8 August 2007
editorial
Lagos — ISSUES about oil are always heated. The gusty debates are more so in Nigeria where the politicians have their teeth dug deep into revenue from oil.
They are ready to put their lives on line to defend sharing of oil revenue, in a manner they consider favourable. This attitude is the fulcrum of the disputations that feature in efforts to resolve the famishing effects of oil exploration in the Niger Delta.
In the Niger Delta, despoliation of the environment, the short-circuited future of the youth, ravaging illnesses and excruciating poverty that rates among the worst nationwide, have foisted a new breed of agitators on Nigeria.
Solutions are more difficult because the festering sore was unattended to for years. In place of sincerity, abuses, subterfuges, and sheer mockery, called palliatives, are thrown at the people.
Acrimonious exchanges fly over matters affecting the region. The insensitivity of most parts of Nigeria is built on distance from the choking gas flares, destructive acid rains, devastating oil spillage, death of agricultural production and creation of settlements where drinking water, education, electricity and hospitals are alien.
The stories have been told for too long. The promises have run their full course. What does this administration want to do about the Niger Delta, for the sustainability of the area, not merely to ensure undisrupted access to the oil and gas? How would it be different from what past administrations did or did not do?
Oloibiri, in Bayelsa State, where in 1956, the first oil well was discovered, challenges Nigeria to attend to the matters of the Niger Delta quickly. All that remains of Oloibiri today is the capped, emptied well, a reminder of the worse future that awaits the Niger Delta. Oloibiri is abandoned to its fate - the world has moved to other oil wells.
This aspect of the Niger Delta is ignored. If the wealth from the Niger Delta cannot be expended in restoring the environment and giving the people another means of living, after oil exploration has banished the local economy and compromised many basic rights of the people, what happens when the oil finishes or exploration moves further offshore?
Arguments that oil will not finish are pedestrian. The most generous projections are 30 years. The ceaseless searches for alternative sources of energy may shorten the relevance of oil to 15 years or less. Whichever happens first, from where would the resources to repair the Niger Delta come?
Spats over corruption of the leaders in the region do not answer the question - they are distractions. The type of money that the Niger Delta requires to be habitable, now and when the oil runs out, according to the master plan the Niger Delta Development Commission prepared is $50 billion - it seems like a lot of money, but it is a bare fraction of the $600 billion that oil has fetched Nigeria in only 40 years, by the most conservative estimates. About $232 billion was made from oil, in the last eight years.
Nigeria has to discover the political will to repair the Niger Delta now. Once oil runs out, the region will be a wasteland, of the worst type seen anywhere, since oil and gas exploration in these parts have minimal considerations for the people, and the environment.
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