By Obiabin Onukwugha
Foremost environmental activist, Dr Nnimmo Bassey, has stated that the Niger Delta region of Nigeria is a privatized and sacrificed zone.
Bassey stated that at the School of Ecology on Recovering Oil Sacrifice Zones, by Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), at the Niger Delta University, Amasoma, Bayelsa State on Thursday.
Bassey who is the Executive Director of HOMEF, averred that the privatization of the region began in 1956 when the first commercially viable oil well was drilled, and has continued unabated.
He accused international oil companies of appropriating the Niger Delta communities as a wasteland suited only for dumping of toxic wastes, oil spills, gas flares and produced water.
The environmental activist who gave references to the UNEP report of August 2011 on the assessment of the Ogoni environment and the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission (BSOEC) report of May 2023 on Bayelsa environment, said the ongoing situation in the Niger Delta is worse than slavery.
Bassey also pointed out to Awoye community of Ondo State which has Ororo 1 well at Oil Mining Lease (OML) 95 in its immediate offshore where the oil well blew up in a fiery inferno in May 2020 and has been burning and spilling crude oil for 4 years non-stop with nothing being done to halt the crime.
He said: “The total dispossession of our peoples of their environment, disconnection from their roots and the spoliation of what is left is worse than slavery and colonialism. Indeed the nearest label that can be placed on the situation may be environmental racism. Colonialism could plunder and mete inhuman treatment to its subjects, but environmental racism normalizes the treatment of both the people and their environment as non-living, subhuman and fit for nothing but to be trashed.
“Between 2006 and 2020, Bayelsa State had 3,508 oil spill incidents or 25% of all oil spills in the Niger Delta according the data from the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA). It suffers an average of 234 oil spills per year. Figures from NOSDRA are notoriously unreliable as it under reports even in comparison to reports from NNPC.
“It is hard to find anywhere else in the world that has been so insidiously trampled underfoot than the Niger Delta and other hotspots of mineral extraction in Nigeria and also in Africa generally. In this regard we note that the tin mines of Jos have been sacrificially abandoned. The same can be said of the coal mines of Enugu and other rising zones of plunder ruled by bandits and so-called unknown gunmen.”
The HOMEF Executive Director accused the Nigerian government and its elites of colluding with the international oil companies to continue in the dastardly act against the environment and the people of the Niger Delta region, saying, “Indeed, neocolonialism would probably not have progressed the way it has without the compromise of our elites in all spheres of human endeavour. These traitors gladly take the place of slave drivers and colonial masters and ensure the privatization of our commons and our commonwealth through devious legislation and through pure elite capture of the socioeconomic systems.”
He further made references to other African countries where exploitative and mining activities have subjected the people to such slavery, saying the slavery will continue until the federal government and the people take conscious steps to reverse it.
“Zones of sacrifice are dotted all over our continent with all having roots in extractivism incubated by colonialism. Here we can mention the gold mines of Ghana and South Africa; the diamond, cobalt and lithium mines of Democratic Republic of Congo; the diamond mines of Liberia and Sierra Leone; the oil fields of the Albertine Graben in Uganda, Okavango basin in Namibia and Botswana, the Saloum Delta of Senegal, the Sudd in South Sudan; the coal mines of South Africa; the gas fields of Cabo Delgado in Mozambique; the phosphate fields of Togo and Western Sahara, to mention a few.
“When our territories are sacrificed, it is not just that our land is debased, we are the ones being sacrificed. This becomes clearer to us when we realize that, for a fact, rather than being owners of the land we are actually the land. To liberate ourselves from this exploitative cul-de-sac, we must know that environmental action is an investment, not a cost. Every action we take today towards ending the sacrifice of our territories is an investment towards reinventing an environment that does not eat us up.
“It is clear that we cannot escape or reverse the perverse situation unless we reboot our imaginaries, recreate our mindsets and reconnect ourselves to our environmental and sociocultural milieu. We need to rediscover our indigenous sovereignty as the core plank in the struggle for political as well as for socioecological liberation,” he stated.