By Nneka Nwogwugwu
The Executive Director, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), Dr. Godwin Uyi Ojo, said that over 4,000 indigenes of Ogoni have lost their lives and others displaced from their ancestral lands following the activities of the oil explorations that have polluted their environment.
He stated this while speaking on the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) scorecard: Hope Betrayed, an evaluation of the implementation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s Environment Assessment of Ogoniland 11 years on in Benin.
He said HYPREP lacks the manpower and experiences required to pull off a multifaceted cleanup, remediation and restoration project of this magnitude.
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Ojo added that the payment of $1billion for cleanup and remediation in the first five years in a cleanup that will last 25-30 years, an agreement between the federal government and Shell on the one hand and the Ogoni community on the other was for the contributing stakeholders to pay $200 million yearly for the initial five years.
He said that four years after the project launched, only $360 million has been paid as confirmed by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) during a public hearing at the house of representatives in 2020 and that there is no update on whether further transfers had been made for 2021 and 2022.
“According to Ogoni community members, HYPREP was thought to be a watertight structure with proper checks and balances that will deliver a word class cleanup of the Ogoni environment and lay the groundwork for the cleanup of the rest of the Niger Delta region.
“However, the process was politicized such that there is little or no benefits to the victims and impacted communities leading to what many have called hope betrayed,” he said.
