The Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission, has said that oil and gas pollution caused by the activities of multinational oil companies puts over 16,000 infants living in Niger Delta region at risk annually.
The Chairman of the commission and Archbishop of York, England, Dr John Sentamu, who disclosed this over the weekend while presenting the interim report on the Commission’s findings to Governor Henry Seriake Dickson, indicted oil companies operating in the region, describing their actions as ‘‘nothing less than environmental genocide’’.
He said that the Commission, working alongside industry and environmental experts to investigate the impact of oil spills and the environmental and social damage done by International Oil Companies operating in Bayelsa State, discovered that oil companies are heaping environmental devastation on the people of the region.
He said: “Roughly 40 million litres of oil wind up in the Niger Delta annually, eight times more than is spilled in America, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of oil.
“It is estimated that the consequences of oil spills may kill around 16,000 infants in the Niger Delta annually within their first month of life.
“Our environment knows no bounds. We are all global citizens. It would never be acceptable to cause such environmental devastation in Europe or America, and accordingly it should never be acceptable in Africa or South America.
“Oil companies today have a moral obligation to uphold the same high environmental standards, wherever they operate, anything less is to knowingly continue an environmental genocide against the people of places like the Niger Delta,” he said.
Governor Seriake Dickson, who, earlier in the year set up the commission to investigate the cause of oil spillage and gas flaring in the state and proffer lasting solution, while receiving the report, said he was grateful to the Archbishop, the Commissioners and the global community for highlighting what he termed as ‘long-held injustice’ on the world stage.
He said the Commission has finally provided a voice for every man, woman and child in Bayelsa that has struggled for over half a century with what can be deemed as environmental terrorism.
He said: “I established the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission to hold oil companies to account, to shift the mindset of multinationals operating in Bayelsa and to inspire a global sustainable change. Everyone deserves the same rights, whether you live in Nigeria or in the USA.
“Since the first oil well was drilled in Nigeria by Shell in Bayelsa in 1956, Bayelsan’s have rarely benefitted from oil. We have faced the destruction of our environment, rivers filled with oil, our farmlands destroyed, and a host of health problems including the on-going deaths of our children.
“I’m grateful to the Archbishop for sharing what he has seen with the world. We, the people of Bayelsa and the world wait to hear the steps the oil companies will take in Nigeria and around the world to address this kind of environmental injustice and we eagerly anticipate the recommendations of the Commission in 2020”.
The Commission is chaired by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, Mr Baroness Valerie Amos, former Under Secretary General at the United Nations, and John Kufuor, former President of Ghana, as well as a number of experts.
