The Coalition for a Cleaned Niger Delta (CCND) on Friday, called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to take immediate responsibility in resolving the prevailing ecocide (Environmental Genocide) in the area, which is identified to have been increasingly threatening the livelihood of the people of the region.
The convener/Executive Director Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nnimmo Bassey, while addressing journalists, said every Nigerian rightfully deserves to live in a society that boasts of peace, human security, and prosperity in the conviction that all citizens and public officers have a duty to make ever constructive contribution towards truly attaining these goals.
“As part of a wider civil society and environmental leadership movement, we call on our President to uphold his sworn commitment to national renewal by calling for swift action to resolve the Ecocide (Environmental Genocide) in the Niger Delta, that increasingly threatens the continued existence of the entire region, undercut the full economic potentials of our country, and constantly hangs national security on high risk level.
“We trust our president is well aware that the ecosystem of the Niger Delta has for about seventy years been plagued by unprecedented perennial pollution from petroleum production activities, enabled or worsened by a highly dysfunctional, conflicted and compromised environmental regulatory system, since the country struck commercial oil in the Oloibiri province prior to Nigeria’s Independence. This festering devastation has projected and Nigeria’s Niger Delta among the worst oil and gas polluted regions in the world.”
Speaking of immediate and lasting solutions, Bassey urged Mr President to issue an Executive Order creating a Niger Delta Environmental Remediation Programme and Trust Fund.
This, he said, can be either independent of or domiciled in the extant Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) currently overseeing the cleanup of Ogoni land, “but with a separate Trust Fund from the Ogoni Trust Fund, an expanded Governing Council and an unimpeachable management system designed to avoid the contradictions that have historically bedeviled HYPREP and the debatable progress of the Ogoni Cleanup.
The tasks of the programme would include a definitive health audit besides the standard environmental audit of impacted areas.
Speaking on funding, he further said “Combined with the Federal Government’s financial latitudes, the primary funding should be from the operators and JV partners in oil/petroleum leases, based on credible costings for remediation within their respective acreages and in line with the universal Polluter Pays Principle (PPP).”
