By Femi Akinola
Little is known about the full impacts of marine pollution in Nigeria, especially in the hinterland where there is almost no information.
First, the ocean is a vital source of nourishment, especially to the people in the poor nations.
Many people depend on fish for their source of protein; fisheries and aquaculture support the livelihood of millions of people directly or indirectly.
Some beaches in the country are already closed to the public because the water is unsuitable for bathing.
There are beaches that are covered with litters of plastics, discharge of sewage, agricultural run-off, and discharge of nutrients and pesticides. These account for approximately 80% of marine pollution in the country.
The Niger-Delta region is an ecologically sensitive region that is rich in fisheries and other aquatic resources.
However, oil production activities in the region have in the recent times reduced the yield of aquatic resources from this region.
The implication of this is a dislocation of the local people from their traditional occupation which once led to violent resistance across the region.
For years, there are reported cases of multinational oil and petrochemical companies that have repeatedly polluted the Niger Delta region and the whole nation’s marine environment.
The increase in production of crude oil and gas in the country, and its progressive yield of foreign exchange, followed by the rapid expansion in industrialization, followed by increased urbanisation, has left the environment, especially the coastal environment, with pollutants of concentration capable of causing harm to both terrestrial and aquatic life forms.
Various types of pollutants are impacting the marine environment in Nigeria. They include land based sources, household sources, marine litter and garbage, operational sources such as fishing vessel, boats and ships and other sea activities
According to E.I. Elenwo and J.A. Alkali, in their journal of Sustainable Development Studies, the effect of marine pollution on Nigerian coastal resources are extensive, impacting on the flora, fauna and entire ecology of the coastal environment.
”In most cases, apart from direct impact on the living resources, marine pollutants tends to degrade the environment to extreme conditions that you are beyond tolerant or adaptation limits of the living resources therein and destruction of aquatic life due to acute thermal schock,” Elenwo and Alkali noted in their journal.
Other effects of thermal pollution include normal physiological process, such as growth and reproduction of aquatic species which has become severely impaired, rampant discharges of hot affluents, oil spills, plastic and other forms of debris into our coastal aquatic.
All these and more are quite common off the coast of Lagos and major industrialized cities of the Niger Delta region such as Warri and Port Harcourt. Also, gas flaring is another source of environment pollutant in the region which inadvertently impact on the coastal resources.
Consequently, people of the Niger Delta region, represented by a non-governmental organisation (NGO), Coalition for a Cleaned Niger Delta (CCND), recently alleged that a billion litres of crude oil equivalent have been released into the Niger Delta ecosystem as the price paid by communities in the region for Nigeria’s oil production.
The NGO led by executive Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nnimmo Bassey, and founding Executive Director, African Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development (LSD, Otive Igbuzor, invited President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to visit the Niger Delta region to see the level of devastation resulting from oil spillages.
This will enable the president to understand the level of pollution done to Nigeria’s marine environment.
