Building a Resilient Future

When we speak of building a resilient future, we have to look at the environment in which we live and examine the state of that environment. What are the living conditions for humans and other beings that we share the planet with? The Niger Delta is a deeply polluted environment, a deeply degraded territory, one of the worst polluted places on the planet.

Researches have confirmed this sad reality. The Environmental Assessment of Ogoni land issued by United Nations Environment Program in 2021 clearly shows the desperate pollution of Ogoni land — the land, the water, and the air. In some places, hydrocarbons have penetrated the soil up to 5 meters. By the time the cleanup started, pollution had sunk as deep as 10 meters.

In 2023 the Bayesian State Oil and Environment Commission, issued a report entitled An Environmental Genocide, Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria. Now, when we speak of environmental genocide, we have to understand this by looking at what genocide itself means. Genocide is an intentional attack and annihilation of a people, ethnic cleansing. An environmental genocide can also be termed ecocide. It happens when there’s an intentional and persistent destruction of a particular environment, as has been the case of the Niger Delta over the last 68 years.

The Niger Delta is a territory that the inhabitants are literally the living dead due to horrific environmental degradation. Consider Bayelsa State that has 40% of mangrove forests gone and there is a 1.5 barrels of crude oil spilled per capita. Imagine that about 14 million cubic meters of natural gas is flared every day at 17 facilities in Bayelsa State alone releasing toxic elements into the air and causing cancers, breathing illnesses and acid rain. Oil related contaminants such as chromium are present in groundwater at a level 1000 times beyond the World Health Organization limit, and then shockingly, total petroleum hydrocarbons exceed safe levels by a factor of 1 million. Think about that.

Now our topic is on building a resilient future. What is resilience? Other words for resilience could be toughness, strength, tenacity, power, persistence. Now, when you are resilient, it doesn’t mean you are merely tough to receive any kind of beating. That’s not resiliency, just being helpless, but strong. No, resilience is a situation where you equipped to overcome hazards, where your vulnerability is removed, and disasters are not the norm. It’s a situation where what you lost is restored and what was damaged is paid for. To build a resilient future, we have to map that future. We have to change our imaginaries.We have to determine what the future would look like and then we build towards attaining that future. We need to be passionate about this. We need to be conscious of where we are, and act to get to where we want to be.

We are considering building a resilient future by integrating climate action and community empowerment. Now, what are the key climate actions that are being taken globally today. One is adaptation, and second is mitigation.

Simply put, adaptation means adapting to changing situations, making accommodation with what is coming at you, while mitigation means taking action to stop the change from happening or to reduce the change that is occurring. When we speak about climate change, sometimes our focus is on the carbon in the atmosphere, but we must also speak about the carbon in the ground that is being extracted and burnt to put that carbon in the atmosphere. If we keep looking only into the skies and forget to look at the ground, then of course, we will not really tackle the problem that affects our people on a daily basis. And so we have to look at where the rain started beating us. That deluge drenched us when the first oil well was drilled and exports began in the late 1950s at Otuabagi in the Oloibiri oil field. Now those early oil wells have since been abandoned. They were abandoned in 1970s but they’ve never been decommissioned. The area has never been cleaned up, and as we speak, they are still contaminating the environment, and this happens because of lax regulation. Lax regulation is not accidental, just like ecocide is not happenstance. It’s all about profit for international oil companies and their Nigerian counterparts.

The Niger Delta is a sacrifice zone where anything goes and the people just manage and struggle to survive. Those of us who live in the area don’t have to be told about the level of pollution here. The reports are there, the Ogoni report, the Bayelsa report, even the Niger Delta Environment Survey that Shell commissioned in the 90s, but never released, and many others including the one by Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Center, which studied blood samples of women from Otuabagi area, and found them all loaded with hydrocarbons. people are literally the walking dead.

In November to December 2021 over a period of six weeks, there was an oil blowout on the Santa Barbara river, a well run by Aiteo. That spill all happened in public view. The polluters and NOSDRA claimed that a mere 3,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled. Imagine a spill from a well head at high pressure for six weeks.Experts estimate that about 500,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled in that incident. And how about Ororo-1 oil well off the coast of Awoye in Ondo State? That oil well blew up 5 years ago and is still burning and spilling as we speak — a clear indication of systemic neglect. How can we be serious about climate action when we have an oil well burning and spilling crude for 5 years? It’s an open sore, burning, spilling in broad daylight, destroying livelihoods of communities along the coastline of the Niger Delta, especially at the Awoye area. In sum, the Niger Delta is not just a sacrifice zone, it’s a zone that holds the history of colonial exploitation, extractivism, expropriation and extermination of the people on a daily and continuous basis.

How can we speak of community empowerment in this sort of environment? What would community empowerment look like? What is community empowerment when perpetrators of environmental degradation are abandoning their responsibilities in the so called divestment moves? What kind of transition would that be? If a polluter leaves the pollution, hands it over to his allies or other companies that they set up, and moves deeper offshore to pollute from offshore and maybe turn the offshore into a situation that is akin to what they’ve left in our onshore the Niger Delta is not only suffering from loss and damage. It is a lost and damaged territory. It is almost a lost and damaged, totally damaged, irreversibly damaged territory.

And our work in community. If we want to do real community empowerment, we must take real climate action to avert a continuation of the sacrifice of the zone. And there are things we must do. Number one, there has to be a clear environmental audit across the entire Niger Delta, what has gone wrong? Who is responsible, and how can people live in that kind of society? Environment number two, health audit. What has been killing our people?

How come we don’t have adults? Children have become adults and we don’t have elderly people. Number three, remediation, we’re not only going to audit the environment, or did the health. There must be a cleanup of the entire Niger Delta. There must be reparations. There must be payment for the damage that has been done to lives and to the environment.

Gas flaring must be stopped and halted. It’s an illegal activity. It’s a crime against humanity. It’s crime against the environment, against Mother Earth. It must be stopped. The so called divestment must be started and reversed, it is time to empower the communities and take real climate action by bringing into play community control, renewable energy provision, supporting food sovereignty, building resilient infrastructure. Still speaking about building resilience through climate reparations, it’s a time to right the wrongs in terms of energy provision, United States a very challenged environment, and electricity penetration is very low, and so to reach hard to reach communities, there must be community controlled renewable energy. In other words, we have to bring energy democracy to the Niger Delta, so that the people who only see glimpses of light from gas flares would now have electricity with which to engage in productive activities and to light up the territory. Now, the land, the water and the air has been so contaminated, if gas flaring is stopped, pollution is cleaned up, then the people have a chance to engage in agriculture in a way that is resilient and a way that helps tackle global warming, and that would be having food sovereignty with a key focus on agroecology, cultivating crops according in line and in harmony with nature. 

And then finally, one clear action that must be taken to build resilience is to encourage community democracy and have community development agencies that are truly driven by the people and not manipulated through divide and rule and rule system by either the oil corporations or the governments at various levels. And so we’re speaking about community agency the people must be on the driving seat to build a resilient future, to take real climate action and to empower themselves the people are going to empower themselves when the conditions are right, and this starts by building social cohesion and resilience through inclusive approaches to resource management, accountability and ownership, communities must be in a position say this cannot happen in our territory. This can happen in our territory. They must be in charge of what resources are extracted in their territories and how these are extracted. And finally, we have to work to promote restorative justice. In other words, community in Agile data can only be empowered and build resilient future when there is environmental justice.

Those who do the harm the most harm must do the most to write those harms, to correct those harms. They have to pay for the harms done.

We need ecological justice. We need species justice where we understand that we are not alone on this planet. We’re not alone in Niger, there are other beings that we share the environment with, and they must be intergenerational justice. We have to keep in mind that the future we’re talking about belongs to the children yet unborn, and so what we do now must be such as would ensure that they can they’ll have a repaired resilience, strong ecosystems, ecology, systems, a week to thrive. These are some of the, these are the thoughts. 

Let us take a pause here.

Keynote address at they 3rd Niger Delta Climate Conference held at Port Harcourt, Nigeria on 8 July 2025

Halting Ecocide in the Niger Delta

We remind ourselves that genocide is an international crime under the Rome Statutes and is defined as “the deliberate and systemic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The report of the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission (BSOEC) is titled An Environmental Genocide: Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria.

The use of Environmental Genocide as the title of the report is weighty and demands that the matter should not be treated with levity. However, as much as we are unhappy about the silence that has engulfed the report, we must applaud the government of Bayelsa State taking the steps, assembling a top-notch team of experts to drive the commission and to produce such an important report. Other states in the Niger Delta should toe the path set by Bayelsa. There is no time to dither on this.

The BSOEC report was published in May 2023 and formally unveiled by the government of Bayelsa State in Yenagoa on 28th October 2024. The report was thereafter presented nationally at Abuja on 30th October 2024. The governor of Bayelsa State presented the report to the president of Nigeria at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on 5th November 2024. The report was widely applauded and endorsed by stakeholders, and this elicited the hope that action would quickly commence towards the implementation of its recommendations.  However, six months after the flurry of activities, not a word, not a perceptible step, has been seen regarding a real response to the report. This is very concerning.

The importance of the BSOEC report to the understanding of the dire situation of the entire Niger Delta cannot be overemphasised. We must never make the mistake of thinking that environmental degradation in one part of the region is a burden only for the directly affected part. The NDAC Manifesto clearly states that the Niger Delta region is one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world, and that “adverse activity in one place immediately results in impacts across the entire ecosystem.” Thus, when we speak of environmental genocide in Bayelsa State, we are inevitably speaking of environmental genocide in the entire Niger Delta.

We must not forget that genocide is a deliberate and systemic crime. It does not happen by accident. No, it does not happen by chance. It is deliberate and deeply systemic. The single word for this crime is ecocide. Stop Ecocide International has defined this crime as “unlawful acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

The lived experience of everyone in the Niger Delta is one of being trapped in an environment that has been severely damaged in a deliberate, irresponsible and persistent manner.  Deliberate because the gas flaring, the oil spills and the discharge of produced water into the environment are intentional. Irresponsible because those committing the crimes know they would scarcely be held to account. Persistent because there is an equivalent of one Exxon Valdez oil spill into the environment annually right from when the first oil wells came into operation. When we add the other polluting activities such as dumping of hazardous wastes into the environment it becomes incontrovertible that environmental genocide or ecocide is the reality of the Niger Delta.

This is our fourth NDAC gathering having had earlier convening in Uyo, Port Harcourt and Abuja. This edition is held in Bayelsa because this is the epicentre of ecocide in the region, even though all parts of the region are dastardly impacted. The outcome of the Assessment of the Ogoni Environment as conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) shows clearly the extreme degradation of Ogoniland by hydrocarbons pollution years after active extraction was forced to stop in 1993. Thirty years after the tragic deaths and the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders, there is yet to be a closure on the Ogoni tragedy. The complexity of the clean-up exercise has rendered the region a huge laboratory for studies on how to handle such massive ecocide. Amid this open wound some political forces still only see possibilities of petrodollars and care little about the discounting of lives in the region.

Before the UNEP report there was the Niger Delta Environment Survey (NDES) commissioned by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) but never released to the public. No doubt there was no way to sugarcoat the damage done to our people and the environment and that may have stopped them from releasing the final report. Other reports and books by individuals and civil society organisations show that tragedy of resource exploitation in the region has a trail of tears and blood going back into the past. Indeed, there is a clear overlay of precolonial, colonial and neocolonial exploitation and harms in time and space over the years. We recall the destruction of Akassa in 1895 resulting from the fight by colonial expedition forces to monopolize the palm oil trade.  Forests and lands grabbed and converted to plantations in the colonial equally overlap with parts today being exploited for oil and gas.  

Ororo 1 well at Oil Mining Lease (OML) 95 in the immediate offshore of Awoye community in Ondo State 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 5 years non-stop with nothing being done to halt the crime.

NDAC aims to ensure that mindless ecological assault does not continue. The key demands made in the Niger Delta Manifesto for Socioecological Justice provide key pathways for halting the environmental genocide that continues to overwhelm the region, and commence the urgent steps for the remediation, restoration of the Niger Delta. Ensuring redress for the decades of unmitigated exploitation, expropriation and human rights abuses requires payment of direct reparations by oil companies before their attempts to divest are considered.

Environmental and health audits of the entire Niger Delta are urgently needed considering the environmental genocide and the brevity of life in the region. The BSOEC called for a restoration fund of $12 billion over 12 years for Bayelsa State. For the entire region about $150 billion will be needed for remediation and restoration efforts over the first 5 years. Besides remediation and restoration, more than that estimated amount would be needed annually as reparations for human and ecological loses occasioned by the clearly deliberate and systemic destruction of the Niger Delta environment. This is a tiny amount when we consider that BP paid a bill BP of $61 billion for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact they further set up a settlement of $20.8 billion with the US Department of Justice in 2015 and also set up a compensation fund of $20 billion for other claimants. That was for just one oil spill. We have a situation where spills occur daily, abandoned oil wells continue to drip oil for decades and where a well blowout would be deliberately left burning and spilling for over five years.

Time is running out and delay is a luxury we cannot afford considering the heavy injuries being inflicted on our peoples and environment on a daily basis. It is indeed time for remediation, restoration and reparations.

Welcome words at Niger Delta Alternatives Convergence (NDAC) held on 12th May 2025 at Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria.

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.

The Future is in our Roots 

Environment is the tangible and intangible surroundings and the complex ecosystem that humans share with all beings, human and non-human, living and non-living. It is both visible and invisible. This includes the land, water, and the air, and all that live in them. It includes everything that aids our wellbeing and that includes our culture, spirituality and identity. Our environment is the source of our knowledge and wisdom. It gives us the strategic keys with which we navigate through life and beyond.

When one part of an ecosystem is destroyed, it impacts or destroys all the other parts. This means, nothing exists in isolation of everything else. Thus, the web of life is the interrelationships that hold everything together – something we often do not think about. As bacteria work in the soil, worms aerate the soils, insects eat the worms, trees grow in soils, birds perch on or live in trees. So, when trees die, and insects and bacteria aid their decay. And the decayed trees fertilize the soil and the cycle continues.

For instance, it is known that more than half of all living things on earth live in the soil and when soils are damaged, the impacts extend to the food web, food production, landscape stability and climate change due to altered carbon sequestration qualities. 

Many of our communities operated solidarity economies. Everyone’s welfare was largely ensured, and the basic rule was that everyone was basically his brother’s or sister’s keeper. Exploitation of labour was rare, as communal efforts were drawn on in farming seasons as well as when homes were being constructed. 

Moreover, farmers engaged in seed development and sharing. There were no patents on seeds and other varieties. If profit was not the driving force in social relations, over exploitation and accompanying pollutions were rarities. We see ourselves as integral parts of Nature rather than as some super being that has Nature prostrate at our feet. Anthropomorphic conception of nature centres actions and considerations on perceived human needs and this has raised many blind spots and birthed exploitative relationships with the land, water, air and the beings we share the planet with.

Other factors that helped healthy living were humility and compassion. Humility opens our eyes to see, that we are not alone on earth and show our dependence through that we are interdependent in a web that cannot be broken. Similarly, Compassion helps us care about the wellbeing of our neighbour by seeing them as our relatives. These values encourage healthy deference to Nature and mandate the roles of stewardship and trusteeship that we must play. 

The very first commandment given to man at creation according to the Bible was:

The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. Genesis 2:15 (NLT). This injunction forbids destructive relations within the webs of life. 

The complex web of life

Environmental protection?

Formal environmental protection laws can be said to have been codified in Nigeria in 1992. The Koko toxic waste dumping in 1988 led to the establishment of Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA) by Decree 58 same year and later amended by Decree 59 in 1992.

It must be said, however, that environmental protection or defense has always been an intrinsic part of our culture and tradition. Notably, Conservation was carried out through taboos in the form of social controls about what was acceptable.  and what must not be done. In the same way, Sacred sites were also locations of conservation and species protection. And Our people also use festivals to regulate or mark when certain activities can be carried out. So, Fishing festivals help to prevent fishing and hunting at certain seasons, thus allowing the fish or animals to reproduce and mature before they are caught or harvested. 

Simultaneously, Certain species were taken as totems in particular communities and such species became entwined with the communities and were members of the communities. Generally, there were strict protection and usage of the gifts of nature and of lands, forests and water bodies including streams, creeks, rivers, swamps. 

Wisdom of the Beings

Wisdom in other than humans can be seen in several phenomena. For our conversation, we will reference migrations of beings as signifying wisdom that should humble humans and demand a duty of care towards these webs of life.

First let us consider the monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies migrate from Northern America to California or Mexico during winter. Although the butterflies migrate back at the year it is their great-great-grandchildren that make that return journey, not the same butterflies that Chad made on the earlier trip. They can fly over distance of 3000 miles and end up in the exact areas they usually stay in. How do these tiny beings carry out such precise expeditions? Compare them to humans who need a compass or a google map to navigate their way to the next neighbourhood.

And how about the turtles that have specific spots in Lagos for laying eggs. These turtles lay eggs at Elegushi beach, Lagos and can rightly call that area their home. Species found here include endangered turtles’ species, such as the Leatherback Sea Turtle, the Green Sea Turtle and the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. They come to lay their eggs between October and April yearly. Upon hatching the youngsters would leave and return after four years to lay eggs. The conditions that made Elegushi a desired destination have changed in recent years. Land use and seafront changes have made the area inhospitable. The coconut trees that provided shade are largely gone, and plastic wastes pose peculiar risks. Besides these, persons hunting for sea meat are on the prowl.

Colonial Environmentalism and the Breaking of the webs of life

When the web of life is broken the act overlooks justice considerations and takes down both resilience and dignity. One of the big forces disrupting the webs of life has been colonialism. Colonialism often entails the invasion, annexation of territories and outright stealing of land and resources. Our notion of land is complex because it is more than territory. Land is our history, our culture and that which connects us with our ancestors, our spirituality and our stories. Colonialism is not a mere historical phenomenon, but one that is ongoing in a diversity of modes.

Secondly, the notion that pollution is permissible up to certain “carrying capacity,” or threshold, of soils, rivers, the air and the earth has been very harmful. Although such ideas have been projected as science and provide platforms to certain forms of environmentalism, we believe that they are patently wrong, ignore the right to a safe environment and are intrinsically colonial. The notion of the threshold of pollution has benefitted polluters and exploiters as it offers them the license to pollute.

We all hear about standards measured by levels of contamination and pollution. When it is said that the ground water at Ogale, Ogoni, has benzene, a known carcinogen, 900 times above the World Health Organization’s standard, it simply means that the WHO permits certain amounts of the carcinogen in potable water. The same with the amount of carbon in the atmosphere which is measured by parts per million. This led to the computation of carbon budget that informs that the planet can tolerate up to 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and that beyond that concentration we risk catastrophic climate change. Following standards of permissible pollution of this sort scientists have produced charts that show where limits have been overshot. Meanwhile entrepreneurs of pollution use the thresholds to promote ideas such as carbon offsets and carbon trading. 

What is less considered is the fact that extractivism and accompanying pollution have harmed our soils, swamps, water bodies and the air, generally disrupted the webs of life, displaced, impoverished and killed peoples. In computing pollution thresholds, humans care very little about the heavy impacts on the webs of life because the measure of permissible or assimilative pollution is considered regarding humans and no other than humans.

The promise that pollution can be eliminated through recycling, just like carbon trading, numbs society into thinking that an equilibrium is being maintained in the use of natural resources whereas they lock the world on an imbalanced pathway of multiple overshoots. 

The idea of circular economy falls in this same pathway when it comes to overproduction for consumption. The push for capital as a driver of transformation of nature upends any sense of balance, beats consumption rates and yields waste that ought to erase the profits if producers were responsible for the whole of life cycle of their products. Inbuilt obsolescence as well as the concealment of the costs of waste and pollution are political actions. 

Pollution in the Niger Delta and Nigeria generally has become so pervasive and has trumped containment. It can be said that there is a pollution epidemic. And it must be political for this level of pollution to be tolerated. Setting thresholds before pollution can be said to have occurred is a dangerous concept of accepting contamination by assuming that it is acceptable to be damaged to such levels.

The Future is in our Roots 

Bringing back environmental sanity requires a resurgence of African environmentalism through cultural and political action. This is a subject we will dwell on in a subsequent conversation. The web of life is quite resilient, but persistent degrading actions by certain humans and corporations are testing that resilience to the limits. The School of Ecology aims to waken us to the dangers of further disruption to the webs of life and the need for everyone to be an environmental defender if we must build resilience and ensure socioecological justice.

Guiding thoughts at HOMEF’s School of Ecology on Ecological Justice and Resilience held at Oronto Douglas Hall, HOMEF, Benin City, Nigeria on 24 March 2025

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

Books, Imaginations and Ecological Liberation

“…all classical traditions of world literature are fostered by environments where there are intensive struggles against great evils for the restoration of human dignity.”

– G. G. Darah, “Revolutionary Pressures in the Literature of the Niger Delta”

The Community and Culture Programme of Health of Mother Earth Foundation seeks to underscore the foundational role that literature plays in our culture. Our stories, poems, theatre, songs and dance often aim to educate, correct through the sharing of information and through naming and shaming. These cultural practices conducted in the public, are for public consumption and demand action. The overall aims include keeping a record of happenings, envisioning what should happen and providing keys towards attaining preferred ends.

Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigeria’s hero of the environment, was many things in his lifetime. He was a socioecological activist, a politician, educator, businessman, playwright, novelist and poet. He used his resources and talents in the service of the Ogonis and by extension his nation. While he laced his writing with humour, he was dead serious about the rejection of marginalisation, ecocide, exploitation and oppression. He fought for socio-ecological justice. It can be argued that through his artistic production he woke the consciousness of his people and used the cultural tools at his disposal to ingrain in them a sense of commitment to the Ogoni cause and along with that a determination to fight for justice. It can also be argued that without his prodigious cultural and literary outputs the Ogoni struggle would have burned out by this time.

Books are the vehicles for building sustainable struggles and retaining a heightened sense of humour while doing so. Literature can and should be an ideological and confrontational tool to reclaim the social mandate of the oppressed. 

While books meet the aesthetic needs of the people, they also shape their imaginations. Undoubtedly, we are shaped by our imaginaries. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ngugi Wa’Thiongo, Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, Christopher Okigbo, Helon Habila, Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie, Nduka Otiono, Chigozie Obioma and a host of others challenge oppressive systems and the imaginaries that acquiesce to such situations. 

Our community and Culture programme aims to use the tools offered by authors, poets, playwrights, storytellers and singers to build environmental consciousness, offer pictures of alternative futures and promote resistance to the horrendous environmental exploitation and damage happening around our nation and continent.

Today is the first in our series of Book Days. As we get ready to digest portions from the book A Walk in the Curfew, there is another book we should peep into. 

This other book is The Great Ponds by Elechi Amadi. It is a book that pictures the disruptions of society through fights over natural resources and mirrors the destructive extractive activities that has numbed our sense of the fact that the environment is our life.

Two key characters in the book are Olumba of Chiolu and Wago of Aliakoro. These two communities engage in protracted wars over fishing rights to Wagaba Pond. In the tale we see Chiolu warriors defeating those of Aliakoro, and thereafter members of Chiolu claimed Wagaba Pond and fished in it without hindrance. Aliakoro villagers, however, began to poach in the pond, and Chiolu sent a war party to catch the poachers. We note that these two communities were from the same clan. They were family torn apart by a natural resource.

Over time the two communities were plagued with wars, kidnappings, and an epidemic akin to COVID-19 which is the pivot around which the stories in A Walk  in the Curfew are spurn. 

Wago was emblematic of Aliakoro’s superiority over the other villages. His power got magnified in stature by those most troublesome desires of humans: honour and praises. Yet being a proud man Wago decided to blow out his own candle, to commit suicide in the contentious pond. The elders in Aliakoro knew suicide to be a great sin but they also knew that for Wago to choose to do so in the pond was a tactical and overly insensitive gesture. Personal interest had disregarded the communal good.

The Great Ponds is a testament to the power of literature to reflect, shape, and challenge societal norms. Amadi’s work continues to resonate with readers, offering valuable insights into the complexities of human nature, community, and tradition. It also offers a cautionary tale that we should not allow natural or other resources to divide us and lead to needles destruction and deprivations.

Now, let’s turn to the writers of A walk in the Curfew and other pandemic tales, some of whom are here with us today. By writing the stories in the time of the pandemic, the writers show that emergencies are excellent moments for reflection on life. They also hold up the light on how to build resilience and overcome the most dire situations.

The stories remind us of the power of human connection, solidarity, and creativity in the face of adversity. The writings not only capture the complexities and challenges of the pandemic but also offer hope, insights, and inspiration for a more just, equitable, and sustainable future.

The authors’ contributions to this collection are a gift to humanity, and there is no doubt that these offerings will resonate with readers worldwide.

Congratulations Onome Etisioro, Mfoniso Antia (Xael) and Kome Odhomor. Thank you for offering your creativity and for opening this journey on our Community and Culture highway.

Comments at HOMEF’s maiden Book Day held on 31 January 2025 in Benin City, Nigeria

Recovering our Taste Buds

Food plays a critical role in the life of any community or nation. Food is at the centre of our cultures. Agricultural and food systems generate songs, dances, drama and other art forms that moderate the pulse of any community. Agricultural and food systems drive economies, identities and spirituality. 

Centre of origin of certain crop varieties simply highlight locations where Nature places those particular crops, for instance. Such crops are climate smart through years of adaptation to those locations. The foods they yield are prepared in particular ways based on the social realities and the preferences of the people. The mode of preparation and presentation are markers of cultural identities and moderate the taste buds of the people. 

There has been a distancing of our people from our cultural foods. We lost our taste buds to colonialism which promoted cash cropping and plantation agriculture rather than the mixed cropping that assured our forebears of nutritious foods from a wide variety of crops. Today we have a massive assault on African foods by reckless introduction of genetically modified foods, some of which are best known as pesticides. These crops do not only kill our soils and biodiversity, they directly assault our food systems and taste buds. That is why some agents of toxic foods can openly declare that “it is better to eat and die, than to not eat and die.” Such talks are declarations of intent to poison Nigerians without any compunction. As we always say, what we eat must not eat us!

Our food is Nigerian is inspired by My food is African campaign of the African Food Sovereignty Alliance, and aims to take us back to the place of recovering our taste buds. It is a call to celebrate our culture and to appreciate the bounties of Nature in our region. Most communities are known for certain foods. Same with nations. Where the foods cross borders there can be fierce competition over who cooks them best, like the legendary competition between Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal over who cooks the best jollof rice.

When we speak of amala, a Nigerian can easily identify which is the region of origin. Same when ofe nsala is mentioned. The same happens when one speaks of tuwo, starch, afang or edikang ikong. When you speak of akara, suya or bole, you are speaking of foods and snacks that have literally diffused into all cultures in Nigeria. Food unites a people.

The liberation of our taste buds from artificial and sometimes toxic foods is a push for recovery of our health and economies. African foods directly connect consumers to producers. We share seeds, have festivals linked to farming, fishing and hunting. Our food is best enjoyed when shared. Food is at the centre of families and communities. A family that eats together lives happily together. 

Take out foods and you’ve taken out, or stolen, the best part of us. 

Bring back our foods. Celebrate our food. Recover our stories. Rebuild our communities. Awaken our taste buds! 

Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey at HOMEF’s Nigerian Food Festival held in Benin City on Tuesday 26 November 2024

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.