Category: Alternatives

Extractivism and Cultural Resistance

The challenges confronting our communities and peoples generally are interconnected. They are often analyzed and presented as though they operate in silos. The reality is that they operate in intricately connected webs and must be understood as such. Our lands are grabbed for extractive or exploitative purposes. Extractivism in turn drives climate change. Climate change in turn triggers more extraction as well as land resource actions. The cycle goes on, until we take action to break it.

To unpack the components of the crises, locate the critical nodes and points of vulnerability, and act to propel transformation using cultural tools we need to look at three key things: land grabbing, extractivism and climate change. As already noted, they are interconnected and are not necessarily hierarchical or sequential.

Land grabbing 

Ownership of land in Nigeria was historically in the hands of individuals or communities. Today, through a military decree promulgated on 29th March 1978, communities have been dispossessed of their lands while ownership has been grabbed by the state, euphemistically on behalf of the dispossessed.  By virtue of the overbearing control of the military over the county’s governance structure, that Decree was inserted in the 1999 Constitution and barricaded in as inviolable. In other words, there should be no debate over its operations. The forced supremacy of the Land Use Act can be seen in its section 47 (1) which states that the Act is literally an outlaw and shall have effect notwithstanding anything to the contrary in any law including the constitution.

Clearly the Land Use Decree or Act was designed in a colonial template of resource appropriation that deprives the colonized of the fundamental resource and ensures that it is owned and used to meet the utilitarian needs or other means of enjoyment of the colonizers. Those whose lands are grabbed may only be compensated for loss of economic crops and for improvements on the land. In practice the compensations have been grossly inadequate, if not outrightly insulting. Consider for example a payment of N100 for a mango tree when one mango fruit could go as much and such a tree would bear multiple fruits for several years. 

Lands may be grabbed by different means, and for diverse purposes. By virtue of the Land Use Act, the government can grab any land by declaring that it is required for the public good. The use of such a land would invariably change, sometimes with dire consequences. A forest could be cleared and replaced with a plantation or cash cropping for export. A poor community could be demolished and the people get displaced and then their territory gets replaced with expensive resorts, hotels or gated estates. Wetlands can be sand-filled and taken up for infrastructural purposes. The list goes on.

The Nigerian government claims ownership of minerals and petroleum resources in the subsoil. So our lands can be grabbed for mining or for oil and gas extraction, ostensibly for the common good. Because  this often happens without free prior informed consent, when the people are called stakeholders what it means in fact is that while the company and government share the profits, the communities own the pollution. Which is also why such pollution is hardly ever cleaned up.

Indeed, land can also be directly grabbed through pollution. Two quick examples can show how this happens. A stream polluted by an oil spill becomes the waste dump of the polluter and usage for fishing or potable water is lost. Secondly, dumping of wastes on a parcel of land takes that land out of the control of communities. Often pollution is not an accidental exercise. It is used to dispossess communities of their land and creeks and for the exploiter to assume ownership without accountability, responsibility or sense of respect of the owners.

Our quest for development without questions also permits lands to be grabbed for infrastructural development. Often such lands are taken without prior informed consent 

Our culture and language are tied to our land and our liberation is connected to both.  Our culture nourishes and empowers us to stand against commodification of Nature and of life. It helps us to defend what belongs to us. It draws boundaries that no one must cross. Our culture is our power!

Extractivism

Extractivism as a concept covers a complex of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differentials that promote and excuse socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life through colonialism, militarization, depletion, and dispossession. It is a mode of capitalist exploitation…

Although extractivism is used mostly in terms of mining and oil it is also present in farming, forestry, fishing and in the provision of care. According to an entry in Wikipedia, “Extractivism is the removal of natural resources particularly for export with minimal processing. This economic model is common throughout the Global South and the Arctic region, but also happens in some sacrifice zones in the Global North in European extractivism.” Extractivism destroys lands, pollutes the ocean and destroys water bodies and wetlands. It results and feeds on land grabs, sea grabs and is aiming at sky grabs with a rise in space enterprises. Extraction also happens with regard to data and labour.

Climate change

The fact that climate change is driven by dependence on fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — is well known. The main challenge is that the world keeps a blind eye to what communities suffer in the oil fields and focuses on mostly chasing carbon molecules in the atmosphere. This lack of focus on both ends of the pipeline has left communities destitute by damaging their lands and water bodies and thereby destroying their food systems, economies and cultures. 

The gradual agreement to terminate the petroleum civilization, and Yasunize the world,  implies that the time to remediate and restore lands damaged by oil and gas extraction has come. This remediation and restoration must be accompanied by reparation.

Our communities have suffered multiple impacts from climate change, extractivism and land grabbing.  Persistent pollution has been the lot of our communities. Studies such as the UNEP assessment of Ogoni Environment and the recently published Bayelsa Environment and Oil Commission’s report titled Environmental Genocide all show the dire situations. Some communities have their soils contaminated with hydrocarbons to depths exceeding 10 meters. Waters are polluted with benzene and other carcinogens. The air is grossly polluted with a cocktail of noxious gases through gas flaring. These pollutions do not readily disappear on their own. They must be consciously tackled and cleaned up. And the time for that is now. 

Other impacts of climate change include sea level rise, costal erosion and salinization of the ocean. These affect local livelihoods and equally provoke conflicts or displacements of communities.

Cultural resistance 

Our lands are healed when extraction and land grabbing are challenged and overcome. Cultural tools are essential for successful resistance is our happiness. They are the sources of people power. A happy community cannot be easily defeated. 

Another key tool is our love. Our love for one another and our love for our land and culture. Love reinforces solidarity. Beyond love, we must build stubborn hope as an antidote to despondency. Hope empowers action. It emboldens.

Boldness empowers telling of truth, including the reportage of destructive extraction and land grabbing. The oppressed must remain emboldened by the knowledge that while the rich worry about the end of the world, workers and exploited communities worry about the end of the day and have deep stakes on what happens tomorrow. 

To resolutely stand against land grabbing and extractivism and also build resilience against climate change our communities need Care and Repair Teams (CARTs) as key agents for overcoming trauma, stressors and illnesses. These teams can also be agents to press for remediation, restoration, repairing and reparation. These demands and their attainment require the use of every tool of cultural resistance. 

Our Right to Safe Food

Nigeria, like many other African nations, stands at a crossroads to her food future. The stark choice is between adopting agricultural biotechnology in line with the industrial agriculture model or agreocology (regenerative agriculture). The former, in the guise of enhancing agricultural productivity, and fostering economic development, locks in monocultures, loss of biodiversity, seed monopoly and seed/food colonialism, while the latter delivers increased productivity and economic resilience and nourishes and revives ecosystems, strengthen local economies, mitigate climate/environmental crises, and promotes food sovereignty.

In this workshop, we will examine the very pressing and complex issues of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and biosafety. As judiciary officials in various capacities, entrusted with upholding the rule of law and ensuring justice prevails in our society, it is imperative that we are well-versed in the intricacies of this rapidly evolving field and risky technology.

GMOs ride on the wave of global fetishization of technology by which technology is considered a silver bullet. Besides posing difficulties to regulatory frameworks, they directly impact on human as well as socio-economic rights of our peoples. The complex threats and attendant risks of this technology makes it expedient that we examine the implications of GMOs through the lens of fundamental human rights. It is important to understand that GMOs represent a paradigm shift in agriculture. These are plants, animals, or microorganisms that have undergone fundamental changes at the cellular level and can no longer be considered natural. Most of them are engineered to withstand dangerous herbicides which kill other organisms except the engineered ones. Other crops are genetically engineered to act as pesticides aimed ostensibly to kill identified pests that would otherwise attack the crop or seeds. Examples include Bt Cotton and Bt Cowpea or beans approved for commercial release in Nigeria. The implication of eating a seed engineered to kill a pest is that you are eating a pesticide with unexamined implications including the microbes in our guts.

GMOs are promoted in Nigeria on the premise of addressing food insecurity. However, after almost three decades since their introduction in the world, they have not eradicated or reduced hunger. Rather, they lock in the system that promotes hunger by degrading soils, reducing biodiversity, disregarding the knowledge of local food producers, and concentrating power in the hands of a few market players. 

The hope of Nigeria dominating the international market and generating billions of US dollars is a pipe dream as nations who do not endorse genetically modified crops will not accept our products unless we wish to further make capital on the opacity in the handling and trading of these and other seeds.

The truth, distinguished participants is that we don’t need GMOs to feed our population. This technology threatens the lives and rights of our local farmers who have selected and preserved seeds, crops, and animal varieties over the centuries, who have kept a stock of varieties that both provide food and meet our medicinal and other needs. 

In a country like Nigeria, consumers are unable to exercise the right to choose whether to consume GMOs due to the peculiar way food is sold and consumed. We cannot label the foods and seeds largely sold on the roadside, in the traffic, and in an assortment of our informal markets. This is if labelling were to even be successfully enforced.

To enhance food production in Nigeria what is needed is the provision of supports to our family farmers and the adoption of farming methods that enhance the health of our soils. Healthy soils build ecosystem resilience to environmental stressors and build biodiversity instead of encouraging monocultures which help pests to thrive. We need a system that supports farmers with needed access to credits, land, infrastructure, and access to markets. We have a moral obligation to steward the Earth’s resources responsibly and to preserve the integrity of our ecosystems for present and future generations. These and more are what agroecology does.

As guardians of the law, it is pertinent to ensure that the Precautionary Principle is strictly applied when anyone wishes to introduce any genetically modified organism into Nigeria. The fact that there is a requirement for risk assessment during the application stage affirms that this is a risky technology. It should be considered unconscionable that public opinion is ignored or that promoters of the technology are also saddled with regulating same, or vice versa. 

The introduction, cultivation, and trade of GMOs at a minimum should adhere to robust regulatory frameworks that prioritize biosafety and safeguard the public interest. Nigeria, like many countries, has enacted legislation and established regulatory bodies to oversee the assessment, approval, and monitoring of GMOs. The National Biosafety Management Agency Act 2015 (as amended) is however froth with loopholes that prevent the legislation from adequately safeguarding the health and interest of the Nigerian people. Not withstanding, GMOs are approved for use in Nigeria in a way that does not conform to the provisions of the Act or global best standards. 

It is incumbent upon us to interpret and apply the provisions of the law judiciously, balancing the interests of innovation, agricultural sustain-ability, and public welfare. We cannot afford to turn our people into guinea pigs or deceive our farmers into believing they are given improved seeds when in fact they are trapped into planting seeds of dubious safety claims.

Furthermore, we must recognize the importance of transparency, public participation, and informed decision-making in matters concerning GMOs. The processes of approvals of GMOs so far do not recognise these elements as the responsible agency – the National Management Agency has gone ahead to approve GMOs despite objections based on scientific, and ethical concerns. 

As judges, we play a crucial role in adjudicating disputes, ensuring due process, and upholding the rights of all stakeholders, including farmers, consumers, and environmental advocates. Adjudicators should resist heavy pressures and influence of vested interests and ensure that decisions regarding GMOs are guided by the precautionary approach, ethical principles, and scientific evidence.  While technological advancements hold out promises, we must not compromise the safety of our people or the integrity of our ecosystems.

In conclusion, we note that it is imperative to approach the issue of GMOs and biosafety with the utmost diligence, impartiality, and commitment to upholding the principles of justice. It is our hope that this training will deepen our understanding, encourage meaningful dialogue, and resolve to promote the common good and sustain-able development.

Welcome.

Welcome Words by Nnimmo Bassey at HOMEF’s Training for Judiciary Officials on GMOs and Biosafety Held in Abuja on 22ndMarch 2024

Will COP28 Play With Fire?

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has again issued an Emissions Gap Report that underscores the fact that the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the linchpin of the Paris agreement is not leading away from the climate precipice but is rather increasing the speed to a catastrophic plunge. While nations offer to do what is convenient, the world has experienced the hottest dark, weeks, months, and years in history. In simple terms, the world is breaking the global heating record daily. The UNEP report shows that if nations do what they offer in their NDCs the World is a reading to temperature increase of 2.5 or 3.0 C. The alarm has been sounding over the years and now we are staring a temperature increase that would be 100% above the sexy 1.5C target by set the Paris Agreement.

COP28 seems set to be a hollow ritual of climate action avoidance while nations hoist scarecrows that are mere totems to indolence. This prognosis may seem harsh, but from the vocations weather events recorded in recent months, increased water stress, desertification, floods and droughts, there is no way to sugar coat the climate vinegar we are serving ourselves.

It is sad that we are forced to attribute agency to all humans when we see climate change as a marker of an anthropogenic age. We should be fair to the millions that are vulnerable to climate impacts but have contributed nothing to the crisis. It has been argued that the climate harming actions were not taken by a majority of humans and placing the blame on everyone is unfair. It can be said that the basic justice principle of the UNFCCC, the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) attempted to address the fact that everyone is not equally responsible for wrecking the planet. The “common” underscores the fact that there is a causative commonality because no matter how minuscule the contribution may be, every living human exhale carbon dioxide and that most likely ascends into the atmosphere if it is not trapped by the trees, soils, or ocean. Adopting or accepting the principle demands that those who contributed the most to the crisis should also take responsibility for the consequences. To underscore this, the Emissions Gap report sums up that “emissions remain unequally distributed within and between countries, reflecting global patterns of inequality”.

The Emissions Gap report, one of the most appropriately titled reports, shows the chasm between emissions cut pledges and climate outcome prospects. The latest report shows that several points of no return will be reached if temperature increases climb as projected. Some of these changes would include the rapid melting of the ice sheets and the drying out of the Amazon forests. This would mean that, for humans, large parts of the world will be uninhabitable.

COP28 marks the halfway between 2021 and 2030 when the world’s governments should have done enough to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C (or well below 2C) above pre-industrial levels. The COP will thus be a moment for taking inventory of what has been done, not done, or must be done. This inventory is termed a stocktake. A Land Gap Report by scientists from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Climate Resource examined updated NDC pledges and found that high emitting, high-income countries heavily rely on land use to offset their emissions. Australia, Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States of America, account for about 75% of the total land required for this mathematical carbon offsetting. These land use carbon offsetting would require about 1 billion hectares of land mostly for tree planting to implement their mitigation pledges. Pledges of this sort ignore scientific and ecological principles and compounds the multiple crises the world is mired in by the encouragement of land grabbing, displacement of indigenous people, threats to food security as well as livelihoods, and ecosystems disruption.

The agenda for this catastrophe was set by the voluntary approach to emissions reduction adopted by both the Copenhagen Accord and the Paris Agreement. The adoption of a voluntary emissions reduction pathway is a direct subversion of both climate science and justice. The logic of science has been used to show the carbon budget as well as the temperature rise trajectory. However, the illogic of geopolitics has seen powerful nations backtracking from serious commitments and actions. This has expectedly driven the gap between equity and fair share wider by the day. Can COP28 afford to ignore the fact that we are hurtling to the precipice or to the canyon, as framed by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres? It will be foolhardy to ignore the call by the Secretary-General that leaders recognize the fact that “We are off the road” and “must reverse course” from coal, oil, and gas.

What does a reversing of course mean? Obviously, the COPs have been bogged down in the rut and reversing the course away from fossil fuels has been made to appear as “mission impossible”. Humans appear to have imaginations that are difficult to change once firmly imprinted on the plates of our minds. Imagination, ease, and greed appear to be three weights firmly placed on the neck of the Mother Earth to ensure that her discomfort is muffled, and our consciences are thus freed to fly over the edges of the climate canyon. To reverse course means turning our backs on coal, oil, and fossil gas. Our affinity to carbon makes this divorce difficult to comprehend or effect. If you do not see that tie, it means that you have forgotten that we are made largely of carbon. 

The Emissions Gap report reveals that temperatures already topped 1.5C for 86 days this year. The report also warns that the chance of keeping to 1.5C limit of the Paris Agreement is a slim 14 percent and will require deep emissions cuts by the big polluters. With this prognosis, it appears that COP28 will be a flaming COP. It may also be an avenue for a ritualistic elegy for a planet whose inhabitants fiddle while the flames leap to the rafters. 

————-

The Artist in the Age of Anthropocene

Archeologists divide Earth’s history in a geologic time scale into a hierarchical series of smaller blocks of time. These divisions are called ages, epochs, periods, eras and eons based on Earth’s rock layers, or strata, and the fossils found within them. Scientists guess which parts of the geological record certain fossils belong to.

We are said to live in the Anthropocene Epoch — an unofficial geologic time. The official name is Holocene— an epoch said to have started almost 12,000 years ago.

The word Anthropocene is derived from the Greek words anthropo, for “man,” and cene for “new”. The basic question that scientists are trying to answer before declaring the Anthropocene an epoch is if humans have changed the Earth system to the point that it is reflected in the rock strata.

Key milestones in the horror history of humanity are  

  1. the advent of the Industrial Revolution — which accelerated climate change.
  2. The testing and dropping of the first atomic bomb on human communities — Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The Challenge of Art: Between Wakefulness and Slumber

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, is tied to human relationships to objects and materials and how these impact our environment. Read more here.
The Anthropocene clearly is an epoch in which human activity harms human habitation in ways that can be compared to a person willfully destroying his or her own home. The question confronting the artist is how to use his craft to wake up humanity to this cannibal inclination, reminding everyone of the African proverb which says that the man who burns his father’s house can only inherit the ashes.

We can also begin by questioning the purpose of arts — all creative forms: music, photography, fine arts, drama, poetry, prose, etc.

Do we have the luxury of seeing art as production without utility beyond generating revenue? Can we afford to develop aesthetic or beautify bullets, bombs and weapons of mass destruction forgetting about how these burst and annihilate dreams, lives and communities?

Could art in the Anthropocene challenge, organize and present alternatives to the current decadent system into which humanity has been sucked?

Can art recover the meaning of terminologies such as “sustainability” and even “development”?

We live in an age when vast chunks of humanity know with more certainty that they do not know why we are here on earth. At a mundane scale we do not even know where most objects around us came from. For the ones we are certain are man made we still grapple with basic questions as to why the objects were made, who made them, when were they made and who can afford them.

Art for Oppression or Liberation

The Anthropocene is arguably an epoch where objects are made with inbuilt obsolescence. We live in a throwaway culture. We live in a time when Nigeria and nations around us have become cemeteries of obsolete technologies of various kinds. We are the junkyard where purchasing scraps is a high gamble as to their utility.

What role can the artist play in reminding us of our humanity, of our proud history of creativity and high aesthetic skills? With humanity racing to the precipice, can art help pull the brakes? Can art challenge the rising poverty as well as erosion of moral bars?

Can art help stop the barbarism of genocide, Ecocide, apartheid and bare-faced war crimes?  How about rising green, blue and carbon colonialism via false climate solutions. 

Can art be the fulcrum of revolt against exploitative socio-economic relations? Can art boldly demand fundamental system change? What would that change look like?

Art as a Tool for Communicating Change

For us, one of the urgent questions of the Anthropocene is whether we can afford to indulge in art for art’s sake. To answer this question, we may have to examine which artistes, and/or their production have stood the test of time, have made positive contributions to the emancipation of peoples across the world. 

At this juncture we should ask ourselves some questions:

  1. What art piece most influenced you and your world view?
  2. Which musician stirred your conscience and demanded that you stand up to be counted?
  3. What do you learn when you reflect on the bronze artistic pieces of Benin Kingdom and why they were stolen?
  4. How best can you use your talent to communicate on the issues of our time— climate change, corruption, poverty, crime and violence?
  5. How can art build resilience in our time by propagating a counterculture?

The artist must take a stand. The artiste must make a choice. The battles raging in the tumultuous age of Anthropocene requires that no artist can afford to sit on the fence.

A talk by Nnimmo Bassey at Exposed! – A TellThatStory Conference, Benin City, Nigeria. 30 October 2023

Time to Build Solidarity, not Walls

I thank the Chancellor and President, and the entire family of York University for the great honour being extended to me today. 

Being born at a time we were at the edge of breaking free from colonialism, the notion of independence was built early into my psyche. Growing up in innocence and being sucked into a season of violent secession was both disruptive and traumatic. This was a season of disruption of my primary education and it yielded an age-long struggle to figure out what was missed in the traumatic gaps of forced migration and survival as a refugee within my country.

Seasons are episodic otherwise they would not be seasons. At the end of the Biafra-Nigeria civil war, I was already severely scarred by the sights of horrible human rights abuses, man’s inhumanity to man, hunger, disease, cries of men pleading for their lives and several other stressors. War games were not video games, but games played with actual bones, fire and gunpowder. Bones of once gallant men who signed up to fight their brothers against whom they had no personal grouse. Today, more investment is being made in warfare, armaments, and destruction than in building resilience and wellbeing in the world.

My early years were wrapped by tales of resilience and charismatic anti-colonial fighters in Zimbabwe （then Rhodesia）, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Angola and South Africa. It was a time of learning of the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, Samora Machel, Steve Biko, Amilca Cabral, Thomas Sankara and others.

Meanwhile my country was under serial authoritarian military dictatorship and as a young adult I could not escape being a part of the human rights and anti dictatorship movement. Whereas I thought that was the zenith of standing against injustices, more graphic examples were unfolding beneath the radar.

The wheels of oppression at home were literally oiled by crude oil and sundry extractivist activities. Capital trumped concerns for the health of Mother Earth and her children. Complaints against the destruction of the ecosystems and livelihoods were met with brute force. Whole communities were sacked or crushed. Oil spills and heinous routine gas flaring pumped cocktails of noxious elements and gases into the environment, birthing cancers, birth defects, breathing diseases and cutting life expectancy to a mere whisper. 

It was at this time that Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders stood out and called for environmental Justice. Later we learned from Saro-Wiwa’s last writings before his judicial murder that the organizing energy rose from the conviction that “silence was treason” in the face of the debilitating pollution!

The judicial murders and assault on communities were the red lines the dictatorship crossed that set me on a lifelong journey of standing for environmental rights as the key basis for the enjoyment of the right to life. It has been quite a journey loaded with inescapably fixing one’s attention on environmental horrors, some of which are unimaginable and indescribable. While the journey has been mostly across the African continent and the sacrifice zones of the global south, we cannot fail to acknowledge the resistance and resilience of our relatives in the global north who face similar circumstances and continue to fight for environmental justice, dignity and basic rights in the efforts to decolonize their territories. 

Extractivism threatens both people and planet. Its roots can be seen in every facet of the polycrisis pushing the world to the brink. Fossil fuel corporations, for one, invest so much to alter and control global imaginaries and have so far succeeded as policy makers believe that there is no other way to drive “growth”. Yet, it is clear we cannot afford lineal growth on a finite planet. While record temperatures, wildfires, floods and other stressors rage across the world, leaders are engrossed in xenophobic nationalism, building barriers against climate refugees and promoting fictional or false and risky climate solutions. They stick their tongues out and sneer: we can pollute and then engage in carbon removal; rather than adopt agroecology （which builds healthy soils      and cools the planet）and support small scale fathers who actually feed the world, we will whiten the clouds, hang up mirrors and sunshades in the sky to lower the global temperature.

We are not surprised that carbon trading is the clarion call and Africa is emerging as a huge carbon sink in what may well be a neocolonial continent grab. An exploitative market cannot be the solution of a crisis created by the market.

It is a big honour for me to stand before you today. It is clearly a celebratory moment for me. However, a life entwined with that of my peoples is inevitably coated by a cloud of rage. As I look at the hopeful faces in this auditorium I plead that you never allow anything or anyone to steal your joy or to dim your hope. In May 2023, Bayelsa State in the Niger Delta of Nigeria, one of the most polluted places on planet Earth, released through its Environment and Oil Commission, a report somberly titled Environmental Genocide. The report, among other things, revealed that the per capita pollution in the state stands at one and a half barrels of crude oil. Rather than being aghast by such a revelation the world has been loudly silent. We hear talks of decarbonizing economies at a time we should be depetrolizing the ebbing civilization and detoxifying the sacrifice zones.

The milestones in my journey and the successes in the midst of continual battles have come by the resilience of the peoples and communities. We see expanding movements and readiness of communities to suffer inconveniences today for the sake of building a sane future for those yet unborn. I have seen the power of traditional wisdom and cultural production in building hope and strengthening alliances against oppression. Talking about cultural production, poetry has been a therapeutic tool for me. Through poetry we capture the past and present and construct the future. It is a tool that exposes folly, elicits action and provides strength even in difficult moments. 

This is not a time to walk alone. Belonging to the York University family offers a layer of strength, not just for me but for my constituencies. This is indeed a time to stand together to demand justice in all circumstances, to call for an end to ecocide, to build solidarity and not walls and to restore hope in our time. I dedicate this honour to the martyrs of extractivism and environmental defenders everywhere.

On being conferred with an honorary doctorate at the convocation ceremony at York University, Toronto, Canada, 13 October 2023.

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).