Nasidi Adamu Yahaya and Mohammed Haruna Yusuf
21 December 2008
"Now is the time for us all to join hands in this most important assignment of our generation for the protection of our environment". This is an assertion from Vice President Goodluck Jonathan who identified environmental protection as imperative to the national development.
The VP who disclosed at the First National Environmental Consultation in Abuja recently, made no hesitation to reiterate his administration's mandate of standing tall on environmental issues.
Hence Jonathan stated that, "for this government, we believe that protecting the environment ultimately translates into good governance".
In a watershed event which, signposts a new dawn in the annals of Nigeria's environmental evolution and the benefits of effective partnerships between civil society and the government, over 200 participants representing the academia, civil society groups, local communities, women groups, the media, government ministries and agencies, members of the national assembly, and friends from Norway and USA converged in Abuja for a two-day national consultation on the environment.
The theme of the First National Environmental Consultation hosted by Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Environment was: The Nigerian Environment and the Rule of Law.
In a remark, the Chair, Friends of the Earth International, Rev Nnimmo Bassey, said the theme was carefully chosen to push the issue of environmental rights and sustainability through the government's avowed rule of law template.
The former Minister of State for Environment, Housing and Urban Development, Chuka Odom, stated that "if we must be taken seriously in our struggle for an environmentally sustainable society we must have a comprehensive body of laws regulating the sector".
Stressing the need for a conducive and enabling environment, a former member of the House of Representatives, Hon. Uche Onyeagocha, emphasized the relationship between good environmental governance and credible elections, saying "credible elections produce credible representatives of the people".
He stated that such representatives are better motivated to protect the people and their environment because they can also be held accountable.
Onyeagocha pointed out that environmental governance is determined by the existence of laws directing citizen's activities as they relate to the environment.
He observed that there is no law in Nigeria that gives any corporation the power to destroy the environment and that gas flaring is a flagrant violation of the rule of the law.
Participants at the occasion critically examined the status of the extant of environmental laws in the country, the need for fundamental reforms and the challenges to overcome in the process.
Prominent issues of land rights, ecological justice, labour, gender and the environment, the vexed question of the Niger Delta, violence and the impact of oil on livelihoods were discussed among others.
In the course of the exhaustive discussions and debates, it was observed that the environment is in danger and requires urgent action to rescue it from the path of grave degradation.
In a communiqué released at the end of the two-day event signed by the chair, Friends of the Earth International, Rev Nnimmo Bassey, and the Executive Director, Women Environmental Programme, Ms. Priscilla Achakpa, the experts noted that the partnership between government and civil society is essential to drive the process of rescuing the environment and making it sustainable.
The experts described good governance, strong political system and credible elections as a sine qua non for environmental sustainability.
Another observation is the evident lack of political will to enact or implement needed legislations and reform or abrogate existing bad legislations because of vested personal, clique and class interests that have been elevated over and above the interests of the people.
Also, the absence of a definitive constitutional regime on environmental issues to make them justifiable fundamentally impairs serious moves towards environmental reforms.
They explained that the wholesale extrapolation and import of legislative instruments from foreign jurisdictions without any attempt to draw impetus from the peculiar socio-economic and cultural milieu and the exclusion of local communities from the processes of making these laws are among the major reasons explaining the non implementation of these laws.
The experts said that guaranteed land rights are essential in achieving sustainable development and environmental laws, adding that some of the existing laws such as the Land Use Act and the oil pipelines law deny communities of these rights and are therefore obnoxious and anti people.
They acknowledged that extractive activities have led to the destruction of the local environment; as a result, the poor are being forced to bear a disproportionate share of the negative impacts of the destruction of the environment. The only way out of our mounting poverty and for guaranteeing future development lies in having a sustainable environment.
Gas flaring which emits dangerous toxins, destroys the environment, contributes to the climate change phenomenon and threatens existence on earth continues in Nigeria because of the insensitivity of the oil companies and lack of political will on the part of government to put a stop to it.
This is evidenced by the continuous shifting of the gas flare-out date and the failure of the oil companies and the government to abide by the Federal High Court judgement delivered by Justice Nwokorie on 14th November, 2005 in Benin City, Edo State Nigeria to the effect that gas flaring is illegal in Nigeria, the communiqué stated.
It added that stakeholders are worried over plans by the Ministries of Agriculture and Science and Technology to introduce genetically modified crops and products into the Nigerian environment even though Nigeria is yet to have a Biosafety Law.
"Communities should be empowered to enable them effectively participate in the process of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and they should also be adequately represented within the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) organs", it stated.
The national consultation expressed concerned about the high level of repression by the Nigerian state of dissenting voices in resource rich communities. This repression uses the full coercive powers of the state (military and paramilitary forces) to crush voices of protest at the instance of multinational oil companies like Shell. It also uses the militarization of oil rich communities to ensure uninterrupted access to energy security for an inflexible economic and social system built on fossil fuels.
It was also stressed that environmental problems are not only interrelated but are also a result of international oil diplomacy. While gas flares in the Niger Delta, contribute to desertification in Nigeria and global warming, the entire framework for regulating and acting on oil problems in Nigeria is related to and derives from international interests in Nigeria's oil.
From the foregoing, and recognising that environmental protection is a collective to sustain both the earth and humanity, the forum resolved as follows:
That the government should stop further operations aimed at discovering and exploiting new oil and gas fields. The oil should be left under the ground as oil operations are harmful and constitute a threat to the environment and continued human existence.
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