Douglas Blessing, Port Harcourt
The Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) has urged the incoming Minister of Environment to take the issue of environment very seriously, especially in ensuring the restoration of all environmental degraded areas across the country.
The group made the call yesterday, at a training organised in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, for community ecodefenders.
The HOMEF also urged the incoming Environment Minister to ensure that the ongoing cleanup exercise in Ogoniland is speedily carried out according to specification of time and as directed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) assessment report.
Speaking with journalists at the programme, Mr Stephen Oduware, Programme Officer for HOMEF, said President Bola Tinubu should appoint someone who is environment friendly, who has the interest of the safety of the environment and is ready to ensure a healthy environment.
Oduware who noted the degraded level of the Niger Delta environment by activities of the oil companies, insisted that the incoming Minister must help to achieve the restoration of the livelihoods of impacted communities in the region.
He said: “We have often seen in Nigeria portfolios and positions given to to people who may not have the environment at heart. So we would say that they should put the square peg in a square hole and put a round peg in a round hole. You don’t need to go and bring somebody who knows nothing or who cares less about the environment because you want to make some group of people happy.
“Nigeria is not a one man’s land. Nigeria should be taken seriously and political appointment should be given to people who have the knowledge, the wherewithal and also, people who are passionate about the environment should be put to handle such positions.
“The Niger Delta is heavily polluted, the corporations are not being regulated, so the minister should first of all, come and have a health audit in the Niger Delta, and in other places where mining acitivities are going on. They should go and clean up areas that have been polluted; they should clean and remediate it, they should also restore the livelihood of community people who have been impacted by their activities for over 60 years of exploration and exploitation activities in the region and in other places in Nigeria”.
On the aim of the training Oduware said: “The participants have been taught about the rudiments of environmental monitoring and also what they can do with the report of such monitoring. So it is expected that as they leave here they are fired up to take into consideration all the happenings in their environment to document it and to also call for action where it is needed”.
Also speaking, Dr David Vareba, a facilitator at the training, said the impact of oil spills in the region is devastating, noting that “environment is our life, is where our first right is because everything we do, our livelihood, our health, our wellbeing, even our culture depends on the environment”.
Vareba who is the Executive Director, Access Africa for Rights and Development Initiative, said sensitise the ecodefenders to do everything they could to ensure that the issue of incessant occurrence of oil spill reduce at a barest minimal.
On the ministerial appointment, he stressed “I am not very optimistic about what they are going to do. We are not going to see a change from what we have seen. When the Environment Minister comes, what we will be seeing is how they will share the slot of the contract within HYPREP.
“We are not envisaging much change but when the Minister comes, as civil society organisations we are going to engage him constructively and tell him the kind of changes we want in the Niger Delta with regards to the environmental laws. Because their concentration is so much around where there is constructs, especially with HYPREP”.
