Jonas Ezieke, Abuja
Health of Mother Earth Foundation HOMEF a think tank an advocacy group on environmental issues and some notable Civil Society Organizations CSOs have called on President Bola Tinubu and the leadership of the National Assembly to immediately halt the planned divestment of the shares of Shell Petroleum Development Company Limited SPDC into the Renaissance Consortium in the nation’s interest.
Nnimmo Bassey the Director of the think tank, Auwal Mustapha Executive Director Tubal Women Initiative, Isa Sanusi Country Director Amnesty International and Botti Isaac Programme Manager Social Action made the call at a press conference on Thursday at the National Assembly Abuja.
The group said that the crooked and crude divestment moves of the SPDC management and some other international oil companies operating in the oil rich Nigeria Delta region of Nigeria without addressing the environment issues is a great injustice to the people.
The divestments according to Bassey entrench and reinforce the age long despoliation of the Niger Delta region and are a ploy to evade accountability and responsibility for the harm that had been inflicted on the territory and its people.
They had argued that the Nigeria Delta region is unarguably one of the most polluted places in the universe and called on the President Bola Tinubu and the National Assembly to halt the planned divestment until a proper framework and region-wide environmental audit and remediation are met.
According to them, the continued neglect to address these issues when companies are divesting sends a very dangerous precedent to Nigerians and it is our collective duty to raise our voices to issues of environmental damage to the environment and ecology of the area.
The noted that the President under pressure had directed the Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Resources Commission NURPC to approve the divestment and called on him to immediately halt the planned sale of assets.
Part of the statement reads thus; “we urge President Tinubu to ensure that approving the sale without addressing the environmental and social costs ‘ll be a great injustice to the people of the Niger Delta”.
The group lamented that the United Nations Environmental Programme UNEP report (August 2011) on the environmental degradation of oil host communities in the Nigeria Delta region calculated to gulp $5 billion and the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission (BSOEC) report (May, 2023) attest to the fact that the region has been wholly grabbed.
The coalition also said that it would take as much as N100 billion to tackle environmental challenges in the Niger Delta communities and insisted that it is the responsibility of the government that the reights of the people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria is protected.
