Group Urges Bayelsa To Commit 10% Revenues To Tackle Oil Pollution

The Coalition of Ijaw interest groups and other key stakeholders have tasked the Bayelsa state government to commit five to 10 per cent of Bayelsa State’s revenues to the Environmental Recovery Fund proposed in the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission (BSOEC) report.

This, they said, was an effort to address the dangerous and destructive pollution slowly killing people in Niger Delta and desecrating the ecosystem, due to oil spillage.

Recall that the BSOEC Report was released on 16th May 2023). The high breed international panel chaired by the former Archbishop of York and now member of the UK House of Lords, Lord John Sentamu, was set up four years ago to look into and recommend remedies to the devastation caused by the oil and gas industry on the environment, social economy and human lives of Bayelsa state.

Findings of the Report titled ‘ENVIRONMENTAL GENOCIDE: The Human and Environmental Cost of Big Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria revealed that, about 110 to 165 million gallons of crude oil have spilled in the state over the last 50 years, adding that, “For the State’s population, currently projected at about 2.5 million the cumulative spill volume translates to each resident suffering an average share of one and half barrels of oil spilled, with the attendant impact.

“In some locations, toxic contaminants such as chromium are present in the groundwater over 1,000 (one thousand) times the World Health Organization’s limit for safety. In addition to the alarming data for gas flaring in the State, the Report also quotes research that puts at 16,000 the number of infants killed by pre-natal exposure to oil spills within a month of birth.”

In a communique, made available to LEADERSHIP, the coalition of Ijaw interest groups and other critical stakeholders in the environmental sector, stated that these indices of pathology are a threat to the continued existence of the Ijaw indigenous nationality and the physical integrity of their homeland, and could therefore provoke any affected population into self-help where the governments, regulators and justice systems that should secure and rescue them have either failed them or in some cases appear to be in collaboration with the genocidal polluters.

They averred that the Bayelsa state government, the federal government, the ministers of Petroleum and
Environment, and other regulators and agencies in the sector, that have brushed aside and overlooked this dangerous and destructive pollution slowly killing people in the region and desecrating the ecosystem now have a core duty and responsibility to bring this environmental genocide to an immediate stop.

They however recommended that the Bayelsa state government should immediately write to the President of Nigeria, demanding the immediate set up a Niger Delta-wide Environmental Remediation Programme. The Bayelsa state government should also impose sanctions within the state’s power, including revocation of rights of way and land leases over operational sites of repeated or egregious environmental breaches, they appealed.

Part of their recommendations are, “The state government should file a formal complaint with the office of the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court to investigate the unprecedented ecocide in Bayelsa state as environmental genocide or a continual crime against humanity. This is urgent because successive Nigerian Presidents and Ministers of Petroleum and Environment, along with the regulatory agencies under their supervision, including most incumbents in those offices, are deeply complicit by commission or omission in the fossil fuel industry’s ecocide in the Niger Delta. They have been conditioned by the Nigerian system to never feel any incentive to act. The government should appoint and capacitate a Bayelsa State Special Counsel on Environmental Justice Enforcement, with adequate provisioning and periodic public reporting obligations.”

They also tasked the federal government to properly fund, stabilize and sanitize the Niger Delta Development Commission and Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, that are vested with statutory mandates for the environmental sustainability and remediation of the Niger Delta, adding that both bodies have been trailed for years by reports and scandals of entrenched corruption, vested external interests/interferences, substandard execution of projects, ghost contracts and subverted tendering/procurement processes, budgetary
abnormalities, plus series of arbitrary cum illegal appointments and removal of their executives.

“The new federal administration should beam a searchlight on these important organizations, to arrest the recurrent travesties and reposition them in accordance with their enabling laws for full delivery of their objectives, including the ecological mandate of NDDC. The functional failure or unabated drift of either or both would create huge setbacks for any expectations of satisfactory environmental remediation and social recovery in the region and throw the region into a tailspin. That spectre and its implications for Nigeria should be a cause for concern to all, home and abroad,” they advised.

“The people of Bayelsa State expect the brisk, faithful execution of the Lord Sentamu Report’s action points, and to hear particularly from the federal government and the Bayelsa state government without further delay. Let us stop the talk and clean up the oiled wasteland. Only then can our People trust our governments,” they appealed.