Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), at the International Oil Pollution and Just Transition Conference held at Abuja on Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Extractivism and accompanied pollution has wreaked extensive damage in the physical, socioeconomic and cultural spheres of our national life. They have worked together to build a warped future, which must be deconstructed, and reconstructed.
One of the planks for this rebuilding effort is the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission (BSOEC) report aptly titled “An Environmental Genocide: The Human and Environmental Cost of Big Oil in Bayelsa State, Nigeria”.
The report highlighted the incredible extent of petroleum pollution in Bayelsa State and has given us a vivid picture of the extreme damage that almost seven decades of crude oil exploitation has done to the entire Niger Delta region particularly regarding both environmental and human health. It is pure environmental genocide and there is no way to sugarcoat its horrors.
The report is riddled with facts that are almost unimaginable. For example, it tells us that there is a 1.5 barrels per capita crude oil pollution in Bayelsa State. It affirms an atrocious level of harm visited on the state including that there is the total hydrocarbons pollution of the water in the state at 1 million times above safe or acceptable standards. One million times above safe standards.
We note that the pollution is from both old and active wells, flow stations and pipelines. Indeed, abandoned and decrepit oil infrastructure continue to pose extreme menace to the environment and the people of the State. Some communities have been ripped apart by canalisation; while others face the threat of being washed into the ocean by combined forces of subsidence, sea level rise and coastal erosion.
Our water ways are blatantly and recklessly used as waste dumps for produced water and sundry harmful wastes in disregard to ecological and human safety. Our lands and water bodies are privatised and damaged, through acts of egregious industrial vandalism and systemic environmental racism, emanating from the worst forms of colonial resource extraction and land grabbing.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, often when we talk of climate change, we focus on the carbon in the atmosphere, mostly emanating from the burning of fossil fuels. That is right. However, it is inexcusable that we can ignore routine oil pollution and gas flare furnaces belching a toxic cocktail of greenhouse gases and other noxious chemicals into our environment and the atmosphere.
As will be seen from this conference, the BSOEC report does not only set out the woes of oil pollution but presents a comprehensive roadmap for environmental recovery in Bayelsa State and the restoration of our right to life and dignity. A lesson from this singular effort of the Bayelsa State government and the Commission that produced the report is that there is no time to waste. The harms suffered since the first commercially viable oil wells was drilled in 1956, 68 years ago, are open sores that cannot continue to be disregarded.
We congratulate the governor and people of Bayelsa State for setting up the BSOEC, receiving its report and determining to implement the recommendations of the report.
The world is debating the needed energy transition in the collective fight against climate change. While that is being done, other transitions, socioeconomic, ecological, as well as political transitions will be needed to ensure that justice undergirds every effort being made. We need transition from imaginaries that lock in extractivism and exploitation without responsibility.
We need to ensure that the new energy regime being constructed is not built on the same polluting foundations of the ebbing petroleum civilisation. This requires a bottom up, participatory approach which does not ignore indigenous knowledge and wisdom.
Remediation! Recovery! Restoration! Reparation!
These are key scaffolds for building our way out of the hole the extractivism and accompanying pollution have pushed us into. Now is the time to forge the pathways to the future we desire.
There is a clear need to declare a state of environmental emergency in the oil producing communities of Nigeria. It is time for a comprehensive environmental, social and health audits of the region.
The process must now be put in place to expand the work of the Hydrocarbons Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) to cover the entire Niger Delta. The UNEP on the “Assessment of the Environment of Ogoniland” and the BSOEC reports have laid very strong foundations for this effort. We cannot wait any longer.
This conference provides an excellent platform for harnessing ideas and building support for the next steps going forward. We have sufficient expertise, knowledge and wisdom in the house and it is clear that we are in for very productive engagements.
