Group Intensifies Call for Environmental Emergency in N’Delta

Blessing Ibunge in Port Harcourt

The Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) has called on the Nigeria and West African regional governments to declare an environmental emergency in the Niger Delta region.

The group made this call after a study showed that about 90 per cent of sea-based pollution, including plastic wastes, in the Gulf of Guinea, is traceable to the Niger Delta.

Speaking at HOMEF’s School of Ecology on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) held in Port Harcourt at the weekend, the Executive Director, Dr. Nnimmo Bassey, called for an immediate step to ensure a safe Niger Delta environment.

According to him: “It is time for our governments (and ECOWAS) to declare an environmental emergency in the region. We need this to ensure that our peoples have a safe environment to carry out their economic, socio-cultural, recreational, and spiritual activities.

“One immediate step that must be taken to ensure that our aquatic commons are not enclosed and grabbed is to have community-managed Marine Protected Areas. Such protected areas could cover rivers, creeks, swamps, and continental shelf.”

Bassey further sought the wellbeing of communities that depend on fisheries for food and nutritional security, saying it is ‘clearly’ at risk.

He blamed the threatened environment in the region on colonialism which, he argued, has gone beyond the political control and exploitation of one nation by another and has extended to relationship with nature.

“This means that after the extreme exploitation of the land, the sea and the sky are the new targets. Just as lands have been demarcated as mining blocs, the same is overtaking the seas,” he said.

Bassey, however, said the implication of grabbing water bodies evidenced by industrial installations, such as crude oil platforms, command land swathes of territories around as security buffers, causing restrictions for fisher folks and coastal communities to access certain areas is posing a threat to their livelihood.

“Stories from fishers who have tried to move into the high seas in pursuit of their business is that large parts of the continental shelf and beyond are off limits because they have been claimed and literally cordoned off by extractive industries’ installations. Another debilitating factor is that of unregulated industrial fishing in our waters,” he said.