The Senate yesterday mandated its Committee on Health (Primary and Communicable Disease) to meet with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to ascertain the number of mysterious deaths so far recorded in Bonny Island, Rivers State.
The upper chamber also urged the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management through the National Emergency Management Agency to provide support materials to the people of the area.
It also mandated its Committee on Environment to meet with the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency to ensure reduction of marine pollution of all kinds.
The resolutions were reached by the Senate following consideration of a motion on the urgent need to intervene in the mysterious deaths in Bonny Island.
Sponsor of the motion, Senator Betty Apiafi, lamented that in the last week of March 2020, there were incidents of large quantities of dead fish around the Bonny-Andoni
shores and several other coastal communities along the Atlantic shoreline in the Niger Delta region stretching from Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Akwa Ibom and Ondo states.
She said, “Less than six weeks later, mysterious deaths have been occurring in Bonny Island in Rivers State and is reported to have claimed about 13 lives.”
