No fewer than 4,000 Ogoni indigenes have lost their lives since 1993 due to the several decades of unwholesome activities of oil explorations in the Ogoni area of the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
Besides, several families in the same area have been displaced from their ancestral lands as a result of massive oil pollution of their environment.
Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), disclosed this in a Report titled, “HYPREP scorecard: Hope Betrayed’, to mark the 11the Anniversary of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Benin City.
“Since 1993, over 4,000 Ogoni patriots have paid the supreme sacrifice and several others have become internally displaced or refugees in exile,” he alleged.
Assessing the impact and performance of HYPREP, 11 years after commencement of operations, Dr Uyi Ojo, stated during the press briefing that amidst concerns that the Niger Delta region clean-up project, which he estimated may cost $100 billion, might be abandoned after the initial $1billion launch is exhausted.
He said HYPREP, the special purpose vehicle set up to implement the Ogoni cleanup process, has struggled to effectively deliver on any of the recommendations set out in the UNEP report despite the best efforts of concerned stakeholders.
The agency, he added, lacks the manpower and experiences required to pull off a multifaceted cleanup, remediation and restoration project of that project magnitude.
(ERA/FoEN), however, described the recent directive by President Muhammadu Buhari for a full audit of the accounts of the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) from inception to date as desirable.
The frontline environmental group in Nigeria, advised the Nigerian government, the Ogoni people and her partners to request the international community to support the continuation of the remediation and restoration exercise, saying that there must be transparency and accountability in the way the initial $1 billion cleanup fund was utilised through collective action.
ERA/FoEN further called on Stakeholders to be vigilant towards ensuring that the presidential directive does not become counterproductive and demanded assurances that the audit process will not hinder the cleanup or become a mouse game like the much-tainted audit of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), which has lingered on for too long or become a cash cow or a channel for political patronage.
The ERA/FoEN Report alleged that HYPREP processes have been compromised and politicized to the extent that there is no benefit to affected communities in Ogoniland, even as the group described the turnover of six ministers of Environment since the cleanup project began in 2016 as disheartening.
The group challenged Stakeholders, particularly the media and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) which are almost comatose, to compel concerned authorities to act fast to salvage the crisis to check the lack of capacity exhibited by HYPREP, hindrances and delays in execution of the project racketing in the entire Niger Delta region, Southern Nigeria.
“According to Ogoni community members, HYPREP was thought to be a watertight structure with proper checks and balances that will deliver a word class cleanup of the Ogoni environment and lay the groundwork for the cleanup of the rest of the Niger Delta region.
“However, the process was politicized such that it is little or no benefits to the victims and impacted communities leading to what many have called hope betrayed.
“The cleanup process appears to have been jettisoned by the actions of the different ministers of environment who now run HYPREP as sole administrators.
“There have been six different ministers of the environment since the project was launched in 2016”, he said.
ERA/FoEN further accused the Nigerian government and Shell of waging a war against the people of Ogoniland.
The environmental rights group further called on the federal government to remove Shell entirely from the day-to-day implementation of the cleanup and restoration work being handled by HYPREP.
“Shell should continue to be a contributing stakeholder under the polluter pays principle but it should not be directly or indirectly in the cleanup, remediation and restoration process as its track record and management of the operations unit of HYPREP shows that it is unwilling to let go of its failed and substandard environmental remediation and restoration methodology”, Dr Uyi Ojo posited.
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