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Buhari to launch Ogoni land clean-up June 2

This is contained in a statement issued by Mr Chijioke Amu-Nnadi, Head of Corporate Affairs unit, Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) in Port Harcourt on Monday.

Ogoni-Land

President Muhammadu Buhari will launch the Ogoni land clean-up on June 2, a statement has said.

This is contained in a statement issued by Mr Chijioke Amu-Nnadi, Head of Corporate Affairs unit, Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) in Port Harcourt on Monday.

It stated that the Minister of Environment, Mrs Amina Mohammed, confirmed the date when she visited Bodo in Gokana Local Government Area of the state to inspect an oil spill clean-up demonstration.

The statement quoted Mohammed as saying that the president had given assurances that the area would be cleaned-up in fulfilment of his electioneering promise to people of the Niger Delta.

“I can confirm that President Buhari will visit Ogoni land on June 2 to flag-off clean-up of oil spills in the area as recommended in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report.

“Buhari would return to Ogoni land where he inaugurated a fish pond in 1984 where the once flourishing pond regrettably had been destroyed by oil pollution.

“The Federal Government is coming back to restore the ecosystem to what it used to be and as such restore the peoples’ source of livelihood.
“We are not just committed to implementing the UNEP report but we are also going beyond that by taking steps to improve security, good governance and economy of the Niger Delta region.

“I can assure that the clean-up exercise is only the beginning, as Mr President is focused on restoring hope to people of the region,” the statement quoted the minister as saying.

Mohammed solicited support of all stakeholders to make the exercise a success.

The statement also quoted Mrs Ibim Semenitari, the Acting Managing Director of NDDC, as saying that the clean was of utmost importance to the commission.

Semenitari lauded the president for taking steps to fulfil his electioneering promise of improving welfare and living conditions of people of Ogoni and others in the region.

“Ogonis are united behind this effort by the Federal Government to clean up their environment, and as such, the people will help in ensuring sustainability of the clean-up,’’ she said.

Semenitari said that NDDC through Niger Delta Regional Development Master Plan Forum would mobilise and coordinate support of various stakeholders to make the clean-up a success.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the UNEP report was released in September 2011, with a call on the Nigeria and multinational oil companies to clean-up the Ogoni land.

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2 Comments

  • Author’s gravatar

    Shell, BP, Chevron and Aggip, to name only a few multinationals that have long exploited the resources of the Niger delta for generations without due and responsible care to the land that fed them, their families in their homes and nations, must now be held to account. We must be bold enough and grown up in our approach to these firms I am one of those few Nigerians that ‘benefitted’ from a scholarship from Shell-BP, but everyone who knows me will testify that I’ve never exonerated Shell and BP from the devastation of my community. On a personal level, Shell-BP has done well by me, but in terms of my wider concern for my country, these companies have done scant little to help. It will have taken extortionate resources to educate me here in the UK when equivalent education was possible in Nigeria as I had admission to Laos and Ife to read chemical engineering in those mid-70s.
    Please don’t feel sorry for me, as I have done well on a personal level, but take it from me that I have never been able to escape the psychological anguish of the knowledge that what was spent by Shell-BP could have helped more 100 other student in Nigeria at least. Those who know me will point to the fact that I have been able to repatriate funds to build houses back home in Effrun, Agbarho and my mother’s resting place in Ovu, but I always had the ambition to help my family and probably would have done no les had I been university educated Nigeria.
    David Cameron, the UK PM, recently called my country ‘Fantastically corrupt’. This is all too true. But let me state quite clearly that the UK is even more corrupt than Nigeria – the difference is that the UK defines corruption and only point to the corruption of subsistence and struggle to achieve relative economic and educational emancipation. I intend to soon embark on the dissection of the anatomy of corruption – a book that will chronicle human corruption and how countries like the UK run around the world creating demand for their resources and in the process, call all the shots in economic transactions that strangulates unsuspecting and gullible big-eyed Africans into selling their birth rites to crooks like Britain. An example of this corruption can be seen from my childhood experience. My late father was a tenant cocoa farmer in Ago Owu in the 60s. The poor man had to leave us in Warri to slog it out in the cocoa farm to compile pyramids of cocoa for the chocolatiers and such international gangs as Nestle. Do you know, that we could not afford Ovaltine nor Bournevita. I am married to an English woman and my poor wife can’t imagine the pain of a father seeing others feed well of his hard labour whilst his own children went without. You may say, we didn’t need these beverages, but bear in mind that these just financially out of the question. I am telling you of the corruption, internationally sanctioned, that makes it possible for Europeans to name the terms of trade. Now they can come, take our crude oil at 20D per barrel and bring us refined petrol for vast profit (disproportionate) to the labour used to produce the petrol from crude. Whilst taking away the crude, they pacify a few of us with the odd scholarship and making good an Olu and his dependants. In this way we connive with them to irresponsibly devastate our environment.
    Our environment is not a price worth paying for the sake of a few scholarships and a happy Olu. We have come to learn corruption from those who formalised corruption as way of wealth creation, but alas, we only learned subsistence corruption. Here in the UK, they entrepreneurs form a club to lobby government on their behalf. So now, the government has made London the destination for internally looted funds with impunity and no one can see that from the fog created willingly by the government of accusing others of corruption whilst receiving stolen funds in their banks. Unfortunately for these looters, the ‘rule’ here allows for these stolen funds to be used for ‘charity’ here in the UK when the account is ‘declared’ dormant.
    In the next few opinion wrting on this corruption accusation, I will be revealing other ways in which we have come accept the whiteman’s corruption as acceptable.

  • Author’s gravatar

    Just look at the headline picture. It’s all too familiar.