For over six decades, Ogoniland in Rivers State suffered environmental degradation due to the activities of International Oil Companies (IOCs) extracting oil in the locality. The clamour for a better environment by the people led to what is known as the Ogoni crisis of the late 80s up to the early 20s. The climax of the crisis was the killing of four Ogoni chiefs and the execution of another nine Ogoni prominent leaders, among whom was the environmentalist, poet and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa. That even drew the attention of the international community as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), commissioned an expert report on the level of pollution in Ogoniland. The outcome of the UNEP reports brought about the establishment of the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) in 2022, to carry out remediation projects in Ogoniland. In this piece, the south-south and south-East Regional editor, ‘SUYI AYODELE, who was in Ogoniland penultimate week reports that HYPREP is doing a yeoman’s job in the locality.
For an average Nigerian who is familiar with the struggles in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of the country, the name, Ogoni, evokes different feelings. Indigenes of the locality known as Ogoniland cannot but easily recall the calamities that have been their lot since crude oil was discovered in commercial quantity in K-Dere, otherwise known as Bonu oil fields, in 1958. The Bonu oil fields span the areas known as Babbe, Gokana, Eleme, Ken-Khana, Nyo-Khana and Tai. Little wonder that when the attendant environmental degradation that is usually the signpost of oil exploration, Ogoniland had, and to a greater extent, still has more than a fair share of the gory experience.
Before the Bonu oil fields sprang up with the oil exploration activities by the Shell Petroleum Company, Ogoni was a peaceful peasant community of farmers and fishermen. With the further expansion of Shell exploration and exploitation activities in Korokoro, Ebubu, Yorla and other Ogoni communities, the locality lost its innocence. As more oil wells and flow stations came alive, the quality of lives of the indigenes began to deteriorate. Reason is that the International Oil Companies (IOCs) operating in the area became pathetically profiteering in operation and paid little or no attention to the environmental effects of their operations.
Within a few years of operations, the locals began to feel the negative impacts of the oil exploration. Their land became polluted. Surface and groundwaters were contaminated. The immediate results of these environmental degradation were the loss of farmland, waterways and aquatic lives. The people’s means of survival became threatened, and in most cases, became annihilated, completely.
Expectedly, the people reacted, especially when the concerned businesses put up horrifying measures aimed at silencing the people. The demand for immediate attention of the IOCs to the calamities befalling the people were met with stiff measures. Many of the locals lost their lives as the Nigerian State deployed its security architectures in protection of the oil companies to the detriment of the people while the IOCs smiled to their banks with capital flight from Nigeria to their overseas parent companies.
Ogoniland was on the brink of total extermination when the intellectuals in the area rose to the occasion and took over the struggles of the people for survival. Prominent sons and daughters of Ogoni at home and in the Diaspora, united in their resolve to save their fatherland promulgated the November 1990 Ogoni Bill of Rights, which was endorsed by Ogoni leaders drawn from Babbe, Gokana, Ken Khana, Nyo Khan and Tai. The primary objective of the Bill is the survival of Ogoni people and the need for a healthier environment for the people.
The Ogoni Bill of Rights was followed by the birth of the poster group for the people, Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), which was led by the State-murdered environmentalists, writer and poet, Ken Saro-Wiwa, or simply, Saro-Wiwa. MOSOP, by operations and stance, became the most visible group in the Niger Delta, agitating for a better environment for the people of the region in general, but in particular, for the devastated and heavily polluted Ogoniland.
The once-peaceful campaign for environmental remediation and compensation for the displaced people of Ogoni championed by MOSOP, however, took a tragic turn when four Ogoni chiefs, Albert Badey, Edward Kobani, Theophilus Orage and Samuel Orage, were attacked at Giokoo community where they were holding a meeting. The four Ogoni leaders were brutally murdered by their attackers, who also set their bodies ablaze, leaving nothing for their families to bury.
The then military government of the late dictator, General Sani Abacha, responded to the killing of the four Ogoni leaders by rounding up the leaders of MOSOP, led by Saro-Wiwa. Nine of the MOSOP leaders: Saro-Wiwa, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine, were arranged before the Justice Ibrahim Auta special tribunal and were sentenced to death. The execution of Saro-Wiwa and the eight others known in the Niger Delta Struggle as Ogoni Nine, on November 10, 1995, remains the darkest point in the history of Ogoniland and its crave for survival!
The outcry that greeted what many believed and still believe to be State murder, drew the attention of the international community to the plight of the Ogoni people. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in response to the event, commissioned a report on the environmental devastation in Ogoniland. The all-encompassing report, which took UNEP a period of 14 months to put together, admitted that a lot of damage had been done to the Ogoni landscape, water and air, and recommended, among others, the immediate remediation of the soil and groundwater in Ogoniland. The UNEP reports, specifically mandated, in accordance with the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s stance that the people must be provided with potable water.
While the UNEP report, which was first published comprehensively in 2011, was left to gather dust in some government shelves, the administration of General Muhammadu Buhari took the bull by the horns when it cleaned up the report, looked at its damning findings and the suggested steps for remediation submitted, caused a proclamation for the remediation of Ogoniland to be published and gazetted and established the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) under the Federal Ministry of Environment vide, a memo dated April 28, 2022, with Ref No, PRES/81/SGF/82. The mandate of the agency is the immediate and comprehensive implementation of the remediation programmes of Ogoniland as contained in the UNEP report.
But a recent visit to Ogoniland has shown that HYPREP is a different government agency with a determination to change the narrative and repose in the people, the confidence that determination and willpower could make a huge difference.
Speaking of the activities of HYPREP in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital, penultimate week, the Project Coordinator (PC), of HYPREP, Professor, Nenibarin Zabbey, noted that the agency had gone beyond the mandate of UNEP on remediation, to adding more values to the wellbeing of Ogoniland and its people.
Zabbey, who spoke at HYPREP headquarters before the tour of the facilities and remediation works in Ogoniland by the agency, stressed that HYPREP, in implementing the mandate of UNEP, had decided to be dynamic by adding the provision of basic infrastructures to the remediation project. His argument is that it would amount to a total waste if the Ogoni environments were remediated but the people had no hospitals, no potable water and other basic amenities.
According to him, “HPREP will implement the UNEP reports and recommendations but not sheepishly. We will add value to the report. Beyond the core value of remediation as recommended by UNEP, we are adding electricity, healthcare delivery services and potable water facilities.”
He added that the HPYREP electricity project in Ogoniland, which would link the area to the National Grid, “is to spur economic activities in the area. What we are doing is a sustainable clean-up project and we are in conformity with the original mandate of UNEP while we are also adding values.”
Besides, Zabbey submitted that the Ogoni remediation programme would serve as the template for remediation in other areas across the Niger Delta, particularly, and the country in general, where there had been cases of environmental pollution. “HYPREP sees the Ogoni clean-up project beyond Ogoniland. What we are doing is a sustainable project for the entire Niger Delta region and the whole country at large. We are determined to ensure that what we are doing in Ogoniland will serve as a template for other areas where we have that kind of experience as Ogoni.”
He added that with the massive mangrove restoration project which he said was community-driven with over four million mangroves planted already, was aimed at bringing back aquatic lives to the once-devastate area, in addition to giving the Ogoni ownership of the mangroves.
Some of the projects HPYPREP showcased during the tour were the Kporghor/Gio Water Scheme which was commissioned on July 26, 2024. With 110-metre three-number boreholes, four pressurised and giant overhead tanks, the water scheme was drilled with a telescopic drilling system which prevents contamination. In accordance with the WHO’s recommendations on potable water. The water scheme serves several communities around Kporghor with connecting water pipes laid to service the communities.
Another water project which was also commissioned on July 26, 2024, is located Barako, and has the same facilities and pumping systems as that of Kporghor/Gio Water Scheme.
But the most audacious project in the infrastructure segment of HYPREP activities in Ogoniland is the Centre for Excellence for Environmental Restoration in Wilyaakara, Khana Local Government Area. The facility, which can easily pass for a modern university campus, sits on a land measuring 28 hectares. The most interesting aspect of the institute is the research Integrated Soil Management Centre (ISMC) , the N40 billion edifice which started in 2023, will serve as the intellectual resource centre for environmental issues in the entire Niger Delta and with strong affiliation with some notable universities in America, the United Kingdom and Europe.
On remediation, the core value of HYPREP, the remediation sites in Ogale, Eleme Local Government Area, was too eyeballing to be ignored! Tagged as Simple Medium Risk (SMR), the site covers 180 square metres of land with two million cubic metres of soil to be treated.
Dr Peterside Dakuku, whose Media Voices for Accountability facilitated the tour of HYPREP projects in Ogoniland, said that the idea of the tour was not only to merely showcase what the agency was doing in the area but to let the world appreciate the level of environmental degradation in Ogoniland and put in the subconsciousness of the people, the fact that a home-grown organisation like HYPREP could make a difference.
Head of HYPREP Communication Department of HYP Dr Enuolare Mba-Nwighoh, in a pre-tour presentation, submitted that what the agency has done in the last two years had gone far beyond the mandate of the body.
This was just as he explained that the successes so far recorded by HYPREP did not come without some hiccups. One of such is the delay caused by some landowners, who, despite the UNEP reports showing environmental pollution, insisted that their lands were clean.
In some instances, the landowners fenced off their lands to prevent any remediation exercise. Some of those standoffs lasted over a year before HYPREP was allowed access to those lands.
The initial hurdles notwithstanding, HYPREP has been able to live up to its billing as an interventionist agency in the cleaning of the compromised Ogoniland soil and water.
Life is back in the once-polluted locality. The locals are back to their traditional trades of farming, fishing and other pastoral lifestyles that distinguish Ogoniland as a place of peace, harmony and aquatic splendour.
More importantly, security of life and property is top-notch as the militarised nature that characterised the Ogoni crisis in the late 80s to early millennium has given way for a serene environment devoid of trepidation of any sort.
Ogoniland stands to be great, or even greater, if the HYPREP giant strides in the area as exemplified by the remediation works, are sustained.
The only worry, however, is the Nigerian nature of poor maintenance of its structures and facilities. This is one area HYPREP and the supervisory Federal Ministry of Environment should look into when the remediated land is finally handed over to the people.
Again, the most patriotic contribution the Ogoni people could offer is to take ownership of the mind-bogging facilities deployed in the locality by building an impregnable wall of protection around them. They owe this duty to themselves, the future generation, and most importantly, to the loving memories of their patriots who paid the supreme price for Ogoni to be great!
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