ministry of Petroleum Resources – a major polluter of Ogoni land – the only visible acts of implementation of the report has been the planting of sign posts at some places informing the people that their environment is contaminated and that they should keep off. You could almost laugh, but this is sad and serious. Keep off your environment! No options given. The people still drink the polluted waters and farm the polluted lands. Seafood is still being scrounged from the polluted waters and community people still process their foods in the crude-coated creeks.

Two years after the UNEP report, we believe that it is not too late for the government to act. President Jonathan can declare Ogoni land an ecological disaster zone and invest resources to tackle the deep environmental disaster here; it can urgently provide potable drinking water across Ogoni land; and the major crude oil stealing mafias must be uncovered. Crude oil and gas volumes must also be metred as demanded by groups such as the Environmental Rights Action (ERA).

Shell should be ordered to urgently dismantle whatever remains of their facilities in Ogoni land along with toxic wastes they dumped in the territory, and the company should clean up the polluted lands and waters.

Bassey is an environmentalist activist, poet and Executive Director, Environmental Rights Action

National Mirror