NESREA boss charges stakeholders to imbibe best practices to prosper environment

Compliance with regulations guiding environmental-related businesses and practices would promote the well-being of both the environment and the population while saving the nation huge resources that could be deployed to other developmental needs, Director General, National Environmental Standard and Regulation Enforcement Agency (NESREA), Professor Aliyu Jauro has advised.

Jauro in an exclusive interview with Tribune Online at his office in Abuja stated that huge resources are expended on monitoring and compliance of the stakeholders, especially operators in the field.

He emphasized that Nigeria is blessed with a beautiful ecosystem for the benefit of man as the flora and fauna interact but every operator must play their role in compliance with the relevant laws that would promote safe environmental practices for the benefit of all.

He pointed out that while the agency would focus on monitoring and compliance as part of its mandate in 2023, it would encourage business entities operating in the environment space, particularly those, whose operations relate to the environment consider the development of the nation in their operations as contribute their quota by imbibing environmental friendly practices.

This, he said if the operators imbibe, would save the agency the cost of prosecution across the country and such resources could be channelled to other developmental needs of the country.

According to Prof. Jauro, the cost of restoring a degraded environment and prosecution where applicable can be very expensive: “it is something that cannot be quantified. It is an unquantifiable cost.

“It is not only the issue of prosecution when the environment is degraded. For you, to put it back a degraded environment to its original form is very difficult.

“At times it needs some years before it will be healed.

“And for the prosecution, it is very expensive, we are talking about court processes here. We have cases in some states, most of the time, so we have to pay our lawyers’ tickets (DTA) to travel there, you know now, you can hardly get an air ticket of N100,000.

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“So you spent millions of Naira prosecuting that single case. And these cases linger for years where you start because the court processes in Nigeria are very slow.

“And most of the judges are not very conversant with the urgency attached to environmental offences. so it cannot be quantifiable. We know it is very expensive and time-consuming,” he said.

”The best approach is for our various stakeholders to partner together to save the environment, health of the people and promote national development by their individual actions.”

He pointed out that NESREA looks forward to having more than 16 awardees in the 2023 National environmental compliance Award as an improvement of the actors in the sector upholding environmental best practices.

Professor Jauro noted that the awareness campaign of the agency has been faced with some challenges in rural areas, particularly those who use charcoal fuel for their cooking.

“I can see there is a good response from some of the populace while some are still reneging. When you meet and sensitize some people, quickly, they would say oh, from now henceforth, I will adopt this behaviour but some people no matter how much you try, they will never comply, they will never do the right thing, until you sanction them.

“And most people will also say okay, for instance, you say you shouldn’t cut down trees, indiscriminately, for making firewood or charcoal, what do they do?

“They don’t have any other means of livelihood. So there is the issue of poverty, the issue of the need for them to get other forms of livelihoods. So I can say some are responding but some are very, difficult to convince to adopt the best tool.”

It would be recalled that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recently revealed that the nation is burdened with multi-dimensional poverty by 133 million of the population.