The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth (ERA/FoEN) has called for the immediate establishment of a remediation fund of $100 billion by the Federal Government for the cleanup of the entire Niger Delta region polluted by oil and gas activities.
Part of this fund, according to ERA/FoEN, which would be contributed by the oil companies, will also be expended for the compensation of communities and individuals directly affected by over 50 years of oil extraction.
Dr. Godwin Uyi Ojo, Executive Director, ERA/FoEN, who made the call at a press conference in Benin at the weekend, called for the implementation of all emergency measures recommended by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to the imparted Ogoniland, which include the provision of portable water, conduct of health audit and setting up of a health register in all the imparted communities
Ojo also urged President Muhammadu Buhari to as a matter of urgency; restructure the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) for the effective service delivery to the people of the oil producing regions especially, the Ogoni land.
He said if such is not done, the rate at which things are at the moment, it will take more than 100 years for HYPREP to complete the more complex polluted sites in Ogoni land which they have not even started to address.
Ojo, who titled his address ‘A litany of failure and a season of discontent occasioned by HYPREP on the people of Ogoniland’ said, it was exactly nine years after the United Nations Environment Program, (UNEP) submitted a groundbreaking report to the Nigerian state detailing its findings, conclusions and recommendations on the environmental assessment of Ogoni land and without any tangible results to show for it.
“It has been nine years of motion without movement, nine years of unfilled promises, nine years of high-level manipulations by Shell and the Nigerian states as well as nine years of opaqueness and unaccountable operations by HYPREP. It has been nine years cluttered with a litany of failures and continuous discontent throughout Ogoni”, he said.
He noted that the reason HYPREP has not lived up to its billings is because it is not designed nor structured to implement a project as complex and sizeable as the Ogoni cleanup and therefore needs restructuring to position it for a more effective cleanup.
The environmental activist alleged that work had stopped at 11 of the 17 cleanup sites researchers visited and that many of these sites stopped work in late 2019 while the two sites had not even commenced work at the time of their except for the information board displayed outside their area of operation.
Ojo further alleged that HYPREP is bogged down by the Nigerian government bureaucracy and Shell bureaucratic bottlenecks which has seen the programme unable to make progress to open the bid process for the more complex sites, and there appears to be no disclosed strategy on how to move forward with the aspect of the project.
The Environmentalist, however, recommended that strong legislations by governments in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands mandating companies to respect human rights and apply the same environmental standards across global operations.
