Category: Climate Change

Halting the Disastrous Exploitation of the Niger Delta

The Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence (NDAC) provides the platform for analyzing the challenges of the region, building an understanding of our shared struggles and outlining an array of actions that must be taken to resolve the crisis. NDAC starts from the premise that there is a solution to every challenge. We also believe that the surest way to get out of a pit is to stop digging further. NDAC also insists that we never forget that oil and gas are not renewable resources and our best interest is to secure the integrity of our environment and the array of gifts of Nature. Oil wells will eventually dry out. The world will either exhaust it or move to another energy source. 

Besides, every oil well has a lifespan usually known during the exploration stages, and before commercial drilling and extraction. This means that the oil companies know the number of years a particular oil well will have a good and economically viable yield. When an oil company enters a field and/or community they already know how much oil and gas is available in that location, how much they would extract and how much petrodollars will flow into their coffers. 

Entry into such a location is primarily governed by the profit they would make from a particular well or field. Oil companies plan when they enter and when to abandon communities and oil wells located there. In other words, they knew that they would abandon Otuabagi in the Oloibiri oil field by the 1970s when they were entering the community in the 1950s. They intensify exploitation within the lifespan of the field, make as much profit as possible within that time including by offloading environmental costs on the people and the environment while at the same time devising ways of managing the expectations of the community by dangling before them carrots that are never accessible and by other devious methods. 

Today, several oil wells are out of service in the Niger Delta, but they haven’t stopped polluting. This reality requires that every oil well in the region should principally be seen and treated as a crime scene. To do otherwise means leaving the wells as ticking time bombs that expose communities to grave dangers as they explode at will. 

It is important to note that oil wells can explode, erupt and spill oil at any stage of exploitation depending on whether they are secured or not, and whether the operators duly exercise requisite duties of care  according to best practices and in line with regulations. We have seen oil wells which had been drilled and plugged erupt and spill massively with attendant socioecological harms as was the case of Shell Petroleum Development Company’s (SPDC) Ibibio 1 well located at Ikot Ada Udo, Ikot Abasi Local Government Area, Akwa Ibom State, in 2007. It is important to note that the oil well had been developed and corked and left for over 50 years while it continued to pose deleterious threats to the environment. 

The first economically viable oil wells in the Oloibiri oil field continue to leak today even though Shell left them in the 1970s and the Nigerian government designated them as part of an oil museum. As we speak they are still leaky and exposing the Otuabagi communities to great environmental and health harms.

The Ororo-1 Oil Well at Oil Mining Lease (OML) 95 located in shallow waters off the coast of Awoye in Ondo State blew up during development processes on 15 May 2020 and the well has been spilling and burning for 6 years now. The oil well was first drilled by Chevron oil company but was shut off in the 1980s with a steel plug due to pressure issues, according to reports. The well was thereafter awarded as a marginal field to Guarantee Petroleum and its partner Owena Oil & Gas Ltd (an Ondo State company) in 2003 but the award was revoked in 2019 because the company had not developed and brought the field to full production before expiration of an extension period that elapsed in April of that year. At the time of the explosion it was estimated that the inferno could be extinguished within six weeks by drilling a relief well. However, six years afterwards nothing has been done with regulatory agency and responsible companies hiding behind a legal fig leaf that does not hide the crime against the people and the planet. The fact that Owena Oil and Gas Ltd or anyone else filed a suit against the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), now replaced by agencies including the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), over the revocation of their lease does not obviate the duty of care of the government to secure our environment and peoples. 

While on this, there is another oil well fire raging at the Alakiri, Ofiomina-Ama in Okrika Local Government Area in Rivers State since 2024 and has been on for two years now, almost becoming a dubious tourist attraction and exposing the community and the environment to deadly harm. 

We can cite a disturbing pattern of locations experiencing repeated oil spills and fires without required attention to rectify the situation and restore the environment. Examples abound in Ikarama community in Bayelsa State; Kpean in Ogoni where repeated eruptions in the Yorla oil field remain unattended to and many others.

The extreme oil and gas pollution in the Niger Delta is not isolated or unknown. Gas flares, illegal in Nigeria since 1984, remain as giant furnaces across the region with new ones coming up like the ones recently lit right within Ikot Ebekpo community in Onna LGA of Akwa Ibom State.  

These environmental horrors have been documented in major reports in the Niger Delta over the years, including the Niger Delta Environmental Survey (NDES) commissioned by SPDC and carried out from 1991to 1997, but whose final results were never released publicly. That report confirmed the role played by oil exploration and extraction activities in soil and water contamination, loss of vegetation and biodiversity. It also noted the poverty into which the region sinks while oil activities externalize the wealth.

We also have the report of the Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland paid for by the polluters and published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011. One of the key recommendations of the UNEP report is the decommissioning of oil infrastructure as well as environmental risk assessments of abandoned “assets.”

A third milestone report aptly titled An Environmental Genocide — Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria, was issued by the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission in 2023. This report showed such widespread and reckless destruction of the Bayelsa environment that a state of emergency ought to have been declared immediately the findings were out. This is yet to happen. Happily, members of the BSOEC and others have not given up and now works as an International Working Group (IWG) to ensure that a recovery plan among other actions are put in place for the  Bayelsa environment and that of the wider Niger Delta. 

The report of an assessment of The Impact of Oil Extraction on Women’s Health in the Niger Delta with a focus on the women of Otuabagi was published in 2024 by Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre. The report showed the alarming presence of 15 out of 16 petroleum hydrocarbons tested for in the bodies of the participating women. 

These reports all underscore the extreme harms abandoned or operating oil wells pose to our peoples. This ought not to be so. And this state of neglect, debasement and contamination of our lands and waters are inexorably leading to extermination or expanded environmental genocide unless something is done, and done urgently. This is the core reason we are gathered in this 5th NDAC. The first NDAC held in this same hall five years ago produced a Manifesto whose demands must be fulfilled. We are especially happy that we have in our midst today political leaders who can lead this process and community leaders who will support them to ensure the exploitation of our lands and people without care is halted.

The focus of this fifth NDAC draws our attention to critical gaps in the governance of the petroleum sector in Nigeria. We stress that the end of an oil well is known right from the first moment they spurt. That end may only be extended by technological developments that may increase the viability of extraction from such wells.

The knowledge that oil wells do not produce in perpetuity led to regulations requiring oil well decommissioning at the end of their useful life. Decommissioning is a key regulated process for safely shutting down oil and gas wells by safely plugging them before abandoning the wellbore. This process helps to isolate hydrocarbon zones, and this is then followed by the dismantling of surface infrastructure, remediating the sites and restoring them. 

Decommissioning and abandonment are the final rites required on every oil well when economically viable operations cease. Oil companies know this. NUPRC rules require this. The abandonment doesn’t mean oil companies pack their suitcases and leave, or simply change their names in dubious legal gymnastics to avoid accountability and shirk responsibilities as we are seeing in Nigeria. Abandonment is a technical exercise that happens after the wells are properly and permanently plugged to ensure the integrity of the environment and protect ground water. This process also involves the killing of the wells by controlling pressures at such wells.  Abandonment includes the dismantling and removal of wellheads, production platforms and other surface equipment. 

These are critical regulatory and moral matters which cannot and should never be glossed over. It is time for a clear audit of all oil wells in the Niger Delta. Knowing that it will take more than a lifetime to restore the environment of the Niger Delta it is clear that clean up, remediation and restoration of the region must begin now and this should be the most urgent political action by government. After losing so much we must wake up to insist on a census of all the wells and an enumeration of which is considered viable and which must be decommissioned, dismantled and the environment remediated and restored. 

It is time to replace aged pipelines, remove the well heads that although termed Christmas trees bring no joy but death and destruction.

Intergenerational justice demands that we wake up and perform our duties for generations yet unborn. It is our duty to see the future, eliminate the perils erected by altars of capital and halt the perpetuation of colonial exploitation that ignores our people and territories. 

We cannot ignore the decades-old neglect and active assault our people and environment have been exposed to. The Willinks Commission report of 1958 laid out the socioeconomic challenges of the region in simple and understandable language. The NDES report, the UNEP report and the BSOEC report all show the unconscionable state of our environment. Remedying this goes beyond the throwing of cash at the problem in the name of development. While development is vital, such must be defined by our peoples, and must start from a complete overhaul of our mindset. It is time to reject exploitation and processes leading to extermination. As we say in Akwa Ibom State, we have to Dakada. We have to Arise! 

The NDAC Manifesto captures it all, says it all, sets out a road map and NDAC 2026 is our space to draw the lines, drive in the pegs and ready ourselves to work to give us a chance to survive. 

It is our time to collectively Arise. Welcome.


Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey at the 5th Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence held  in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, on 14 May 2026

Straight from the Strait of Hormuz

No matter the reason for warfare the environment and the innocent end up bearing the brunt of the inevitable destruction. This fact is clearly illustrated by the several ongoing smoldering and open conflicts that have led to this season being described as one of endless conflicts and violence. Many of these conflicts and wars have crude oil footprints, suggesting an underlying connection between energy grabbing and wars. The most glaring examples are the situations with Venezuela and Iran.

In all these situations of conflict the war waged by the USA and Israel on Iran highlights many distinct concerns. First, the shifting explanations as to why the first shots were fired suggest to some observers that crude oil and gas are major motivations. Crude oil, more than a drive for democracy, turned out to be the major reason for the assault on Venezuela. For Iran we are told they must not develop an atomic bomb. Indeed no nation should develop atomic bombs. Reality is that there are already about 13,400 nuclear weapons in the world today and these have a combined explosive yield of more than 360,000 times than the bombs detonated at Hiroshima during the Second World War. 

Second, it is much easier to find funds for destruction than for construction or building of lives. This explains why wars gulp close to $3 trillion a year while the budget for development and for tackling the climate chaos and loss of biodiversity hovers in the range of just billions of dollars. 

At a time when the world should be investing in climate adaptation and mitigation, funds are being gulped by the weapons industry and the oil moguls. At a time when talks should be on how to recover our collective humanity we are hearing moans over a depletion of stocks of missiles, suicide drones and sundry weapons of mass destruction. We are seeing the bombing of civilian infrastructure, chemical factories, hospitals, and schools. We are seeing ecocide planned, executed and bragged about without consequence. 

Unfortunately, one acknowledged common attribute of war mongers is that they know how to start wars but hardly ever how to end them. This may be because they are never in the line of fire, besides those from opinion polls.

The tourniquet introduced by Iran at the Strait of Hormuz should drive a strong message to every nation — that we live in a common ecosystem of interdependences. The Strait gets shut and straightaway the world feels the shock. While the missiles fly and sorrow, blood and tears afflict the innocent, the oil companies smile to the bank alongside the players in the military industrial complex. It is estimated, U.S. oil companies may garner up to $63 billion in excess profits from the price increases this year driven by the Iran war.    Experts also estimate that the U.S. may gain additional federal revenue of approximately $600 million/day from its output of 20 million barrels of crude oil per day. With a war that may end up costing an estimated $200 billion, would oil cushion the impact of deaths and destruction?

The paradoxical situation for Nigeria is that the sharp rise in the price of oil does not suggest more revenue for social services for the population. With a poor capacity in local refining, the nation depends on the importation of refined products and is thus totally exposed to the shocks related to global oil conflicts. Privately owned Dangote Refinery that could have cushioned the shocks is forced to import crude oil due to insufficient receipts of locally extracted crude which stands at less than the nation’s OPEC quota. Moreover, according to reports, 400,000 barrels of the 1.5 million barrels of Nigeria’s daily crude oil production goes to paying debts owed to international oil majors, banks and traders. Thus the pump price of petroleum products is translating to rising costs across board in an unregulated and evidently inefficient economic environment.

Added to the economic quagmire is the reality of the violence inflicted by crude oil extraction and refining on the environment of the Niger Delta. The region experienced an equivalent of one Exxon Valdez oil spill annually for close to 70 years. This level of violence is an undeclared war against the people and the environment.

Back in the Middle East, the explosion of missiles guided by artificial intelligence illustrate the artificiality of warfare fought without conscience and notions of accountability. It is a season of barbarism. Might is not always right. Stealth may sometimes be visible.

The shutting of the Strait of Hormuz (and possibly others) should wake the world from slumber to the essential need to phase out fossil fuels and invest in ecologically sensible alternative energy sources. The release of huge strategic reserves of oil by members of the International Energy Agency may bring a small respite, but the increasing price of oil has not appeared to abate. How much more barrels will be released when the reserves runs dry? Moreover, experts have noted that the current energy instability introduced by the war against Iran will not easily overcome even after the last missile has exploded. Reasons for this include the huge reconstruction that will be needed to restore damaged or obliterated infrastructure and to rebuild confidence in challenged geopolitical alliances and among sectoral players. 

The famous invisible hands of the market has been exposed by the apparent open manipulation of oil prices by statements made, sometimes on social media posts, by political leaders. This underscores the need for energy democracy and an end to dependence on energy resources that plungers the world into conflicts, financial turmoil, social disruptions and unimaginable destruction. The world needs an urgent phase out of fossil fuels, not digging in and fighting over them. This is the lesson straight from the Strait of Hormuz. 

The Force and the Fire at COP30

The opening and closing of COP30 were marked by significant events. Not about climate ambition or high sounding speeches but by unplanned events. First was the determined entry into the COP venue by indigenous protesters who felt excluded from the conference and needed to be heard. They charged through the security and raised the critical question about who is really at the table and whose cause they were negotiating on. One of their demands was that they want their lands “free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers.” The second  event was the fire outbreak at one of the pavilions within the Blue Zone in the morning of 20 November, a day before the scheduled closure of the conference. As the flames leapt through the fabric of the ceiling delegates and observers scrambled for the exits.

While the forced entry of unbadged persons into the COP venue was followed by a high level of militarization of the  conference premises, it was not clear if the fire in the conference venue would make the negotiators and politicians recognize the climate emergency for what it is. Nothing could be more poignant than lapping flames at a climate conference. As the flames leapt, and teams of volunteers fought the fire, the temperature in the already hot venue literally leapt  through the roof. More than a dozen individuals were treated for smoke inhalation from the fire that was contained within minutes.

COP30 formally opened on 10 November but was preceded by a leaders conference on the 6th of November. At that conference, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil laid out his key ideas and hopes regarding CO-30. Two of these were the TFFF or the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, and the need for the COP to get serious about phasing out fossil fuels.  While the TFFF sounded poetic, even lyrical, it is nothing more than another variety of carbon deals or false climate solution mechanism. It basically will not tackle the root cause of deforestation but will serve as a tool for the financialization of Nature and may benefit carbon speculators more than forest dependent communities or even highly forested nations. It sounded new, but its antecedents date back more than a decade. It has been fiercely opposed by many.

For thirty years the Conference of Parties has skirted around recognizing the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is the major driver of the climate crisis. Call it willful denial. You would be right. Petrostates have regularly hosted the COPs and fossil lobbyists literally swarm the COP venues. Competing with the 1773 fossil fuel lobbyists that were at the COP29 in Baku, COP30 had 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists in its halls and lobbies, with the obvious objective of erasing any mention of fossil fuels in outcome documents or demanding its phasing out as an energy source. When fossil fuels were highlighted in the books at COP 26 in Glasgow the reference was restricted to phasing down unabated coal. When it raised its head at COP28 in UAE the reference was to “transitioning from fossil fuels” in energy. A more determined effort to push for a phase out of fossil fuels got some life from President Lula’s candle even though he is reportedly keen on extending the fossil fuels frontier in his country. As COP29 progressed more than 80 countries joined the call for transitioning from fossil fuels, while almost 30 others are strongly opposed to such a roadmap. While this could make or mar the COP outcome, a global conference on this subject will be hosted by Colombia on April 2026.

The draft outcome of COP30 was framed in a 9-paged document titled Muritao Text. It recognized and celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement and pushed for a new season of implementation beyond wordsmithing. Suggested focus areas for implementation in the draft text got interestingly spiced with options, and even blank ones at places. The text appeared to have carefully crafted so as not to ruffle fathers of those who hold the purse strings and power. And so rather than denouncing the slow pace of raising climate finance and condemning the lack of readiness to meet agreed targets, the text sought to accommodate everyone and even left blank options for those who care to fill.

The political correctness of climate negotiations, the deference to power and the sheer lethargy that engulfs every session are alarming considering that the voluntary actions of nations and other entities are driving the world to a heating of more than 3 degrees above the emergence of capitalism. Even if humans can survive such a furnace, should we not realize there are billions of other beings that we share the planet with?

It is not surprising that funding adaptation remains a sticky issue while more funding goes to mitigation efforts. Adaptation mostly concerns helping the vulnerable to cope with a crisis they did not create, while mitigation often offers options of investing in ideas and infrastructure that maintain current polluting paradigms and frees polluters to keep plying their trade. The rich and powerful nations spend up to 2.7 trillion dollars on warfare annually and a fraction of that, coupled with a little shift towards peaceful coexistence would definitely reduce the impacts of the climate crisis and move the world towards resilience built on solidarity. Will the petro-military complex allow this sensible path?

While negotiators dithered, the outside spaces raised serious and fundamental solutions to the climate crisis. Such outputs include A New Pledge For Mother Nature by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) and the Declaration by the People’s Summit Towards COP30 which had up to 70,000 participants.

As COP30 drew towards the finish line the key issues that would mark it out as an “implementation” COP and as a conference that showed more seriousness towards far reaching decisions, remain an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels, finance for adaptation, a truly just energy transition and a climate finance that does not come as loans and other instruments that push vulnerable nations into further debt and further exacerbate geopolitical imbalances.

Ogonize and Yasunize!

(A raging Battle of Words)

We have always been concerned about words. Words are powerful. They help us communicate events that unfold around us. They are building blocks for action. They aid mobilisation. They can be tools for organizing, control, or even of colonization and exploitation. Negotiations at local, national and global levels often enter quagmires due to disputes over words and their meanings. A word can have multiple meanings and with a little inflection a benign word can turn into an insult and ignite a wildfire.

Global actions can be forever delayed due to manipulation of perceptions that make emergencies appear to be less so. An example is the framing of the climate crisis as global warming. If the crisis had been labelled global heating or climate chaos, it would probably have garnered serious attention. Warming can be a nice thing because most people love keeping warm.

For years, climate campaigners have demanded a fossil fuels phase out. Rather than do that, COP26 came up with the idea of a phase down of unabated coal power and phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, not phasing out of fossil fuels. A phase down should have pulled someone’s face down in shame. After kicking and screaming, COP28 in the United Arab Emirates ended up with an agreement to move away from fossil fuels in energy systems with the objective of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. This was the agreement that the UNFCCC characterised as a pointer to the “Beginning of the End” of the Fossil Fuel Era.

With that sort of wordsmithing negotiators and some campaigners came off celebrating that the word ‘fossil’ was mentioned, not caring whether it would be phased down or phase out. To avoid dumping coal, we were told we can have clean coal. Cutting carbon emission at source was suddenly considered an uneconomic way of thinking and the preferred path became carbon offsetting. So, polluters are permitted to carry on polluting provided they can show that an equivalent of their emissions is compensated for by those who pollute less or by mechanisms that can capture or bury such pollutions. Another sleight of hand was played by pushing a concept of net zero down gullible throats even though everyone knows that net zero is not zero.

At another level we have seen how colours have been used to lull the world to sleep while escalating the exploitation and marketisation of Nature. The green economy was quickly followed by the blue economy. There are blue, green, grey, turquoise, and other colours of hydrogen. All these are plied to show that a choice of colour can clear your conscience and allow a particular action to be acceptable or to attain certain degrees of acceptability.

It was in recognition of the potency of words that Oil Companies turned to calling themselves Energy Companies. If oil tends to soil anyone’s hand, certainly what energy does is to strengthen you. So, Energy Corporations swagger into the communities and continue their polluting activities with reckless abandon.

Polluters have not only adopted colours and words to hide their crimes, sometimes they simply subvert the meaning of words that previously provided moorings for a drifting world. A key word in this bracket is sustainability. Truth be told, the meaning of the word is now thrown into the air. The United Nations Brundtland Commission in 1987 defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” That original definition ought to stick to our memories and keep us on guard so that subverted definitions do not become acceptable and thus aid dysfunctions to become normalized. An example is when an oil company issues an annual “sustainability report” while mindlessly engaging in persistent ecological destruction or ecocide. This led Health of Mother Earth Foundation to adopt a hyphenated Sustain-Ability so that we emphasise that anything that does not sustain the ability cannot be termed sustainability. Another hyphenated word is re-source which eliminates the consideration of the gifts of nature as mere commodities but require that we recognize the sources, return to the sources and see them as what they are both tangibly or otherwise.

How about when a military establishment announces that they would carry out an environment-friendly warfare?

The climate arena births many words, besides the ones already mentioned, that we must be wary of. Such words include decarbonisation as a process of moving in a low carbon economy. The wedlock to carbon is so strongly welded by capital that there appears to be no life beyond carbon. This is why the possibility of defossilization appears anathema to carbon moguls.

Most people agree that an energy transition is vitally essential if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. That transition basically refers to a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. There is however plenty of acrobatics over what constitutes green or renewable energy resources. There are pundits who argue that nuclear power is renewable, ignoring its hazardous life cycle — from cradle to its dubious grave. Someone may even argue that hydroelectric energy, hydrogen, nuclear or thermonuclear energy are clean energy modes.

The necessity of a shift from dirty to renewable energy has triggered a rush for the minerals required for the process. The extractivist mindset that drives capitalism, and violence threw up a powerful word to numb the sensibilities and permit destructive mining of the minerals. That word is “critical”. The key resources needed for renewable energy components are thus termed critical minerals. The connotation is that if you stop or slow down the extraction of these minerals you can be accused of being against the transition to renewable energy. This subtle label permits violence, displacement and environmental genocide in many nations and territories, but especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nothing is clean or “renewable” if it reproduces patterns of territorial exploitation and degradation epitomized by fossil fuels extraction.

The power in the use of words and the subversive twist of meanings requires epistemic challenges, including the creation of new words and phrases. New words are birthed so regularly that older people sometimes have difficulties understanding the language of youths. In Nigeria words creep into common vocabulary through music, movies and street yarns. Such new words include japa and kpai. To japa means to emigrate out of one’s country, while kpai means to die, and to kpai something means to kill that thing.

The call for epistemic reclamation of the true meaning of certain words is an anti-colonial enterprise. We also see this in the concept of thingification as espoused by Aimé Césaire in his  “Discourse on Colonialism,” where he characterized thingification as a situation where a colonized subject is reduced to a thing, objectified along with the land and resources, and used as a commodity. Our reading here is that we can forfeit our very being when words are used to invisibilize us or our territories.

In our struggle to have community-centered just energy transition we believe that the primary focus must be to keep fossils in the ground. To do this requires bold actions and a robust challenge on our imaginaries. One approach is to learn from the David and Goliath battles that communities and territories have successfully waged against corporate giants and their allied political structures. We propose a learning from the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta, Nigeria and the Waraoni people in the Yasuni territory of Ecuador. With due deference to their rugged resistance to the claws of fossil fuel extraction machines we call this resistance Ogonizing and Yasunizing. The clarion call is for the world to Ogonize and Yasunize.

As a working definition we see Ogonize and Yasunize to mean “a call for the protection of territories with natural or cultural diversity threatened by serious environmental impacts such as from oil and gas extraction, open cast mining, and other mega-projects.”

Here is the background to the birthing of these words. Yasuni is a territory in Ecuador where the people voted in a national referendum in 2023 to keep the oil in the ground. Over 59% of voters chose to end oil extraction activities in the Ishpingo, Tiputini, and Tambococha (ITT) oil fields, located inside the Yasuni Park. Ogoni is a territory in the Niger Delta where the people halted oil extraction in 1993 by declaring Shell a persona non grata. This move led to the militarization of Ogoniland and the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa who was the leader of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and eight other Ogoni leaders on 10 November 1995. Because the people have remained ogonized (and are not agonizing) they have stood their ground and rejected efforts by colonial extractors to return to the oil fields of Ogoniland.

To Ogonize and to Yasunize is to reject the culture of poverty and death and to stand for the wellbeing of Mother Earth and her children. It is to stand for Ubuntu, Etiuwem and buen vivre.

It is a decolonial struggle against authoritarian extractivism and other socioecological misbehaviours.

Needed Socioecological Cohesion

The fabric of the social and environmental conditions of Nigeria are literally stretched to the limit. The threats emanate from local and global strands of the polycrisis wracking the globe. Exploitation, displacements, conflicts, climate chaos, socioeconomic inequities combine to threaten the tenuous fabrics holding our nation and peoples together. Desertification, deforestation, extreme water and air pollution, deadly floods, coastal and gully erosion, insecure farms and diverse ecological devastations all merit a declaration of national environmental security state of emergency? The widespread environmental challenges also provide clear platforms for collective work to salvage the situation in ways that political coalitions may not.

Waiting before acting is a luxury the people cannot afford. The clarion call for action is urgent and critically existential. This reality inspired the Nigeria Socioecological Alternatives Convergence (NSAC). Regrettably at this second outing the conditions remain dire. We remain undaunted because we understand that the struggle for the change we need cannot be a sprint because it has to be a comprehensive overhaul of a system entrenched by indifference and lack of accountability. The socioecological alternatives we propagate must overturn the current predatory system of destructive extraction and shredded ecological safety nets. Our charter has to construct a Nigeria that is decolonial and post extractivist.

In the maiden national convergence, we collectively agreed to a national charter for socioecological justice.  Even as we achieved that major milestone we had hopes that at a future date, we would have participants from other African countries. That future has come faster than we expected. At this convergence we have participants from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. We also have other international partners. The reality of having an African Socioecological Alternatives Convergence (ASAC) is drawing near. 

There are sources to learn from in efforts to overhaul environmental governance in our nation.

  • In Africa, Kenya and South Africa have constitutional provisions for environmental rights that we can learn from.
  • The South American countries of Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela have constitutional provisions for the rights of Nature.
  • The Rights of Nature includes the right for Nature to be free from pollution. It also places obligations on human at a number of levels. The Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth is yet to be universally adopted[1].
  • There is a strong campaign for the recognition of ecocide as a crime in the Rome Statute in line with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.
  • We already have outcomes of litigations as well as reports that show evidence of ecocide in Nigeria and these could back up the urgency of the crisis . Two of such reports are the UNEP Report ( Environmental Assessment of Ogoni environment, 2011) and the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission Report (Environmental Genocide, 2023). 
  • Delta State House of Assembly is working on a bill to recognize the personhood of River Ethiope. The 2014 National Confab had recommendations for justiciability of human and environmental rights 

According to the NSAC Charter, ‘Our vision is of a Nigeria where ecological integrity, social justice, and economic wellbeing coexist. We must birth a Nigeria where the rights of nature are respected, where communities have control over their resources and enjoy resource democracy, and where everyone has access to clean air, water, and a healthy environment.’

The key demands of the NSAC Charter include 

·       Access to water as a human right

·       Recognise the Rights of Nature

·       Inclusive policy development 

·       Just energy transition from a polluting and epileptic dirty energy model to renewable energy

·       Job transitioning

·       Transition to agroecology

·       Ensure biosafety and biosecurity, ban genetically modified organisms  

·       Halt deforestation, promote reforestation 

·       Protect our wetlands and halt indiscriminate land reclamation 

·       Invest in flood control infrastructure 

·       Enforcement of mining regulations 

·       Decommissioning of mines and oil wells at end of life 

·       Compensations for job losses and reparations for ecological damage to affected communities

·       Ecological audit — State of the Nigerian environment 

·       Environmental remediation 

·       Accessible and affordable clean energy. Energy democracy

·       Revamped emergency response mechanisms 

·       Reject false solutions to climate change, including carbon offsets, geoengineering, etc

·       Halt gas flaring

·       Halt and reversal of divestments by IOCs

·       Declare no mining zones

The environment supports our life and exploitation of nature’s gifts must be conducted in manners that do not disrupt or breach the cycles of nature.  As part of nature, humans have responsibilities and obligations regarding how we interact with our environment and other beings we share the planet with. Human activities contribute to the squeezing we are experiencing from desertification in northern Nigeria and the erosion washing away our communities on the coastline. Sixty-eight (68) years of extraction of fossil fuels has rendered the Niger Delta a disaster zone. Climate impacts and environmental genocide leave festering sores on the territory. Uncontrolled solid mineral extraction is poking holes across the land, and these combined with long abandoned but non-decommissioned mines are scars that we cannot ignore. 

Let us together ‘Yasunize’ and ‘Ogonize’ by demanding the protection of communities and territories with natural or cultural diversity against activities that cause serious environmental impacts, such as from oil and gas extraction, open cast mining, and other mega-projects. We must wake up and demand a change of mentality. Our leaders must Arise and be true compatriots, not lords or emperors, even if that anthem has been placed on the shelf. Oil for development has placed Nigeria on a treadmill surrounded by voracious and insatiable forces of exploitation, expropriation and extermination. 

The major focus of this Convergence is Examining Relevant National Policies and Frameworks for Addressing Environmental, Climate Change and Socio-ecological Challenges. We have an erudite professor and climate change expert to set the tone for our deliberations. We look forward to learning about those critical planks for addressing the subject. We will also hear how the policies and frameworks which he has helped formulate and frame over the years are faring.

NSAC is a space for the convergence of ideas, sharing of wisdom and passion. We note the critical role of communities in nation building and believe that any nation that sidelines communities is on a very slippery slope. This is why we must do all we can to stand with our peoples, build cohesion for socioecological transformation and ensure communities are embedded as key players in defining the direction of a truly just energy and social transition.

It is our collective space. It is our time. Welcome.

Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey, Director of HOMEF, at the 2nd Nigeria Socioecological Alternatives Convergence held at Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja, on 14 July 2025.

[1] https://www.rightsofmotherearth.com/declaration

Yasunize and Ogonize the World

On this Earth Day, we call on all people, all movements, and all communities of conscience to rise up and reclaim power from the toxic and exploitative grip of extractive forces that continue to assault peoples, communities and our Mother Earth. We stand with peoples and communities who are resisting the violent operations of a global economic system that exploits, pollutes, and dispossesses without care or limit. 

As we mark this year’s Earth Day, we must not forget that while corporations celebrate with green logos and hollow pledges, millions of communities are living the realities of poisoned air, dead rivers, stolen lands and a stolen future. Our communities are bleeding. And while the machinery of capitalism and warped geopolitics try to make us believe we are powerless, we know better. Our people are not defeated. We are rising. 

For too long, transnational corporations have treated our lands as sacrificial zones, our waters as waste bins, and our lives as collateral damage. But Earth Day is not theirs to co-opt. It belongs to the people. And today, we reaffirm that the theme Our Power, Our Planet is a call for resistance as a duty, and as the path to justice. We are children of the Earth. We are neither disposable nor discounted.

The crisis we face is not just an environmental crisis. It is a crisis of power. Capitalism, especially in its neoliberal, expansionist form,has long waged war on the planet. Wars over oil, food, forests, water, and rare earth minerals are frontlines of a global assault on our Mother Earth. These are not isolated events; they are the inevitable outcomes of a system built on the notion of endless growth, domination, and extraction. The cost is incalculable: ecological destruction, climate chaos, mass displacement, food insecurity, and cultural annihilation. The victims of this global assault are overwhelmingly the poor, the Indigenous, and local communities. On this Earth Day, we stand in fierce solidarity with all peoples resisting the corporate plunder of nature, from the Amazon to the Congo Basin, from Standing Rock in North America to the Niger Delta and Okavango Delta.

Our work has always centred on grassroots power. We work with communities to monitor pollution, defend their territories, and demand environmental justice. We promote food sovereignty through agroecology and seed autonomy. We push back against GMOs and the biotech takeover of our food systems. Through our School of Ecology and Sustain-Ability Academy, we cultivate radical political education and ecological consciousness. We reject the capitalist myth that the Earth exists to be exploited or to be recklessly transformed. We reject the lie that development must mean destruction. 

We insist on Eti-Uwem, on Ubuntu — highlighting our interdependencies and interconnectedness. Thus, we reject the notion that a small elite can poison the planet while the rest of us pick up the pieces. We call for a decolonisation of nature and a restoration of balance, rooted in solidarity, equity, and justice. We join cross-border campaigns for climate justice. We organise against land grabs and water theft. We build autonomous local alternatives, from community energy systems to collective food production. We defend the commons, challenge patriarchy, oppose militarism, and reject the imperialist logic that turns nature into a battlefield.

To mark this Earth Day, our vision is clear – a cooperative, decentralized society powered by community-controlled renewable energy. An economy where land, water, and seeds belong to the people, not to profit-hungry corporations. A politics where those most impacted by environmental destruction lead the way in healing and restoration. We are calling for the closure of expansionist projects like the EACOP pipeline in East Africa and the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline in West Africa. 

We demand the halting of efforts to divest by polluting oil companies that masquerade as agents of development while destroying ecosystems and communities. We demand that they bear full responsibility for close to seven decades of atrocious pollution on the Niger Delta as well as payments for remediation, clean up, restoration and reparations for decades of plunder. Our Power, Our Planet calls for a total transition from fossil fuels, rejection of false solutions including carbon markets, geoengineering, corporate “net zero” lies and stand for real climate. The transition away from fossil fuels and dirty energy isn’t simply an environmental imperative, it is a moral obligation that we owe the future generations and it is one that must be undertaken without delay. We make this moral demand on an increasingly shameless immoral world. 

We lean on heroic, even difficult, struggles of communities and territories who have insisted on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. We salute the courage of Ogoni people who halted crude oil extraction in their territory in 1993 and remain resolute on this reality to date. The Ogoni struggle has been an inspiration to communities across the world that real

Real power is Peoples’ Power. Today we call on all to stand with the Ogoni people, to Ogonize and reject any attempt to reopen the oil wells of Ogoniland.

We equally applaud the people of Ecuador, especially the indigenous communities in Yasuni ITT in the Amazonia who struggled against the extraction of crude oil in their territory. They kept at it for over a decade and a national referendum was held on the matter in August 2023. At that historic referendum, 59% of the citizens of the country voted to keep almost 1 billion barrels of crude oil underground in the Yasuni National Park. They inspire the rest of the world to Yasunize their territories. On this Earth Dat we call on all peoples to rise and Ogonize and Yasunize our world.

While some wish to make Earth Day a festival of greenwashing, others are using the day to mock the drive for climate justice. But we will not allow it. Both groups will fail. This day belongs to those who fight. Our struggle is not only against polluters and profiteers, it is for Mother Earth, for justice, and for the future.

Our Ocean and Human Rights

Today we are considering the state of our ocean—not as a commodity to be exploited, but as a common good that sustains life, livelihoods, our culture and spirituality. Our ocean is under siege, and the communities that depend on it bear the brunt of pollution, displacement, and human rights abuses.

 Across the coastline of Nigeria, community folks are being forced from their territories, deprived of their resources and left to grapple with the consequences of laxly regulated natural resource exploitation.

The economic forces driving this destruction prioritize profit over people, extracting resources beyond the ocean’s capacity, and leave behind a trail of ecological devastation. The infrastructure of Nigeria’s economy begin at our shorelines and extend to the deep waters where resources are extracted— and coastal communities who bear the pressures from the land and the sea remain trapped in poverty. We cannot ignore the countless oil well blowouts that have polluted our waters: Akaso Well 4, Atanba, Bonny Terminal, Buguma Wellhead 008, Santa Barbara, and the ongoing inferno at Ororo Oil Well 1 at Awoye, Ondo State, which has been raging for close to five years now, among others. These disasters are ecological crimes that contribute to climate instability, and a worsening scarcity of land and water, placing entire communities and livelihoods at risk.

We live with the struggles of fishermen and women who set out each day with their nets and baskets, only to find empty waters—enclosed and sacrificed for industrial dredging, multinational oil companies and corporate fishing. A Community like Aiyetoro with its history of well organized governance and industrial strides is now a ghost of its former self, bashed and washed by unrelenting waves and left to grapple with unrelenting impacts of global warming and possibly heading for complete displacement unless we act.

We acknowledge the plight of Makoko’s communities, whose rights to housing, food, and health have been trampled by forces that would be happy to have the people displaced so the waterfront can be grabbed by speculators. Overall, the destruction of marine biodiversity disproportionately affects fishing communities, making them the most vulnerable to environmental degradation.

Our fight to defend the ocean is inseparable from the fight for human rights and justice. We must resist the unchecked advances of transnational polluters in our ocean and demand accountability. We must protect our biodiversity, our land, and our water from the destructive forces of exploitative capitalism seeking to privatize the commons. It is time to rethink our relationship with nature—to take only what can be replenished and respect the delicate balance that sustains us all.

Governments must act—not as enablers of destruction, but as stewards of the environment, ensuring that decisions about natural resources are made with the full participation of the communities who rely on them. Nigeria has signed so many conventions and treaties regarding the wellbeing of marine ecosystems.We even have designated Marine Protected Areas whose protection is disputable. Our constitution may be said to have a tilt towards ensuring the right to life, but there can be no right to life without the right to a safe environment.

This workshop is more than a gathering—it is a platform for us all as oceanographers, marine scientists, government agencies, civil society organizations, and community leaders to reflect, strategize, and commit to the urgent task of defending our ocean. Coming on the heels of the International Wetlands Day, we use this opportunity to take a stand against so-called land reclamation which should rightly be named aquatic ecosystems conversion and grabbing. We have seen wetlands and dependent economies destroyed by urbanization and diverse speculators. We are also seeing swaths of the ocean and public beaches being converted into fenced housing estates or so-called superhighways. These disregard the fact that the state of the ocean directly affects the climate, reflects on the quality of our lives and the capacity of the Earth to maintain her cycles and support all beings.

Let us seize this moment to build a future where our ocean is protected, our rights are upheld, and our communities thrive.

——-

Nnimmo Bassey’s Opening Comments at the State of the Ocean Workshop held at the NIOMR on 3 February 2025

COP29 and Climate Geopolitics

Activists in an action at COP29

As COP29 dragged into overtime the expected climate finance target of at least $1.3 trillions of dollars shrunk to an offer of $250 billion per year from 2035. After much bickering  the rich countries decided to raise its offer from $250 billion to $300 billion.  This does not indicate that there is a consensus about the urgency for developed nations to pay up for squandering the carbon budget and bringing the world to the brink of climate change catastrophe. Additionally, by pushing the date for providing needed funds a decade down the road, it does appear that there is no consideration about what the scale of the climate disasters may be by 2035 and what would be the value of $250 or $300 billion then. Developing, vulnerable and poor nations have rightly insisted that whatever funds are made available must not come as loans or instruments that would increase their already huge debt burdens.

 Another sad fact is that any offer made is basically nothing more than an offer as the pledges are not enforceable by law. In 2009 the pledge was to pay $10bn dollars yearly from 2010 to 2020 and raise that to $100bn from 2020. Those targets never materialized. The polluters never want to accept responsibility for the climate crisis, or to support the poor vulnerable nations financially at scale. The COP is an arena for geopolitical games, with polluters arrogantly making it seem they are doling out charity to climate victims. When negotiators throw out statistics and speak of temperature and finance targets the tendency is for us to forget about climate change affects real people and not mere numbers. Little consideration is given to the victims, and the billions of dollars they are already investing on their own in their desperate struggles to survive the onslaught of floods, droughts and destruction. 

 COP29 ended on a whimper, and as a big disappointment on many fronts. It had opened with a broad acceptance of Article 6.4 thus literally opening the floodgates for carbon markets and other elements of carbon market environmentalism. Rather than cutting emissions at source, nations and carbon speculators had a field day raising the banners of false solutions including those promoting carbon colonialism through carbon trading and geoengineering. Some even projected nuclear and fossil gas as clean energy pathways. 

 Whereas at COP28 there was a decision to transition away from fossil fuels for energy, at this COP that reference is completely off the table except by merely referencing “article 28” of the UAE outcome document. That must have ranked as a huge success for the petrostates and the over 1750 fossil fuels lobbyists at the COP who do not mind burning down the planet if there is a chance of inheriting the ashes. However, there was a strong presence of civil society and indigenous activists calling for a Yasunization of the world. Their cry, Yasunize the World, echoed the decisive vote of Ecuadorians to keep crude oil in the soil at Yasuni ITT oil field.

 The COP, labeled a Climate COP, crawled on divergent tracks towards achieving a level of climate finance with parties marching without moving, regarding levels of climate action ambition. Talks of loss and damage and other instruments of climate finance became largely muted. In their place emerged a contentious concept of New Collective Quantified Goals (NCQG) – a phantom possibly aimed at erasing the justice base of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) by requiring that everyone contributes to the finance pot in the same thought pattern that birthed the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), the hallmark of voluntary emissions reduction according to convenience.

 Perhaps an extension of the NCQG logic made a Nigerian minister to contentiously claim that China and India are not developing countries. This claim aligns with the assertions of some developed nations intent on breaking the solidarity within developing nations and thereby avoiding doing their fair share regarding climate finance and other actions. Truth is that China and India remain squarely within the geopolitical and economic grouping of developing nations because “developing” cannot be a tag reserved for nations in economic stagnation or regression. Now is a critical moment for vulnerable nations and allies to stand together in the determination that justice must remain the bedrock of climate negotiations and action. Historical responsibility must align with commensurate action and everyone should humbly accept this fact because, although huge investments are being made in intergalactic pursuits, we have only one Earth.

 

 

 

Privatized and Sacrificed

The Niger Delta is a privatized zone by the simple reason that the international oil companies have since appropriated it as a wasteland suited only for dumping of toxic wastes, oil spills, gas flares and produced water.  The privatization of the region began in 1956 when the first commercially viable oil well was drilled, and has continued unabated. The privatization has been so obnoxious because since the creeks, streams, rivers and swamps became waste dumps, they have been fit for no other purpose than to serve the private needs of the polluting corporations.

The UNEP report (August 2011) on the assessment of the Ogoni environment and the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission (BSOEC) report (May 2023) attest to the fact that the region has been wholly grabbed.

The total dispossession of our peoples of their environment, disconnection from their roots and despoliation of what is left is worse than slavery and colonialism. Indeed the nearest label that can be placed on the situation may be environmental racism. Colonialism could plunder and mete inhuman treatment to its subjects, but environmental racism normalizes the treatment of both the people and their environment as non-living, subhuman and fit for nothing but to be trashed.

Kwame Nkrumah wrote spoke 0f exploitation without redress in his book titled Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965):

“Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.”

This gives an apt explanation of why the Niger Delta has become a sacrificed zone with ostensible acts of defense actually turning to acts of indignities and degradation. It is clear that we cannot escape or reverse the perverse situation unless we reboot our imaginaries, recreate our mindsets and reconnect ourselves to our environmental and sociocultural milieu. We need to rediscover our indigenous sovereignty as the core plank in the struggle for political as well as for socioecological liberation. Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) touched on this when he declared, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

It is hard to find anywhere else in the world that has been so insidiously trampled underfoot than the Niger Delta and other hotspots of mineral extraction in Nigeria and also in Africa generally. In this regard we note that the tin mines of Jos have been sacrificed abandoned. The same can be said of the coal mines of Enugu and other rising zones of plunder ruled by bandits and so-called unknown gunmen. Indeed, neocolonialism would probably not have progressed the way it has without the compromise of our elites in all spheres of human endeavour. These traitors gladly take the place of slave drivers and colonial masters and ensure the privatization of our commons and our commonwealth through devious legislation and through pure elite capture of the socioeconomic systems. 

The BSOEC report titled An Environmental Genocide tells of Bayelsa State as having a per capita hydrocarbon pollution of 1.5 barrels. Pause to think of that. 

Between 2006 and 2020, Bayelsa State had 3,508 oil spill incidents or 25% of all oil spills in the Niger Delta according the data from the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA). It suffers an average of 234 oil spills per year. Figures from NOSDRA are notoriously unreliable as it under reports even in comparison to reports from NNPC. 

One bizarre example of a sacrificed zone is the Awoye community of Ondo State which has Ororo 1 well at Oil Mining Lease (OML) 95 in its immediate offshore. That oil well blew up in a fiery inferno in May 2020 and has been burning and spilling till date. In other words, Ororo 1 oil well has been burning and spilling crude oil for 4 years non-stop with nothing being done to halt the crime. The ongoing sacrifice has impoverished the people in the coastal communities by decimating their livelihoods — farming and fishing. 

Zones of sacrifice are dotted all over our continent with all having roots in extractivism incubated by colonialism. Here we can mention the gold mines of Ghana and South Africa; the diamond, cobalt and lithium mines of Democratic Republic of Congo; the diamond mines of Liberia and Sierra Leone; the oil fields of the Albertine Graben in Uganda,  Okavango basin  in Namibia and Botswana, the Saloum Delta of Senegal, the Sudd in South Sudan; the coal mines of South Africa; the gas fields of Cabo Delgado in Mozambique; the phosphate fields of Togo and Western Sahara, to mention a few. 

When our territories are sacrificed, it is not just that our land is debased, we are the ones being sacrificed. This becomes clearer to us when we realize that, for a fact, rather than being owners of the land we are actually the land. To liberate ourselves from this exploitative cul de sac, we must know that environmental action is an investment, not a cost. Every action we take today towards ending the sacrifice of our territories is an investment towards reinventing an environment that does not eat us up.


Welcome Words by Nnimmo Bassey at School of Ecology on Recovering Oil Sacrifice Zones  by HOMEF @ Niger Delta University, Amasoma, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, on 2nd  August 2024

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.