From Blessing Okorite, Port Harcourt
A renown environmentalist and Executive Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, Nnimmo Bassey, has urged the federal government Nigeria that instead of resuming activities on oil Wells in Ogoniland, it should speed up cleanup of the environment.
This as the activist has called on all and sundry to rise up and defend the environment from injustice of hazardous attack by polluters.
Nnimmo Bassey made the call at a lecture programme organized by University of Port Harcourt Right Livelihood College and Health Of Mother Earth Foundation, at the university premises in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
Speaking further on the cleanup process, Nnimmo noted that the cleanup will last for over 30 years, hence the need to salvage the environment of all deadly pollution that has destroyed the people’s source of livelihood and which has also caused high rate of death in the area.
He added that the cleanup of the environment is the right of the people who have suffered environmental injustice for decades, stressing that resuming oil exploitation and exploration in the area will amount to continuous pollution of already polluted environment.
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He said “Since oil drilling started 61 years ago in Ogoni land justice has not been done on the environment. Live expectancy here in the Niger Delta is 41 years, every weekend is a festival of funerals. For a 25 years old girl to die and they put a banner “life well spent” what well life spent. So, you cannot compensate the people with the cleanup. The cleanup is a moral obligation of the Nigeria state and oil companies to purify our environment.
“In Ogoni, the cleanup is going to last for about 30 years and is a life long time. So, we don’t need to continue to pollute our environment.
“I am challenging the notion that government will be thinking they can just open the oil wells in Ogoni while cleanup is just beginning. Reopening the oil wells negates one of the clear things that ought to be done within the cleanup. The cleanup itself requires the decommissioning and dismantling of decrepit installations that are still polluting in Ogoni land. Now, you have not done that and you want to reopen the oil well.
“Government have a lot of information, but for some information is just how to increase the national wealth and national wealth must be increased, national wealth does not mean drilling oil, it means having a safe environment in which Nigerians can take care of themselves; going to fetch water, drinking it and staying alive, harvesting your cocoyam, eating it and staying alive. But if you are eating and drinking water and foods from polluted land, things that cause cancers, miscarriages and all kind of health disorder, no matter how development you build in a polluted environment is a waste resources.”
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On the event with theme “Global environmental politics, Human Rights and Conflicts”, Nnimmo Bassey noted that the society globally is high level of human rights abuses.
He said “There is also a campaign for the respect of the rights of the nature, is part of the crisis we have today in the nation because people don’t respect the right of the nature.
“We had an international panel, made up of a Speaker who is a professor and activist from Argentina, a speaker from the United State and a speaker from Indian who is a mobiliser, community leader and activist. They brought in different experiences from different continents so we can see the global picture that the challenges we are having in Nigeria on environmental issues is not only about us but is happening elsewhere.
In her paper presentation titled ‘Gender, Ecology and Human Rights’, an Indian rights activist, Dr Ruth Manorama, noted the need for environmental democracy. She added that “women need to be involved at all levels of policy formulation and decision making in natural resource and environmental managements”.
On his part, a native of Argentina and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Prof Raul Montenegro, said “multilateral education in the university where everybody is seen as important with shared ideas and knowledge will go a great ways in improving our research on environment.
On how to defend the environment, Montenegro added, “To talk slowly diplomatically do not work. We need to fight but at the same time we need to be conscious that our world is dangerous, a lot o friends have been killed. We also do defend defenders. We need to fight to have a best environment for our families, children and future”.
