Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian architect, environmental activist, and author, who insists that stakeholders across sectors and governments are culpable in environmental degradation. In this interview with Sustainable Economy’s Managing Editor, Clara Nwachukwu, he accuses the international community of keeping “a blind eye” on mining activities in Nigeria. Excerpts:
Ahead of the COP26, the IPCC released a report, which declared ‘Code Red for Humanity’, what do you think this means for Nigeria?
Well the current review by the current review of the IPCC shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. For Nigeria, the major lesson is that the report confirms the climate impacts and prospects, challenges that were already on the table. It also should send a strong lesson to our policymakers that handling global warming issues goes beyond the technicalities; it’s also political. The report confirms to us that we can expect a lot more flooding than before, temperatures are rising higher, the ocean is getting warmer, and that has implications for our economy as well as for the livelihood and health of our people. So desertification, flooding, loss of arable land, loss of territories, are all the things that the report confirmed.
The report also called for an urgent end to hydrocarbon E&P activities, and Nigeria is dependent almost solely on hydrocarbon resources for its revenue sustenance, how do you think this will play out for us as a country?
When we say that Nigeria depends on revenue from the petroleum sector, we will probably say the government of Nigeria depends on the revenue from the petroleum sector. But the petroleum sector does not have a definitive or integrative influence on the Nigerian economy.
…Is it because of its low contribution to the GDP?
I don’t believe in GDP because it doesn’t measure the real economic situation of any country. Even when they talk about measuring the output, what output, because it also includes destructive activities. GDP was the measure derived towards the end of the Second World War, as a way to show that countries were recovering, so it is not very reflective in terms of the wellbeing of the people. This is why there are many other indices like the United Nations Human Development Index (UN HDI); we also have the Happiness Index etc.
Back to petroleum; for a long time some of us have been saying that if Nigeria wants to get more revenue from the fuel sector it is not by expanding the fields; it’s not by opening new oil wells; it’s not by seeking for oil in frontier basins. It’s about stopping oil theft. We keep hearing figures, and there is no definite figure about how much oil is stolen in Nigeria on a daily basis; the figures we hear like 120,000 barrels, 400,000 barrels to 1 million barrels a day. To some people, they see the same quantity as what is being produced officially.
Why this is so is that we don’t really know how much crude oil we produce on a daily basis because the metering system is dependent on indices that are not very transparent or serving the purpose.
I don’t think the world policymakers are serious about the deadlines they set, because if they were serious about deadlines, the research for new reserves would have been halted.
… But the DPR insists that they can account for every molecule of oil produced now using the kind of technology in place now
That may be now, but not before. The first time I heard someone say they have a means of determining this was when Ibe Kachikwu was the Minister of State for Petroleum. Still, I don’t believe that they know exactly how much is being produced; because if they do, can they tell us how much oil is being lost to the environment on a daily basis? There has to be a mathematical way of confirming how much we are producing, no this is how much we are going to reason; this is how much we lost; this is how much goes to the seaport for export. If the figure for the seaport is independent of what is lost or what is stolen then I don’t trust the figures.
2050 is the cut-off date for ending hydrocarbon activities, but Nigeria insists that it is going to use oil to exit from oil. Where would that leave us in the energy transition programme especially in line with what we are talking about – environmental concerns?
Again, I go back to challenge the IPCC concerning the deadline set; we have heard many deadlines. For a long time we have heard scientists say that 80% of known fossil fuel reserves cannot be extracted and burnt if you want to keep within certain temperature levels. At the same time, the World Bank, and International Energy Agencies agree to this, but we see more funding for fuel and searching for more fossil fuel. For the Nigerian Petroleum Industry Act, a whopping 30% of NNPC profit will go into searching for oil.
I don’t think the world policymakers are serious about the deadlines they set, because if they were serious about deadlines, the research for new reserves would have been halted. We wouldn’t be having Nigeria searching for more oil; and oil companies moving to deep offshore. We shouldn’t be having Recon Africa, a Canadian company searching for new oil in Botswana and Namibia, or Uganda building a pipeline from Uganda to Tanzania to export oil.
There is a lot of hypocrisy, because the leaders don’t have a high inter-generational understanding of the actions they take now; they just look at the short term and keep a blind eye to the dire situation. Also, the same oil companies who are supposed to stop the extraction of oil, what they are doing now is to change their names, like Total that is now TotalEnergies. They spent millions of dollars polishing their image, getting people to see them as an energy company, because energy sounds neutral and desirable. But if we see them as oil and gas or coal companies then that image is what would make them change their behaviour, otherwise right now it’s all about semantics. While the world is burning, while we are having wild fires everywhere, floods everywhere, policymakers are still in the pockets of oil companies.
Even the climate negotiations are heavily influenced by the corporations and that is why you find that the negotiations are very lean on action; they are more of a lot of talk and little action. Even the latest IPCC report, when you read it carefully, keeps saying that what needs to be done is to take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you lay emphasis on taking carbon out of the atmosphere, it means you are actually emphasising the fact that you can keep on burning fossil fuels; we can take care of the carbon that you are emitting. So the talk about Net-Zero carbon emission is just one way of telling us mathematics can solve the climate problem and nature doesn’t work like mathematics.
For a long time we have heard scientists say that 80% of known fossil fuel reserves cannot be extracted and burnt if you want to keep within certain temperature levels. At the same time, the World Bank, and International Energy Agencies agree to this, but we see more funding for fuel and searching for more fossil fuel.
…In order words, you are saying that neither the world nor even less Nigeria is prepared for Net-Zero?
Net-Zero 0 is a false argument, because it is not real Zero. We need real zero, and that’s why the figure or the name is interesting to corporations and governments because politicians like to play politics with words. Net-Zero means you keep polluting, which is an offence but you are also ameliorating that offence.
This is not what we need, what we need is real zero; stop polluting. Not polluting and then believe that planting trees are capturing the carbon or that you will do some kind of geo-engineering activity to make the ocean absorb more carbon or to make, or put mirrors in the clouds to reflect more heat into the atmosphere. The whole concept is moving towards solar radiation management rather than halting pollution.
Net-Zero means there’s an offence but you’re also ameliorating that offence. But this is not what we need; what we need is real zero, and stop polluting. Do not pollute and believe that trees are capturing the carbon or that you’re going to do some kind of re-engineering activities to make the ocean and trees absorb more carbon; put mirrors in the cloud to reflect more heat in the atmosphere.
The whole concept is moving toward solar radiation management rather than halting pollution completely.
Looking at the Nigerian environment, how responsive/responsible are the government, the companies and the people to climate issues/challenges?
The Nigerian people on the average understand that we depend on the environment for virtually everything. We depend on the environment for water because access to pipe borne water is very low across the country, so people are concerned that they have to drink from streams, creeks and rivers. They depend on the soil for production of food and for many other things.
People are a bit disadvantaged because if the government does not invest in environmental health then the people are left to suffer, and this is one reason life expectancy is very low in Nigeria. A healthy environment means healthy people, and an ailing environment will see people dying and that’s what we are seeing.
In essence, corporations – oil companies in particular, have committed and are still committing ecological damages in Nigeria. They’re wilfully engaging in activities that damage the environment, which they don’t do elsewhere, especially in their home countries. Because the world is keeping a blind eye to the harm they are committing here, they can still have some social capital back home.
There is a lot of hypocrisy, because the leaders don’t have a high inter-generational understanding of the actions they take now; they just look at the short term and keep a blind eye to the dire situation. Also, the same oil companies who are supposed to stop the extraction of oil, what they are doing now are to change their names.
Also, the Nigerian government doesn’t invest enough in the environmental sector across all levels of government. The Ministry of Environment is the least resourced ministry, but their work is critical and cuts across sectors – Ministries of Health, Work, Transport, Power, Water Resource, even the Women Affairs, which are all adversely affected by global warming.
When you put the Ministry in a poor situation and the best ideas there do not have the resources to push their ideas through. We can safely say we don’t see enough seriousness on the part of government to provide the quality environment that Nigerians need.
And climate impacts are compounding these problems, for example, right now, Nigerians have to produce and supply themselves almost every service they need. Individuals have boreholes to provide water in their homes and workplaces such that we don’t have an audit of how much water that is required or available and what is outstanding and soon people would have to dig even deeper before they can get clean water.
In the Niger Delta, which is one of the most impacted areas of climate change, the surface water is so contaminated and visibly noticeable. In some areas, the groundwater is equally contaminated and when the people drill their boreholes, they are not able to reach portable water, but find toxic water which is harmful to them. To reach clean water, you may have to reach a second aquiver and it is not what individuals can afford.
Generally speaking, Nigerians are able to support themselves, but to support themselves in a clean environment they need public or government help.
But some would argue that the people are also culpable, as there are incidences of pipeline breaks not just in the Niger Delta but all across the country. If people are breaking the pipelines knowing that whatever products in the pipelines will contaminate their environment and threaten their sources of livelihood, why do they persist in such acts?
I don’t think the people are culpable because looking at the breakages and stealing from pipelines, if we restrict ourselves to oil is something that is happening at an industrial level; it’s not what poor villagers can do. Also, we have the military all over the Niger Delta; we have helicopter surveillance by oil companies; we have the Navy at the sea etc; the smallest figure I’ve heard is up to 120,000 barrels per day that are lost or stolen. No matter how many villagers break pipelines, they can’t take out that amount of oil in a single day.
When Dr Okonjo-Iweala was the Minister of Finance, she told the Financial Times of London that 400,000 barrels of oil are stolen every day. Accusing the communities is just a way to avoid responsibility and this is because of the erroneous belief that if you blame oil theft on sabotage then the corporations will not be responsible for the damages. The scale of damages can be traceable to decrepit infrastructure, and facilities are not being maintained adequately leading to equipment failures generally. But when we talk about breakage for stealing, that is a very high level business.
While the world is burning, while we are having wild fires everywhere, floods everywhere, policymakers are still in the pockets of oil companies.
But if we keep on pointing at the poor villagers who are actually victims as the culprits, who use buckets and plastics to collect spilled oil on the surface of their creeks, then we have missed the point. Some even store the oil in their homes, so there is ignorance about the harmful impact of the pollutants or crude or gas. Talking about gas flaring, which has a very direct global warming impact, this act is not being done by villagers but by the oil and gas companies. If we take that as major evidence, then we see who the real culprits are. There may be some artisanal mining and illegal refineries, which happen in the bush, but in terms of the volume of oil being stolen, the fingers have to point somewhere else.
Some years back, a ship loaded with crude oil was arrested by the Navy, but that ship supposedly escaped from detention. Ships are not like speedboats and when it was intercepted in the high sea it had only sea water and no longer crude oil. I recall that some naval officers lost their job as a result of that but it was a clear indicator that we need to point our fingers somewhere else.
Going back to the operating companies, we are still talking about the Ogoni clean-up, even though UNEP raised an alarm and declared the contamination of the environment a state of emergency and 10 years after nothing much has been done. What do you think is responsible for the delay?
Yes, it’s been 10 years since the UNEP report was released and we are all disappointed at the slow pace of work, and where we are at the moment. But we also recognise the fact that the complexity of the work to be done in Ogoni is such that it has to be a learning process and this usually takes time.
The work is foundational; we thought that the Ogoni clean-up would have been done and within five years, a lot of the remediation would have been done and by now the process should be restoration – getting the health of the environment back and getting the ecosystem back to life; the species and varieties of things that ought to be there restored. But now we are still at the initial clean-up stage.
HYPREP (Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project), and the Ministry of the Environment have to step-up their game and they have to look at the clean-up architecture and measures that will hasten the activities, and we don’t have to wait for electioneering campaigns before they can speed up the process. This is the time to show commitment. I had served on the Board of Trustees up till last year, and I do know that there is the challenge of availability of funds. The challenge is such that the initial awards were for less-complex sites and now we ought to see work going on now at the more complex sites because a lot of the groundwater has been contaminated.
One of the challenges has been the provision of emergency measures like portable water for the Ogoni people, and HYPREP working with the Rivers State Government are engaged in refurbishing moribund water boards across the affected local government areas. But we need to see a far bigger and integrated water supply system.
Still on Ogoni, do you think it was right for Shell to have paid for the pollution that happened during the civil war, because some pundits believe the payment should have been for remediation?
I think people are mixing up the issues – there are three distinct litigation going on in Ogoni land; two have been settled and one is ongoing. The first was the Bodo Case, where Shell had to pay about $80million to the community for the contamination that took place in 2008/9, which they agreed to in a court in the UK.
The payment of compensation is different from remediation. Right now, Shell is working at Bodo, handling remediation of the area they contaminated outside of what HYPREP is doing. The case of Ejama-Ebubu, was the pollution that occurred in 1970. That case had been in court for 30 years – 50 years of pollution, 30 years of litigation before Shell agreed to compensate the people for the damage. This doesn’t remove the responsibility of Shell to remediate that environment. They are paying the people for the damages done to their livelihood and health, and they have to still remediate the environment as a sub-sect of what UNEP/HYPREP is doing.
I don’t think the people are culpable because looking at the breakages and stealing from pipelines, if we restrict ourselves to oil is something that is happening at an industrial level; it’s not what poor villagers can do.
The other case is about four fishermen, who sued Shell cutting across Oruma, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states, even if the entire Niger Delta is remediated, it doesn’t remove the liability of the corporations for the harm done for over 50 years of careless exploitation.
Some argued that Shell is being singled out among the oil companies, why is that?
They are not being singled out because there are cases ongoing and there are settlements by other oil companies as well. There are also cases against Eni, Total; Shell is just crying the loudest, they have the biggest share in the industry and if their cases make news, it’s about their reputation.
Who takes responsibility for the issue of ignorance – the people or the government? Also, organisations like yours, what are they doing in terms of creating awareness and educating these people on the dangers of pipeline vandalism and destruction of oil facilities?
Civil society organisations (CSOs), including ours, are doing a lot, working with fisher folks, working with governments and the people, discussing and sharing information on the harms of environmental pollution and also, why life expectancy is so low in the Niger Delta. It is not a lack of information sharing. Even groups like NDDC are supposed to be carrying out sensitisation programmes about environmental issues. But we do know also that there is a general Nigerian problem.
…But are these interventions enough?
The challenge we have is not lack of information, but the bigger Nigerian problem of citizens being left to struggle to survive with very little social support. In the absence of these social support, and people try to help themselves by farming and fishing but get very little for their efforts because the soil and seas are polluted. So if we have a little bit of understanding about these struggles, I believe that approaches by those whose job it is to provide a safe environment for Nigerians will be a lot different.
We are talking about an audit of the entire Niger Delta and entire Nigerian society. If you go to the mining sites in the Middle Belt, the same scenario plays out, it appears to be a no-man’s-land and the people are suffering with all manner of pollution – noise, dust, contamination of water bodies so it is a very big problem that we have.
Finally, going by your narrative of culpability among the international community, the government, operators across sectors, and the people out of sheer ignorance, how can we then protect our environment from desertification, rising sea levels, loss of arable land, wildfires among others?
Yes, the list is really very long and that is a whole new conversation entirely. Let me note that it is not just the people that are ignorant but also the government. The oil and mining companies are not ignorant because they know what they are doing. There is a big problem and Nigerians need to ask more questions. If you look at the Dangote Refinery in Lekki, once the plant began construction, property developers began to put up structures and increase rents in that area when in actual fact people should be running away from the area because refineries are very toxic and unhealthy for people. There is a lot of incidence of cancer in people living or working near the refineries. If you have middle class or rich people, who think that living near an airport or a refinery is a good thing, then you can see that we have a big national problem and not just the poor people in the communities. The poor in the communities may actually understand better why they have a clean environment but they depend on the government for everything.
Let me note that it is not just the people that are ignorant but also the government. The oil and mining companies are not ignorant because they know what they are doing.
We need to have national discourse or conversations about the state of our environment, and this yearly or every two years at least so that everyone can see what the progress are, what is being done and what is left to do. Nobody is exempt from the crises that we are in and the situation is diving downward and we should be doing all that we can to stay afloat.
On a final note, let me use a cliché to round up and say: the environment is our life; we are a part of nature, we are not separate or masters of nature. We have to learn to live with nature and support her to maintain her natural state. Nature supports us when we respect her.
