Despite the completion of United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP, report in 2011, the clean-up of the Ogoniland has been delayed, thus fueling anxieties in the area. UDEME AKPAN who investigated the subject, reports that stakeholders have tasked the Federal Government to provide details of remedial plans and how it intends to implement them.
The Ogoniland, comprising of about 1.5 million inhabitants in Rivers State, and its extension to other parts of the Niger Delta has been in lingering crisis because of commercial oil and gas production activities which come with environmental problems. The completion of work on the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP report in 2011 was expected to assist in finding solutions to the complex challenges which fuels crises and instability for some reasons. First, the Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland covered contaminated land, groundwater, surface water, sediment, vegetation, air pollution, public health, industry practices and institutional issues. Second, the report probably constituted one of the best guides to not only understanding but also tackling of the environment and related issues in the area. The approaches were also said to be very comprehensive. For instance, UNEP identified 69 sites for detailed soil and groundwater investigations.
The project team examined more than 5,000 medical records and staged 264 formal community meetings in Ogoniland attended by over 23,000 people. The samples were collected following internationally accepted sample management procedures and dispatched for analysis to accredited (ISO 17025) laboratories in Europe. Specifically, field observations and scientific investigations showed that oil contamination in Ogoniland was widespread and severely impacting many components of the environment. The team found out that even though the oil and gas operations were not ongoing in the area, oil spills continued to occur with alarming regularity. The report disclosed that any delay in cleaning up an oil spill leads to oil being washed away, traversing farmland and almost always ending up in the creeks. It maintained that when oil reaches the root zone, crops and other plants begin to experience stress and can die, and this is a routine observation in Ogoniland. The report indicated that overlapping authorities and responsibilities between ministries and a lack of resources within key agencies has serious implications for environmental management on the- ground, including enforcement. It maintained that remote sensing revealed the rapid proliferation in the past two years of artisanal refining, whereby crude oil is distilled in makeshift facilities. UNEP also reported that this illegal activity was endangering lives and causing pockets of environmental devastation in Ogoniland and neighbouring areas and concluded that pollution of soil by petroleum hydrocarbons in Ogoniland is extensive in land areas, sediments and swampland. It maintained that most of the contamination was from crude oil although contamination by refined product was found at three locations. The report maintained that at twothirds of the contaminated land sites close to oil industry facilities which were assessed in detail, the soil contamination exceeds Nigerian national standards, as set out in the Environmental Guidelines and Standards for the Petroleum Industries in Nigeria (EGASPIN). Continue reading on NationalMirror website
