Category: Alternatives

Decolonize our Waters

Colonialism is beyond the political control and exploitation of one nation by another, it extends to relationship with Nature. The colonisation of Nature sees it being exploited and resources being transformed for economic gain without much regard to socio-ecological impacts. This bent has led to myriad problems including climate change, biodiversity loss and conflict. Terminologies such as Green and Blue economy have been coined as fig leaves to actions that seem good but merely provide cover to negatives activities. 
In the School of Ecology held in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, we looked at two key matters, the first being what it would mean to have Marine Protected Areas (MPA). The second issue was connected to the first, and that is the Blue Economy. We considered why the Blue Economy, such a beautiful name, should be a cause for concern.  The term and concept of “economy” has become so pervasive that it is taken as a given that aquatic ecosystems are for nothing other than meeting the ends of capital accumulation through the business of exploitation.
Although Blue Economy is conceptualised as the sustainable management of aquatic and marine resources and ecosystems, anything  done for other than economic profit or power is seen as unreasonable or as not viable. Our concern is to promote the resilience of our ecosystems and secure them from being grabbed by wielders of power and capital. Some people see the promotion of the Blue Economy as a means of securing life under water as highlighted in the Sustainable Development Goals. However, there isn’t much life under water coated by layers of crude oil and contaminated to outlandish levels above safe limits. What life is under water in Bayelsa State for example where the recently released report by the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission reveals that “the concentration of noxious chemicals, such as Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons, exceed safe levels by a factor of  1 million according to some of the samples taken.” 

Environmentalism from below requires that we overturn the notion that environmental concerns are for those who have met their basic needs, are sated, and have the pleasure of thinking of luxuries. We also need to demolish the distorted notion that environmentalism begins and ends with the forcing of citizens to evacuate waste from drainages once a month, only to pike them on the edges of the drainages to be washed back, by the rains, into drainage channels. Environmentalism from below requires those who depend on the environment for their basic needs to stand up to reject attempts for the territories to be appropriated for mindless exploitation by the powerful and connected individuals, governments and corporations. 

Economy ought to be a third or fourth leg of sustainability, but the other legs, social and environment, have been roundly diminished that the table largely stands on one leg. So it is that the Blue or Green Economy are terms that must be taken with a dose of salt. Blue Economy is conceptualised as the extraction of economic value from aquatic ecosystems through deep seabed mining, modern biotechnology, geoengineering, industrial fishing and a variety of other activities. Some of these activities lead to ocean acidification and compound climate change impacts besides outright pollution. 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. The wellbeing of 200 million Africans who depend on fisheries for food and nutritional security is clearly at risk. 

The implication of the grabbing of our water bodies is that very soon they may be partitioned and claimed as private properties. No doubt once these areas have been claimed, they will become inaccessible to our fisher folks and coastal communities. The partitioning and claiming of aquatic territories may seem far fetched but that is only if we deny that this is happening already. Industrial installations, such as crude oil platforms, command land swathes of territories around them ostensibly as security buffers. 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. We have a situation where access to healthy water bodies is becoming more and more difficult by the day due to industrial installations and related pollution. In recent times, we have been witnesses to massive oil spills from blowouts at well heads at Santa Barbara river and at Ororo-1 well; explosion of FSPOs; and the incredibly polluting blowing up of oil laden vessel and burning of bush refineries by the security forces. 

With about 90 percent of sea-based pollution, including plastic wastes, in the Gulf of Guinea traceable to the Niger Delta, it is time for our governments (and ECOWAS) to declare an environmental emergency in the region. We need this in order 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. The advantages are numerous and deeply connected to the peoples history and socio-cultural outlook. Such people-managed MPAs would see restoration of degraded areas, rebuild biodiversity, revive cultural practices, restore dignity and reinvigorate local economies. In sum, we aim to work together and figure out ways of liberating Nature, from the bottom up.   

Decolonizing Our Energy Future

This reflection is coming at a critical moment with climate change alarm bells are ringing loudly and clearly. According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), global near-surface temperature rise may between 2023 and 2027 exceed the threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Although they say that this rise would be temporary, it is also agreed that there is no certainty over whether this scenario is true.

The point is that although 1.5C is given as the best-case scenario in the Paris Agreement, catastrophic impacts of extreme climate events are already being experienced with temperature rise below that threshold. Droughts, water stress, coastal erosion, desertification, and related conflicts are well documented. We have seen such events in Nigeria and in Africa generally. Floods have led to the deaths of thousands of Africans in recent years, and the intensity of cyclones has been on a high trajectory, especially on the southeastern seaboard of Africa. Higher rainfall and floods have been predicted for Nigeria in 2023.  

The climate alarm bells may be sounding what has already been the experience of those least responsible for climate change. The point must also be made that Africa suffers about 50% higher temperature increases than most other regions worldwide.

What have all these got to do with the shift from corruption to sustainability and the critical need to energise Nigeria’s future? Many things. The concept of sustainability itself has been corrupted and is limping on two legs when it should stand on at least three. The traditional three legs of sustainability are social well-being, economic growth, and environmental care. Without a doubt, in practice, economic growth trumps environmental care and social well-being. The focus of governments on economic growth has blindsided the fact that development, and social well-being, cannot be attained without ecological care. Lineal economic growth and sustainability are contradictory on a finite planet.

With massive revenue from crude oil and gas, Nigeria has allowed decades of ecocide on her environment and permitted operators in the sector to ride roughshod over the social and even cultural wellbeing of communities unfortunate to have these resources in their territories. The Niger Delta, comprised of wetlands, swamps and forests, is crisscrossed by 21,000 km of oil pipelines and has 5000 oil wells.  The extreme degradation that has rendered this region one of the top ten most polluted places on earth has been attested to by UNEP’s assessment of the Ogoni Environment and recently by the reportof the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission aptly titled “An Environmental Genocide: Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria.”

Besides the word ecocide and what the Bayelsa Commission has termed genocide, the other word to describe the situation in the oil fields is corruption. 

According to the 2014 OECD Foreign Bribery Report, one in five cases of transnational bribery occurs in the extractives sector. Research confirms Studies a correlation between corruption and increased carbon emissions particularly as this had been a key for extending the life of carbon-intensive industries, through corporate capture, alternative truths and sometimes outright deception.

It is estimated that Nigeria has suffered a financial loss of more than 11 trillion Naira from corruption in the electricity sector from 1999 and this May rise to over 20 trillion Naira by 2027.

Nigeria’s Energy Future

It is not easy to figure out what government policy would be and how it will shape Nigeria’s energy future, seeing that the nation is in a critical moment of political transition. The electioneering campaigns should have presented robust ideas on energy or about the environment. The town hall on environmental issues, hosted by a coalition of CSOs, including HOMEF, was unfortunately shunned by the front-running political candidates. From public statements, the parties are all enamoured with rent-seeking from the murky oil and gas sector. However, we suppose that the incoming government will implement the Nigeria Energy Transition Plan and other policy templates, such as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) from the outgoing government. In that case we can surmise that there will be a need for intensified campaigns at both practical and pedagogical levels. The alternative will be to allow a reign of muddling through half-hearted policy formulations.

Among other things, Nigeria’s NDCs pledge to end gas flaring by 2030 and to reduce fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas by 60% by 2031. To put this in perspective, The NDC indicates that fugitive emissions represent 36% of energy sector GHG emissions, accounting for 60% of the country’s total GHG emissions.  This means a 60% reduction would represent about 13% of total GHG emissions for Nigeria. The International Renewables Energy Agency (IRENA) states that Nigeria can produce 60% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2050. The report projects that 47% could be reached by 2030 and 57% by 2040. These projections may appear less than plausible for a fossil fuels dependent country with scant investment in renewable energy.

As for the Energy Transition Plan, the aim is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, with key focus areas being power, cooking, oil and gas, transport, and energy. The plan discusses replacing fossil fuel-powered electricity and deploying decentralised renewable energy to achieve universal electrification goals by 2030. The same plan interestingly states that “there will be an initial ramp-up of gas generation before 2030.” It also mentions the “deployment of centralised RE-solar PV and corresponding storage with Hydrogen starting from 2040.”

There are concerns about Nigeria’s energy future due to embedded contradictions, and lack of political and economic clarity hinged on a complex of factors, including ongoing divestments by international oil companies, the marriage to fossil gas and the proposal to deploy centralised solar power and production/storage of hydrogen. Despite the enormous amount of oil and gas extracted in Nigeria, the nation suffers perennial power outages, boasting of poor social infrastructure and massive poverty levels.

With an energy future hooked to fossil gas and centralised renewable infrastructure from 2040, Nigeria seems unable to escape the trap of rent-seeking from fossil fuels.  It will step into rent-seeking from solar power by producing “Green Hydrogen” for export. Thus, energy will likely be available for export, but unavailable for use at home.

To avoid this bleak prognosis, the incoming government, and others after it, must take decisive steps to invest in research, production, and socially moderated distribution of renewable energy to meet the national and regional needs.  Regular corruption risk mapping will help the process of grasping how corrupt practices operate in the sector. These are important because the extraction of minerals for renewable energy equipment can easily replicate the dastard realities associated with fossil energy resources.

The temptation to get trapped as the perpetual storehouse for colonial exports of oil, gas or Hydrogen must be halted. 

For Justice and Dignity

We have just had elections in Nigeria and by 29th May 2023 new persons will step into the saddle of political leadership. Considering the nature of our political system where the major parties are indistinguishable in terms of programmes and organizing ideas, it is a major duty for citizens to make clear demands on the system and to ensure that leaders are held to account based on their promises, declarations, and the constitution.

The Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence (NDAC) as a forum for the fusion of voices on the multi-layered socio-ecological crisis confronting the region provides a platform for the promotion of actions to address the problems. It is our hope that this convergence will not be a hand wringing exercise garnished with a long list of regrets. This must be an agenda setting convergence, and that agenda must include both what we expect of our political leaders and what we must do as citizens on the back of whose votes they have ridden into power.

Socio-ecological issues hardly take the forefront in political discussions in Nigeria. We had to push this with a different kind of presidential Town Hall we co-hosted on the 7th of February 2023 at the University of Abuja. Four presidential candidates participated and brought discussions about the environment to the spotlight highlighting why our environment must no longer being brushed aside in policy circles in Nigeria and Africa.

The challenges of the Niger Delta are well known and have been catalogued in the Willink Commission Report of 1958 and the activities of various agencies set by government with some exhibiting a poor focus on solving those problems but gaining a dubious reputation of being cesspits of corruption. Such agencies include the Niger Delta Development Board (1960), the Oil Minerals Areas Producing Development Commission (1992), Niger Delta Development Commission (2000) and the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs (2008).

The key outcome of NDAC 2022 was the Niger Delta Manifesto for Socio-Ecological Justice. The manifesto outlined eight (8) key demands that remain germane as the outgoing governments did not appear to hear the call of the peoples of the region. The Manifesto will again be examined at this convergence as a reminder, and to both reinforce and convey our core demands.

These core demands include the following:

  1. An immediate comprehensive audit of the entire region Niger Delta covering health, livelihoods, social and economic impacts of crude oil and gas extraction.
  2. Remediation and restoration impacted territories and reparations for the damage suffered.
  3. Drawing up a clear policy framework for divestment of international oil companies from the oil fields and communities they have exploited for more than six decades.
  4. Comprehensively address the issues related to artisanal refining of crude oil, stop all forms of oil theft, and hold accomplices to account.
  5. Legislators to ensure the review of the Petroleum Industry Act, to eliminate the criminalisation of communities and removing vestiges of colonial authorities given to oil companies to determine who the host communities are and to rig the arrangement for developmental supports of the communities. The earmarking of 30 per cent of profit of the NNPC for exploration of oil in so-called frontier fields should be deleted from the Act and a definite deadline to end routine gas flaring should be set.
  6. Immediate review of the NDDC Act and the release of the forensic audit ordered by the outgoing government. The administration of the 13 percent derivation fund should also be designed to be transparent, inclusive, and fair to impacted communities.
  7. Urgent responses to climate change impacts including by setting up mechanisms for emergency response to floods, shoreline protection, restoration of mangrove forests, halting of deforestation and proper urban and rural planning.
  8. Adequate protection of our coastal communities and continental shelf for the security of maritime transportation as well as fishing activities by our peoples. 

Other items that must be on the top burners of incoming governments include a comprehensive energy transition plan that ensures popular ownership and control of such clean energy systems. 

Politicians should have zero tolerance for uncompleted and abandoned projects. The drive to embark on so-called legacy projects must be halted. The region will remain a basket case if new players in governments refuse to complete projects commenced by their predecessors and instead chase after projects that may not address the critical socio-ecological and economic needs of our peoples.  Completion of projects started by previous administrations should be a cardinal principle.

Finally, permit me to recommend that the Nigerian government should take steps to recognize ecocide as a crime and ensure the prosecution of offenders going forward. Ecocide in simple terms is the destruction of one’s home, the Earth. Any person or entity engaged in activities that lead to large scale and long terms or irreversible destruction of our home, the Earth, should be held to account as an incentive for others to be of good environmental behaviour.

We must regain our dignity as a people. We must rebuild our devastated region. We can do it. And the time to do this is now.

This Hate Does not Define Us

Mangled ballot boxes 

Bloodied faces

Headless goats

Mouthy hoodlums in the corridors of power

Burning votes define the 

Last (s)elections 

Yes the (s)election  has come

Yet refuses to go

You are not us

We are not you 

Stay away! 

Risk death 

If you won’t thumb my avatar

Meanwhile the powerful masquerade as enemies 

In the dark they snort together 

Convivial cannibal crooks feasting on 

Laden tables 

Yes the (s)election  has come but

When will it be gone

The loquacious wax louder 

Brimming bile and utter nonsense 

The Good Book declares

Even fools are thought wise when they keep silent;

with their mouths shut, they seem intelligent.

Maggots-laden mouths lie in wait

To spew more trash on the threshing floors of death

Hate does not define us

Still hate struts bloodied streets propelled

On ballistic missiles 

Stereotypes misfired from damned guns 

Cheap commodities for bloody blackmail

But

This hate does not define us

Yes the (s)election has come but 

Yet refuses to go.

Yes, we voted, weeping, dancing, beaten by rain and batons 

Yes, voters waited outside the nameless collation tombs.

Why are dancers frozen in midair?

And winners blowing muted trumpets?

——–

Written after reading Bishop Kukah’s Easter message

09.04.2023

Don’t Play Politics with our Environment

The town hall meeting has been convened to provide a platform for presidential candidates in the upcoming election in Nigeria to discuss their plans and strategies for addressing critical environmental and climate challenges facing the country. We thank the Vice Chancellor of this great university for playing host to this epochal event. We are also highly enthused by the fact that our youths are a majority in the audience. The future belongs to you and the seeds sown by those we elect will determine the level of wellbeing attainable in the coming decades. They could also determine your chances for survival. The subject of this town hall is fundamental for our survival and to living in dignity. 

Without a safe environment the enjoyment of human rights is impossible. The present Nigerian Constitution at Section 20 provides for environmental protection as one of the Fundamental Objectives and directive principles of state policy. It states that states shall protect and improve the environment and safeguard the water, air, forest and wild life of Nigeria. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights expressly states at Article 24 that All peoples shall have the right to a general satisfactory environment favourable to their development. The Charter has been domesticated by Nigeria, thus, provides a basis for the justiciability of our right to a safe environment. 

The reality is that the focus of political leaders on the environment has been largely tokenish. The indicator that they care at all about the environment is often only when they move to destroy underserved and largely autonomous communities termed slums. It is this mindset that led to the destruction of Maroko (which was inhabited by over 300,000 people) in July 1990 and is now threatening Makoko community in Lagos. And sometimes a cosmetic sanitation exercise in which trash gets pulled out of drains and piled by the roadside until they get washed back into the drains. Although there is a designated ecological fund, its use has been characterized as mostly being for political ends.

The Environment Unites

We believe that serious focus on tackling the environmental problems in Nigeria could be a unifying factor in a nation faced with many divisive factors. Every region has significant ecological problems and investment in solving them would reduce the troubling reality of unemployment by providing needed supports to our largely informal economy. Our propensity to invest in mega projects serve more as means of financial extraction rather than meeting real social-economic needs of our people. We celebrate the construction of deep seaports, but do we have any fish port for the millions of our artisanal fishers?

Cross section of participants

Nigeria suffers from huge biodiversity loses. At a time when our farmers should be supported to build a farming system that works with nature, to preserve indigenous seeds and varieties, we are opening to all sorts of genetically engineered seeds and products in a very lax biosafety regulation regime that threatens our biosecurity and food security and ignores the precautionary principle. While the law requires labelling of GMOs as a cardinal requirement for their being permitted into our environment and to our dining tables, our social-cultural context and informal trading systems make labelling an impossibility. Since we cannot label, we should not permit. That is simple logic. Should we sacrifice our health and environmental sustainability, promote monoculture, and disrupt our agricultural systems for seed monopolies and promoters of pesticides, and other harmful inputs?

Environmental sustainability has lost much of its meaning since it is hung mostly on the economic plank which sees the environment as a thing to be exploited or transformed for the extraction of rents often termed foreign exchange earnings. This drive for foreign exchange has allowed rapacious exploitation that has scarred our environment and our peoples, leading to a catastrophic and shameful fall in life expectancy. 

Concepts such as the green economy, blue economy and the like, have been aped without any serious interrogation. These have built the scaffolds for the commodification of nature, exploitation of our people and entrenchment of colonial approaches that deepen poverty and lock in corruption and a lack of accountability. Some of these approaches have led to massive land and sea grabs and raised the potential of sky grabbing and ultimate loss of independence.

Existential Threats

The climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity, Nigerians, more so. The floods of 2022 took the lives of over 600 Nigerians and destroyed infrastructure and over one million homes. Now we have heard warnings about impending floods. This town hall should help us know how the candidates would address this perennial issue that is bound to get worse. Amid floods, Nigerians are battling with water stress and the blockage of water ways by invasive species across the nation.

The trend in political circles has been that Africa must persist in using fossil fuels to drive economic development because Africa has not contributed significantly to the harmful carbon stock in the atmosphere. A supporting argument to this is that renewable energy cannot drive industrialization. Before the conversation begins, let us place on the table that this argument is contestable. The entire nation of Greece was powered with renewable energy for 5 solid hours in October 2022. Overall, the European Union produced 22 percent of its electricity in 2022 from wind and solar power. If we wish to ignore that as a signal that change is coming, let us not ignore the fact that overall, although Europe is investing in fossil fuels infrastructure in Africa, they are taking steps to wean themselves of this same energy source. And, there has been a drop in energy demand as the people become more conscious of the climate crisis.

Will we continue to pollute our environment, extend the situation in the Niger Delta to Gombe, Bauchi, Lagos and elsewhere? Do we consider the fact that without a shift in the clean direction, we stand a chance of becoming the cemetery for internal combustion engines in the coming decade. What will the presidential candidates do to ensure that we don’t end up with stranded assets as the international oil companies divest and skip off with inordinate profits, even as our communities are already stranded. 

We are here to hear from our esteemed presidential candidates. The moderators will likely cover issues of droughts, desertification, deforestation, floods, coastal and gully erosion, oil, and other forms of pollutions. We would also like to know what they would do about the oil/gas well fire that has been raging since April 2020 at Ororo-1 field off the coast of Ondo State. Hopefully, we have a leader that will not keep a blind eye on such blatant ecocide. 

Uncontrolled artisanal mining, including of lithium right here in the Federal Capital, and the disturbing blasting of hills in the outskirts of Abuja for construction materials, pose serious environmental and social-cultural problems.

This town hall is as much a platform for the candidates to inform us of their plans for the environmental sector and a platform to sound a wakeup call to every Nigerian to hold office holders accountable for environmental actions or inaction. We cannot play politics with our environment because it holds the webs of life.

Four Presidential Candidates were in attendance were: Omoyele Sowore of African Action Congress, Dumebi Kachikwu of African Democratic Congress, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso represented by the NNPP Chairman, Prof. Rufa’i Ahmed Alkali and Adewole Adebayo of the Social Democratic Party. 

Welcome Address by Nnimmo Bassey, at the Presidential Town Hall on Environment and Climate Change held at the University of Abuja on Tuesday, 7 February 2023. The Town Hall was hosted by the University of Abuja in partnership with Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Corporate Accountability and Popular Participation Africa (CAPPA) and We The People (WTP).

Waking from the Fossil Nightmare

The Niger Delta is a territory under siege. This siege did not begin today. It didn’t begin yesterday. The siege has been on prominent from before the 15th Century.

The siege has disrupted our ways of living, our communities, our cultures, and our spirituality. It has brought drastic fissures in our relationship with Nature and other beings. This assaulted our routine patterns of living in harmony with nature, our philosophical underpinnings of ubuntu, eti-uwem and other norms by which communities were built on the platforms of cooperation and solidarity rather than on violence, dispossession, undue accumulation, and wastefulness. 

This disruption has eroded our resilience, harmed our health or broken our biodiversity. Today we breath poisoned air, fish and drink polluted waters and grow foods on toxic soils. 

We must not forget that we were once organized, productive, and progressive nationalities with moralities and communalities that paralleled or excelled their counterparts elsewhere. At that time farming yielded bountiful harvests, and fishing was a great joy before the downward spiral . Today, with broken local economies and environments our story has become an unending struggle for survival. 

History may have been banished from our curriculum, but no one should banish them from our schools of life. They provide markers and memories of where we have been; what we have built; what we fought for, won, or lost. History provides us with more than mere scaffolds for the construction of our future. It gives us the energy needed to confront oppression, degradation, humiliations, and sundry manifestations of ecological racism.

We remind ourselves that leaders of the Niger Delta were not pushovers when the shove came from brutal precolonial and colonial adventurers. We recall the fact that the battle for the control of trade between our peoples and European markets brought much violence against our people. It led to cruel military invasions and horrendous pillage, with the razing of Akassa in 1895 standing out as one of the reprehensible landmarks on the march to colonialism.  The smoke of that assault was still rising when the Royal Niger Company (Unilever) sold Nigeria to the British crown for £865,000 (Eight Hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds sterling in 1899. 

That Akassa massacre was over palm oil. One hundred years later, in 1995, the bloodletting continued with the judicial murder of Ogoni leaders in a bid to continue reckless exploitation of crude oil, without any concern about the environment or the people. 

Oil spills, blowouts, gas flares, and the criminalisation of a people

Today oil spills have become routine occurrence and responses have remained slow or inadequate. Gas flaring continues and deadlines come and roll by while the people and environment continue to be gassed with no respite in sight. Several well blowouts have been recorded over the decades, including Texaco’s (Chevron) Funiwa -5 well blowout of January 1980 which spilled 400,000 barrels of crude and another blowout and rig fire at the same field in January 2012. In recent months we have been witnesses to the AITEO well blowout at Nembe in November 2021 with an estimated 300,000 barrels of crude oil dumped into the environment and the explosion and sinking of an aged and unlicensed floating, storage and production vessel (FSPO Trinity) off the coast of Ondo State in February 2022. One largely ignored well blowout is the one at the Ororo-1 field. This well blow out occurred in April 2020 and has been burning and spilling crude non-stop for over two years now. In which other region in Nigeria or in the world would a disaster of this magnitude be ignored for two solid year and counting? 

The criminalization of the people of the Niger Delta has been something of concern to many. Transnational oil companies and public agencies continually plead “sabotage’ or third-party activities as the cause of every oil spill. They never pause to ask how these so-called sabotages occur despite the high militarization of the region.  The oil companies and related public agencies have sung this refrain so much that it has become a tattered fig leaf. Now the situation has expanded with horrendous pollution through artisanal refining in the region. We dare say that this deviant economic activity may have been encouraged by corporations and their cohorts as a mean of offloading pollution resulting from their irresponsible environmental behaviours. It has also arisen as individuals and groups ape the Special Economic Zones concept that officially creates enclaves of economic activities with least control on the guise of promoting national economies.

The Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence

The Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence (NDAC) has been convoked as an inclusive platform for the individuals, civil society groups, political players, community groups, women, ethnic nationalities, and business to come together to address the nagging problems that continue to plague the region. The NDAC is a conference that yields spaces for the interrogation of the outputs of research, community dialogues and the search for alternative resource management pathways as well as examination of laws governing mining and petroleum sectors in Nigeria. The space for engagements of this nature has been often rigged against our communities, but this is a peoples-driven engagement designed to ensure that the communities are heard. It builds on other convening that has been led by many highly respected groups in the region over the years with the aim of extricating the region from the paths of retrogression.

The convergence also aims to produce an inclusive Niger Delta Manifesto for socio-ecological justice highlighting needed alternatives for transformation and social mobilizations for re-source justice. It is hoped that NDAC will provoke a platform for convergence of communities in the region to galvanize action for needed changes for resource access including through demands for legislative changes, debates on the Petroleum Industry Bill, and for critical attainment of re-source democracy – defined as the right of a people to live in harmony with Nature and to retain a right to use, or not use, the gifts of Nature.

Bandages over Festering Sores

We recognize that huge sums of money have been allocated to alleviate the dastard harms caused by petroleum resource exploitation in the region. Such efforts include various Memoranda of Understanding with communities by oil companies, and various government interventions through agencies such as Niger Delta Development Board (NDDB) established in 1961, the Niger Delta Basin and Rural Development Authority (NDBRDA) of  1976, the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC) of 1992, the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) established in 1995,  Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) set up in 2000 and the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs created in 2009. 

These efforts have been characterized by the throwing of money at the problems without a participatory and due consultation with our peoples. Little wonder the outcome has been reigns of corruption and manifestations of abject failure. They have been nothing short of bandages aimed at covering festering wounds without dealing with the fundamental malaise that over six decades of reckless oil and gas exploitation has inflicted on the people and the environment. 

Life After Oil

Considering that the world is moving from fossil fuels and that Nigeria is struggling unsuccessfully to meet her OPEC allowed production quota; considering that oil theft continues apace, oil spills, gas flares and dumping of toxic wastes and sundry ecological destruction continue unabated, we risk not just being left behind by the world, we risk remaining mortally wounded and utterly stranded if we do not brace up insist on urgent transition from this destructive activity, demand and insist on a clean-up of the entire region. Tomorrow will be too late. This is the time to examine and check-mate the moves by transnational companies to divest from their ancient infrastructure, drying wells, polluted fields and sneak away to enjoy their loot. 

We cannot say this too often, but it is time for us to accept that without a healthy environment we cannot be a healthy people. 64 years of oil extraction has brought untold misery and cut life abysmally low in this region. Things cannot continue this way. We have demands and resolves in the proposed Niger Delta Manifesto shared to delegates. Let’s all rise to be counted, demand that politicians declare their environmental plans before they gain our votes; let us demand real climate action including a halt to gas flaring and a restoration of our ecosystems. Let us demand action to stall the washing away of our communities. After 64 years of a nightmare, it is time to wake up, it is time to demand socio-ecological justice. We are not calling for charity, we are calling for justice.

I thank the Chairman of this Convergence, His Excellency, Obong Victor Attah, a man with demonstrated impeccable leadership and wisdom. I thank our keynote speaker, Prof G. G. Darah for what promises to be a rousing call for action based on knowledge. I thank all our academic, activist and community comrades who will take the podium in this Convergence.

I welcome you all, brothers, and sisters.

Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation at NDAC 2022 held at Watbridge Hotel, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria on 23 June 2020.

Learning for Change

The wise is a knowledge holder and keeper. 

Learning is a lifelong process. In other words, we never graduate from the schools of life as long as we are still on planet earth. We learn to walk, to speak intelligibly and we learn to be part of our communities. Many factors affect our learning and some of these are personal, others are social, cultural, and economic. In this information age, we need guidance to navigate the rapidly changing situations with virtually everything around us. There must be few things that are not in a flux around us. We struggle to keep up with changes in our culture, social norms, environment, politics, education, the arts and even spirituality.

In the midst of the stormy changes, we note that the changes are propelled by humans and human institutions, including corporations. Wisdom requires a rethink of current modes of production, reproduction, and consumption. Consciously retaining understanding of our being, as humans, in the community of other beings is essential in an age such as we are in. To do otherwise is to become beings that have lost both memory and mind. We need information and we are having more than we can analyze and sift for our purposes. This state of things require that we pause, sit, and learn. We need to learn from the wise, the proverbial seated elders who see far beyond what the youths cannot see standing on top of palm trees.

Although the wise do have information, information on its own is not wisdom. Information is like tools in a box. Anyone could own or access the toolbox, but only the trained or schooled would know what tools to use and for what purpose. Mere information is not wisdom. Having a pouch filled with information does not make anyone wise. Knowing what to do with gathered information per time, makes one wise.

Our elders and initiates into diverse age groups hold a vast array of knowledge about our forests, ocean, and biodiversity generally. As we know, some of the knowledge are not accessible to all and could get lost if the holders are not available or willing to share such.

Why sit at the feet of the wise and the knowledge holders in natural and less formal settings? We do this with the aim of bridging the gap and building relationships between the learner and the teacher. It is essential to build relationships of trust to facilitate knowledge sharing, interrogation and understanding.

Through Learning from the Wise (LftW) we hope to tap into the reservoir of the abundant knowledge of our people from especially knowledgeable and respected individuals.

What are the questions plaguing the youths? How are they interpreting the objective conditions around them? What is their reading of the state of the environment and energy systems? We don’t just want our youths to know the solutions, we want them to know how to find solutions to known problems and even to those yet to occur.

Our hope is that our youths will not only be recipients but agents and broadcasters of knowledge and wisdom using contemporary tools such as those available on social media platforms and which are readily utilized by them.

It is our desire that the youths bear in mind that, as is the case with all teachers, knowledge holders are often not self taught. They learn from other knowledge holders and understand that they hold the knowledge as a sacred trust, as something to be shared with others. The knowledge cuts across all spectrums of knowing and include those on environment, traditional medicine, varieties of crops and animals, value systems, ceremonials, values, and language. 

Our knowledge keepers are custodians of our tangible and intangible cultural heritage embodied and manifested in our knowledge system, including fishing and farming systems, customs, poetry, songs, architecture, and other art forms. The fact that the tangible and intangible are closely intertwined as a multilayered tapestry of life urges us to fundamentally look at our learning processes and spaces. What are the available spaces for learning? Universities? Why not Multiversities? How come our polytechnics are more like monotechnics? What are our youths educated for? Are they educated for life steeped in solidarity, dignity, and respect, or are they trained to be mere economic beings, sold and bought by the highest bidder? Can such narrow educational pathways prepare a people for the increasingly complex challenges they must face?

LftW is a platform for active acquisition of knowledge, bearing in mind the urgent need to propel changes in our society, the kind of change we desire and need. The change that is for the people and from the people.

Reject Seed Colonialism in Africa

It has often been said that one of the ways to colonize a people is by dismantling or subverting their culture. This pathway is also effective for building dependency and disrupting the systems that organically secures the health of the populations. In terms of agricultural and food systems, the disruption is most effective when staple crops are targeted, appropriated through patenting and presented as mere merchandize. Food is fast becoming an instrument of control and power.

Science has been used as a cloak for the introduction of foods of dubious value and quality. The quest to solve perceived problems through artificial means introduces new problems, some of which can be intractable. Today we see unrelenting forces seeking to control our food and agricultural systems with attendant disregard for indigenous knowledge, natural cycles, biodiversity, and livelihoods of communities. 

We are concerned that food is being seen as a mere commodity or a mechanical or chemical product from a factory or laboratory. Truth is that eating is beyond swallowing food to satiate hunger; food has deep cultural and spiritual anchors with special significance in many religious observances. 

Food supply across Africa depends largely on the maintenance of a healthy and thriving biodiversity. Our farmers save, reproduce, and share seeds, understanding that these seeds encapsulate life. These communities engage in mixed cropping and harvest a mix of fruits, tubers and vegetables that yield foods that are rich and healthy, providing needed nutrition and building defenses against illnesses. They have a strong link to what is presented as food and harvests are never mechanical exercises. Moreover, many of our farmers do not see food production as mere business or for profit.

These practices are being threatened by the genetic modification of seeds particularly those that make up our staple foods.

Today we are speaking of the genetically engineered cowpea, popularly known as beans in Nigeria, and drawing attention to the fact that the insecticidal beans can also kill non-target organisms and that even the target pests can develop resistance. In the same vein, when crops are genetically engineered to withstand herbicides, we cannot ignore the fact that they kill other plants and microbial life and not only the so-called weeds. These modifications interfere with the webs of life in ecosystems, and this has intergenerational consequences. 

Although the promoters of the Bt cowpea claim that it will translate to improved food security in Nigeria due to availability of much higher amounts of cowpea, one concern that cannot be overlooked is that this GM variety will utterly contaminate natural varieties through cross pollination. This means that even where a farmer chooses not to grow the GM variety, the preferred natural variety will be contaminated. Thus, rather than promote food security, Nigeria/Africa is stepping into an era of uncertainty, of gross unpredictability and instability of food supply and resultant food insecurity.

The genetically engineered beans (recently approved for commercial release in Nigeria despite objections by HOMEF and several other stakeholders) is modified with the transgene Cry1Ab which has not been approved anywhere else in the world. Most of these genetically engineered events are prepared overseas and brought for testing in Africa and yet we boast that we are adequately equipped and innovative. The genetically engineered cowpea is originally a Monsanto product brought to Africa on supposedly humanitarian grounds. We insist that Africans must not be used as testing ground for novel and risky technologies.

Promoters of these risky technologies fight against strict liability clauses in national Biosafety laws. This has been experienced in Nigeria, in Zambia and in Uganda and so on. In Uganda a clause in their genetic engineering regulatory law was inserted to ensure that producers of GMOs will be held accountable for any harm that may come from cultivation or consumption of their products at any time, even if such effects manifest years later. Since then, GMO promoters and producers scientists have branded President Museveni and the Ugandan parliament as being anti-science. 

There are attempts to overlook the Precautionary Principle which is the bedrock of biosafety regulation. Simply put, the precautionary principle advice that where there are doubts regarding human, animal or environmental safety, we should hold the breaks. Good genetic engineering science must not leave room for doubt and when harms manifest, the producers should be held strictly liable. 

The speed with which Nigeria is permitting GMOs is highly suspicious and offers no assurance that the government is concerned about food safety, the preservation of our biodiversity or the rights of our indigenous peoples. Neighboring and other African countries should beware.

As you are already aware, this press conference is a platform for exposing the grave risks our food and agricultural systems face through the introduction of genetically modified beans. Besides the environmental and health risks, our people’s right to choose what variety to plant and what food to eat is absolutely breached by the introduction of the genetically engineered beans, a staple and critical source of protein for our peoples. The right of choice is eliminated because our food systems do not allow for labelling. This right is fundamental, and our people should not be ambushed to eat any risky material. We call on farmers to reject Bt Cowpea seeds and continue to protect our food system.

My welcome words at the International Press Conference on Bt Cowpea held on 7th March 2022 via Zoom

What After Oil

Good morning, distinguished participants in this Public Forum. I have the privilege of welcoming us all to this event which is organized by the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation in partnership with Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and with the solid support of Ford Foundation. We hope this forum will trigger other inclusive engagements and platforms to help rouse us from slumber, ask ourselves frank questions, and take a peep at the energy and economic future of our country, Nigeria. 

The petroleum civilization is winding down. The handwriting has been on the wall for quite a while. The burning of fossil fuels has taken up the carbon budget and wrapped the earth with a thick blanket of greenhouse gases that have resulted in the hottest days in recent history and calamitous floods, wildfires, and other freak events. While climate change is a global crisis, we cannot deny the fact that we face peculiar impacts at both national and sub-national levels.

For one, the global shift towards more sustainable energy technologies is bound to provoke a precipitous reduction in global demand for hydrocarbon fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas. With nearly 86 percent of Nigeria’s export value coming from fossil fuels, the global energy transition will have profound effects on our economy. The prospects of a zero-carbon future will also have a far-reaching environmental, social, and governance impacts on Nigeria. 

Most affected by this will be impoverished extractive communities who have been treated as sacrificial zones since the first commercial oil well was drilled at Oloibiri 65 years ago. The impacts of climate change are already being experienced through sea-level rise and coastal erosion. These impacts are multiplied by the massive pollution whose intensity going by NOSDRA reports amounted to 1,300 spills or an average of 5 spills a day in years 2018 and 2019. 

The global tumbling of oil fortunes has led to shifts in the calculations of fossil fuel companies. While some are rebranding through a change of name, others are shifting to other energy fields. And some are moving from onshore oil assets to offshore deep-water oil fields. 

This forum intends to build an understanding of the potential impact of the inevitable global energy transition on Nigeria. It also seeks to trigger improved inclusiveness in re-source governance and reduce the power asymmetry in climate action. Finally, we hope to see in what ways government can enhance commitment towards the implementation of policies, laws, regulations and initiatives that would lead to equitable economic, social, and environmental outcomes in extractive communities.

This is a pivotal public forum that will set the tone for further community-level engagements. Today we will be learning from economic experts and industry players as we figure out appropriate responses to the dramatic shifts unfolding before us. We are also looking forward to hearing from government officials and community representatives. We believe that even if energy shifts produce stranded assets, actions must be taken to ensure that we do not end up with stranded communities. 

Again, let me say what a great honour it is to welcome us all to the forum. Let us make this a major marker on the pathway to a Nigeria where every citizen has access to electricity and energy from clean, safe, and renewable sources. We look forward to a future where no territory will remain a sacrificial zone and where citizens are actively integrated into re-source ownership, management, and energy production.

16 September 2021

Politics of Turbulent Waters

The fact that Africa can be completely circumnavigated has advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that the continent can be accessed by sea from any direction. This means that the seas can be a ready tool for wrapping up the continent and promoting regional integration and cooperation. We would be stating the obvious when we say that this spatial disposition has also made the continent prone to exploitation and assault. This position made it easy for Africans to be uprooted and relocated through slavery and this central location of the continent equally made it open to adventurers and colonizers. It is also noteworthy that key terrestrial infrastructure on the continent either begin or end at the shorelines.

The sea means a lot to Africa and her littoral states. The mineral resources and aquatic diversity have attracted entities with interest in legal activities and others with illegal intentions. With the world literally scrapping the bottom of the natural resource pot, there is a scramble for the sea and one way to sell the idea of limitless resources and opportunities has been to dream up the Blue Economy concept. In the publication, Blue Economy Blues, HOMEF stated:

To understand the Blue Economy, one needs to look at the concept that inspired its creation. That concept is that of the Green Economy. The Green Economy is another top-down concept that jars the organic relationship of humans with their physical environment as it essentially deconstructs that relationship and builds up on a philosophy that distances humans and other species from the environment and presents that environment as a thing to be manipulated, transformed, and exploited in a way that delivers gains along subsisting unequal power alignments.

African political leaders, including those at the African Union, are enamoured to the Blue Economy concept particularly when considering what can be done in the areas of fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, transport, shipbuilding, energy, bioprospecting, and underwater mining and related activities. The oceans and lakes simply appear to be spatially limitless and endowed with limitless resources. The truth is that these notions aren’t true.  African waters are among some of the most overfished waters, and this is often not for consumption in the continent. 

Our fisheries provide nutrition to about 200 million Africans and employment for over 35 million coastal fishers.Nevertheless, about 25 percent of fish catches in African waters are by non-African countries, according to an FAO report.

West African waters that have been among the most fecund have seen shrunken fish populations due to overfishing, illegal fishing and climate change. These illegal fishing activities are often carried out by large foreign industrial trawlers that travel over long distances with the help of harmful subsidies. It is said that about 65% of all reported illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing takes place in the waters of Gulf of Guinea.

The rush to exploit our oceans has manifested in criminal activities including sea piracy, waste dumping (oil spills) and stealing of fishes. Shockingly, 95% of all kidnappings at sea is said to happen in the Gulf of Guinea

Their catches are said to end up being used to feed livestock in Europe and the USA.  According to reports, these trawlers come from China, Russia and countries in the European Union. They catch more fish in one day than what an artisanal fisher would catch in a year. These unregulated and illegal activities largely go unreported. 

IPCC—Oceans warming faster than expected

Warming oceans lead to reduced fish populations and catches as fish migrate to cooler waters and away from equatorial latitudes. Ocean warming has been fingered as triggering more violent cyclones such as cyclone Idai, Kenneth, and Loise on the southeastern seaboard of Africa. The warming has also led to the destruction of coral reefs off the coast of East Africa. This clearly has impacts on fish stocks.

The sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirmed that 1.5C temperature rise above preindustrial levels may be reached by 2050 due to the continued dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If drastic emissions cuts are not embarked on, the world is on track to overshoot the Paris Agreement targets thereby literally frying Africa and cooking our oceans. This will make nonsense of any notion of the Blue Economy, except that the oceans could become arenas for geoengineering experimentations aimed at sucking carbon out of the atmosphere or for some form of solar radiation management by pumping sea water into the clouds.

With temperatures rising and polar icecaps melting, the IPCC report assures that sea level rise stays on a steady course. The floods are coming. Submergence of coastal communities and cities will go from being a threat to becoming stark reality. We are already seeing deadly floods on virtually every continent. With sea level rise comes loss of coastal land and infrastructure, as well as loss of freshwater systems through salinization. For a continent that often suffers water stress and has the spectre of water conflicts hanging like the sword of Damocles, real action must be taken to counter climate change. 

One key action that must be taken is the outlawing of new oil or gas fields in our oceans and other aquatic ecosystems. The oil rigs and FSPOs (Floating Productions Storage & Offloading) cut off fishing grounds and engender human rights abuses by security forces who expose fishers to extreme danger just to ensure an expansive off-limits cordon ostensibly to protect oil company installations.

It is equally a time to halt the building of petrochemical refineries and other polluting industries (such as the one at Lekki Free Zone at Lagos) on seashores as they are sure to pollute the waters, poison the biodiversity and negatively impact the food chain. A phosphate factory at Kpeme, Togo, for example, pumps its  wastes into the Atlantic Ocean, literally fertilizing the continental shelf to death. Nutrient pollution can have devastating impacts on public health, aquatic ecosystems, and the overall economy. 

Blue economy sails on the highway of pervasive market fundamentalism that seeks to shrink public involvement in productive endeavours and yield the space for the private enterprises. Market fundamentalism blinds policy makers to the fact that the so-called efficient and profitable private sectors depend on subsidies and securities provided by the public sector. One only needs to think of the bailouts of financial institutions during economic meltdowns, and the elimination of risks by pharmaceutical companies in the race for COVID-19 vaccines. These are, of course, justified by overriding public interests.

The drive to support industries such as those producing plastics, and our love for disposable products, permit highly polluting materials such as plastics to be unleashed into our environment thereby causing great harm to our oceans and aquatic creatures. It has been said that there would be more plastics than fish (by weight) in the oceans by 2050.

Reports indicate that the production of plastics increased twentyfold since 1964 and reached 311 million tonnes in 2014. This quantity is expected to double again over the next 20 years and almost quadruple by 2050. It should be noted that the volume of petroleum resources needed to make plastics has been increasing steadily, and despite the highly visible pollution impacts the demands keep rising with only about 5% of plastics being effectively recycled and 40% ending up in landfill. 30% of the plastics end up in sensitive ecosystems such as the world’s oceans.

Already there is a plastic flotilla or a Great Plastic Patch in the Pacific Ocean that is euphemistically called the 8th continent. The patch is “three times the size of France and is the world’s biggest ocean waste repository, with 1.8 billion pieces of floating plastic which kill thousands of marine animals each year.” Sadly, those plastics will require hundreds of years to degrade if left floating out there.

The politics of economic development and market fundamentalism, allow what would ordinarily be unthinkable to happen. A drop of crude oil contaminates 25 litres of water making it unsuitable for drinking. Imagine how much water was polluted by Shell’s 40,000 barrels Bonga Oil spill of December 2011 or Exxon’s Idoho platform spill of similar volume in 1998. Shell’s Forcados terminal spill of 1979 dumped 570,000 barrels of crude oil into the estuary and creeks, while Chevron (then known as Texaco) released 400,000 barrels of crude oil in the Funiwa incident of 1980. Add to these the Ozoro-1 oil well blowout off the coast of Ondo State in April 2020 that has remained a crime scene more than a year after.

A little help from Nature

Once upon a time, our turbulent seas were embraced by verdant mangroves on our coastlines. Today the mangrove forests have been deforested for energy or to make way for infrastructure or urbanisation.  These forests are key components of a viable Gulf of Guinea. Without them the region has no answer to rampaging waves and sea level rise. The spawning ground for fish species and nurseries for the juveniles gets eroded and lost as mangroves get depleted. Oil pollution turns the mangrove forests into dead zones. Their deforestation opens up space for invasive nipa palms introduced to the Niger Delta in 1906 by a horticultural adventurer.

The call for restoration of mangrove forests must be supported and acted upon. This can be done in cooperation with community groups that are raising nurseries and demonstrating their efficacy through pilot efforts. Support by government can bring these efforts to scale and impact. Alternative energy sources also need to be provided for communities that depend on mangroves for fuelwood.

Protecting selected freshwater and marine ecosystems could be a way of securing thriving biodiversity in our oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers. However, such areas must be delineated with close attention to indigenous knowledge and the cultural protection norms of communities that depend on them for their livelihoods.  Top-down approaches to establishing protected areas end up dislocating communities, harming their economies, and eroding their cultures, spirituality, and dignity. Some of such areas are simply demarcated for officially sanctioned land and sea grabbing. They can, and have been, used as tools of oppression and exploitation. 

In an article titled “Protected areas must promote and respect rights of small-scale fishers, not dispossess them,” Sibongiseni Gwebani stated, “The concept of protecting an identified fishing area, designating marine spatial territory and linking this to specific regulations has a long history in South Africa. These have been influenced by the apartheid spatial planning legislation introduced in the 1960s. Large proportions of coastal land were forcibly cleared for either forestry or marine conservation by using racial segregation laws. The histories of all of the major marine protected areas in South Africa are shaped by racially based removals through land and seascape during the 1970s and 1980s.”

No Politics with our Seas

The statistics rolled out during Health of Mother Earth Foundation’s (HOMEF) School of Ecology on the Politics of the Sea, show a very disturbing situation in the Gulf of Guinea. The gulf has become one of the most dangerous maritime areas in the world. He informed that 90% of sea based environmental pollution footprint in the Gulf of Guinea takes place in Nigerian waters. The region is very laxly policed and is a zone of plunder with hundreds of thousands of stolen crude oil moving unhindered.

When we gaze at the ocean, creek, or river, let us think about life below the surface, not as an SDG goal, but as creatures that have rights to live and thrive as children of Mother Earth. Let us see our water bodies as arenas of life and remind ourselves that we are just a tiny fraction of the biomass of living beings on earth. The seas offer us a canvass for learning positive politics of life rather than scrambling to grab and trash whatever we can lay our hands on.