Ogoni: Group reacts to HYPREP’S advertorial response to critics

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has reacted to the advertorial response to critics.

The group urged the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) to focus more on delivering a proper clean-up that benefits the people of the polluted environment in Ogoniland.

Executive Director of ERA/FoEN, Dr. Godwin Uyi Ojo, in a statement in Benin City, on Friday, said the organisation remains resolute to champion a proper clean-up as an environmental advocacy group.

Ojo added that it would continue to speak verifiable truth to power and to stand shoulder to shoulder with the indefatigable and resolute people of Ogoni in their implacable opposition to the genocidal activities on their lands, rivers, and lives.

The environmental activist condemned the recent advertorial response by HYPREP to critics, noting that HYPREP’s response was a cover-up and a cheap diversionary tactic to deflect from the reality on ground.

Ojo said as quoted by the Guardian, “HYPREP’s advertorial response was an audacious and vexatious judicial overreach on a matter that is sub judice, over which a competent court has granted far-reaching orders restraining the former chair of ERA/FoEN board of trustees from parading himself as such and further restrained the former chair and his hirelings from participating in the management of ERA/FoEN as well as maintaining that Godwin Uyi Ojo remains the valid Executive Director of ERA/FoEN.

“ERA/FoEN believes that the Ogoni people stand on the part of justice when they declared Shell persona non grata in Ogoni until the company has publicly apologised for the genocide it perpetrated in Ogoniland, clean up, remediation and restoration of the ecosystem and pay appropriate compensation to Ogoni people for the death and destruction the company brought to the impacted communities.”