The Nigerian government has launched a one-billion dollar project to clean the creeks of Ogoniland from oil pollution. The area in the Niger Delta is at the heart of the country’s oil producing region. But for some, money is clearly not the answer. One community living in one of the most polluted waterways on earth has actively rejected the attempts to clean it up.
Oil should have made the people of the Niger Delta rich. But instead, all it has brought is destruction.
This used to be a very flourishing forest with a region diversity. See? They are all dead. And we can no longer do the fishing business here. Sad to see things like this.
The government has just launched an unprecedented one-billion dollar cleanup operation to be paid for by the polluters. But cleanups have been attempted in the past.
I saw trucks coming in and bringing a new soil. They said they will clean the soil. But it’s not clean. We still can’t farm our land.
Environment Minister Amina Mohammed is determined that this time the cleanup will be different.
A lot of the asks of this have been transparency. This is not about sharing money. It’s about contracting people to do work that needs to be done to clean up the Niger Delta. And a lot of that starts with building the capacity of the people in Ogoniland to do so.
But the first challenge is getting the community to accept it. Just down the coast is a quiet fishing town that became famous last year for two major oil spills. The money was split between thousands of local people. Each got about three thousand dollars. But that certainly has bitterly divided the community. Part of the deal was that Shell would clean up the mess.
I am not in support of the cleanup. I want that the money, the amount for the cleanup be paid to the community.
He is not alone is his opposition.
Eighty percent of the ordinary people on the streets say we don’t want any cleanup anymore. Give us the money.
The local Catholic priest was calling when clashes erupted over the cleanup killing four people.
And I’ll tell you give us the money because they don’t really trust any kind of negotiation and negotiators from the community. They have no trust on them. And a second reason is that there’s actually no more money in their hands. They are literally hungry now.
