ANOTHER WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY, ANOTHER
SPEECH MAKING BAZAAR IN BAYELSA?
By Iniruo Wills
___________________________________________________________________________________
Barely half way gone and still fairly young, the year
2020 is already uniquely historic in many ways. Easily forgotten now is the
infectious affection with which an enthusing world welcomed it at birth, for as
simple a reason as the nice ring of its twin name, Twenty-twenty. The ritual of New Year resolutions was expressed in
momentous tones and portrayed with the finest memes across social media.
Then came coronavirus from the shadows of 2019’s
evening, breaking out onto the morning of this year. Nothing has since remained
the same. The world has literally stood still. The buzzword in recent years being
disruption, coronavirus has become
the world’s dominant Disruption. All are agreed that the one overarching lesson
from the pandemic is that the world must rethink and reset its ways; so too its
rituals.
One ritual perhaps to rethink and reset is the
practice of designating days on the annual calendar to, as it were, celebrate specific themes of life.
Almost everyday of the year is now World Something
Day: World Friendship Day, World Human Rights Day, World Gender Day, World
Sickle Cell Day, World Happiness Day, and so on. Some themes are even repeated
by having resort to synonyms. So we have World Earth Day on April 22 and World
Environment Day on June 5. It is almost as if we need to pretend seriousness on
global challenges by setting aside a day for each one. After that day, life
goes on as usual until another year and another World Day for another set of moving
speeches.
We have to wonder if this culture of annual rituals,
without more, can ever put a dent on any global challenge. Whoever bothered to empirically
evaluate what remarkable impact this global governance by rituals has made? For
all the pain the pandemic has caused and its costs socially, if it forces us to
check the habit of dressing up complacency in garbs ranging from solemn
commemoration to jubilant celebration, it would be a small dividend. Perhaps a
greater dividend would be for the United Nations, leading designer of these
rituals and embodiment of the world system, to take stock for self-reinvention,
seeing as it was itself flustered at the outset of covid-19.
If there is one place where the shock of covid-19 and
the oil price crash that coincided with it should serve as a life cry to
convert a crisis into a catalyst for change, it is Nigeria and, more so, it is
Bayelsa State. The 2020 World Environment Day is a fitting day to start that
move.
The environment of Bayelsa State is probably the most
polluted on the planet, due to reckless and unregulated petroleum production
activities, both by government-licensed operators and artisanal groups who
siphon and crudely “refine” crude oil on their own terms. The ravages of
petroleum pollution in the state, as I have often pointed out, are only possible
in ungoverned spaces, i.e. where governments do not exist. Agip/ENI, Shell,
Aiteo, Chevron and other oil producing behemoths overwhelm the regulatory and
supervisory institutions of the Federal Government and State Government alike. The
artisanal racketeers desecrate the environment further, while most of the
security operatives look the other way, barring periodic scapegoats.
The State’s immediate past governor, Seriake Dickson,
rightly described the situation as environmental terrorism. Sadly, Governor
Dickson also exemplified a political governing elite whose spectacular failure
is the reason why just another round of World Environment Day speeches in
Bayelsa State may mean nothing more than blowing of hot air.
Blessed with eight years as governor, Dickson embarked
on a policy of grandiloquent rhetoric as his environmental roadmap from 2012
till 2019. So the State remains grossly oil-polluted, the worst flooded every
year and without a flood management plan (the Dutch Embassy tried to facilitate
one but was treated like it was begging to be done a favour), and without a
single public waste management infrastructure. Institutionally, it knows not
what to do about the rich biodiversity in its renowned mangrove forests and
extensive coastal territory, an area broached by the UNDP at a time for a
marine park, to be the first of its kind in the sub-region if not in Africa.
The State’s Ministry of Environment, i.e. the environmental governance body of
the most ecologically distressed State in Nigeria, enjoyed spasmodic funding of
roughly three hundred thousand Naira about every other month, at least for the
period April 2014 to February 2016 when this writer was Commissioner for
Environment. Capital releases were practically zero: zilch! The environmental
governance ministry of the state is institutionally dilapidated and perennially
gasping for breath.
Governor Dickson waited till his last year in office
(2019) to take the only serious step he ever did to deal with the multi-layered
crisis, by empanelling the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission.
Comprising a fine team of Nigerian and international experts, environmentalists
and moral figures led by the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, the BSOEC has
done tremendous work to record the ecological epidemic that has been the lot of
Bayelsa’s people since 1956 when oil was struck in one of their communities in
commercial quantity, for the first time in Nigeria. For a task that entailed
intensive field visits and might be next in significance only to the
unprecedented UNEP Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, BSOEC was inaugurated
just months to the foreseeably turbulent governorship elections in the State.
It worked against debilitating constraints that members tried courteously to
conceal and could only defy by their sheer gravitas.
Shorn of the policy discontinuity associated with
political transitions (even when the same party produces the successors), and
with the right funding and personal executive support - a.k.a. political will -
accorded BSOEC by the Governor, for that is how we roll in Nigeria, the smooth
conclusion of the Commission’s work may be the State’s finest hour yet on the
environmental stage. It would be the best chance at mitigating the former
governor’s betrayal of Bayelsa’s wounded environment. Alas, he does not hold
the monopoly for that shame.
One of the biggest lessons from the covid-19 crisis is
that, regardless of globalization, societies must learn to be their own solutions
not just in public health but also generally in building resilience against
shocks coming from whatever sector, whilst striving for universal standards.
Added to that, the epidemic of racist homicide in season again in America,
reminding us how that land of dreams is not nearly as civilized as it is
developed, should teach us that we cannot keep waiting for outsiders to free us
from our shackles. Some of the external liberators we are counting on are crawling
in their own moral scourges.
The moral here is that Bayelsa’s leaders must start to
solve Bayelsa’s problems and compel external violators to do right by our
people, including by way of strict enforcement of environmental standards.
There is no lack of approaches to reverse the situation, but there has always
been lack of will by native Bayelsans or Niger Deltans that have been
governors, senators, ministers and president.
It is specific people with specific authority that must be held
responsible for the primitively polluted condition of Bayelsa. Our kith and kin
previously in these positions refused to protect our ecology, biodiversity and
environmental rights. Senators go and come back with no agenda. Ministers of
Petroleum were more interested in OPEC meetings and the prestige of rolling
with oil industry moguls than with compelling the industry they supervise to
clean up their mess. The only Minister (of Environment), one not from our
region, that showed an understanding of the value and urgency of our environment
was Amina Mohammed. Whatever her faults, she was a better “Niger Deltan”
Minister than all the Ministers of Niger Delta origin. Since 1999, when last
did a Minister of Petroleum from the Niger Delta visit any of our devastated
sites? President Obama visited the areas affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon
blowout many times and pressed BP and its co-defaulters to ensure they were
properly remediated and victims were compensated. Our previous governors have
rather embarked on grandiose projects than do the things that will enhance
communities and livelihoods.
This lack of shame and community patriotism is at the
core of our problems, ranging from development to empowerment to environmental
governance. We have had the headquarters of the Nigerian Content Board in our
domain for ten years now. Granted, it has done considerably well in promoting
Nigerian content. Yet, it has done so abysmally in terms of host community
content enforcement and empowerment that no less an expert on comparative local
content policy as the Guest Speaker at this year’s World Environment Day
Conference in Bayelsa State, Dr Pereowei Subai, hinted at a possible advocacy
for the establishment of a separate agency for Community Content Development,
during the public presentation of his book on local content last year.
So let us look beyond the fiction of regulatory
institutions and pin down responsibility on human agency, where it practically
belongs in our Nigerian context. For the present time, the two most important
gentlemen responsible for stopping the environmental carnage on our homeland
from the petroleum industry are the incumbent CEO of Bayelsa State, Governor
Douye Diri, and the incumbent Minister of Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre
Sylva, both sons of Bayelsa State. None is a Hausa-Fulani or Yoruba man or
Italian. It is to them we must look for the revival of the ecological carcasses
of our communities that form a morbid trail:
-
from Ezetu where
an oil firm insulted them with the rubble of a burnt platform as a gift “for [their]
hospitality”,
-
to Koluama that
was displaced by ocean surge and is yet to be duly compensated for the K S
Endeavour blow out,
-
to Okpoama that
was recently flood by oil pollution,
-
to Brass Kingdom
that is drowning and eroding away under 48 years of daily toxic sludge from
Agip/ENI,
-
to Otuabagi that
is witnessing fresh crude oil seepages from the earliest wells that fed Nigeria
with petrodollars before the drillers and government abandoned the community
high and dry to move on to new fields,
-
to Obunagha where
the giant Shell flame of hell burns, and
-
to Nembe area where
Aiteo the indigenous oil giant has been mercilessly polluting and seems to say
“go to hell”.
Their predecessors failed on this score. But if
Governor Douye Diri and Petroleum Minister Timipre Sylva resolve to be
decidedly different from their predecessors, there would still be hope for
restoring our biodiversity. Then this year’s World Environment Day may not have
been just another worthless bazaar of speeches. It would be a mark of how we
did not waste the lessons of the crisis of this season.
Wills a Former Commissioner of Environment in Bayelsa,
wrote from Yenagoa.
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