Recently, precisely on Tuesday, November 21, 2023, I participated as a panelist at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands, panel discussion on “The role of multi-stakeholder engagement in achieving environmental justice.” The gathering was part of training on Environmental Justice: Reducing Ecological and Social Inequalities through Effective and Participatory Land Governance.
Essentially, in my private study/preparation for the programme, the need to domesticate the subject was paramount to me. To achieve this objective, the following questions came flooding; what is Environmental Justice? Are there traces or evidence that it exists in any part of Nigeria? in what forms or shape? Who are the people responsible? Who are the most impacted? What is the politics that kept it going? How can we creatively achieve effective development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies without discrimination against the have nots and vulnerable peoples? What strategy and tactics can policy and decision makers at both federal and state levels adopt to get the people directly involved in the decision making process that affects their environment?
Providing answers to the above questions beginning with the first, from what experts are saying, environmental justice is a crusade that advocates fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, colour, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.
Viewed broadly, environmental justice, according to the world information search engine, Wikipedia, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
Historically, the movement began in the United States in the 1980s. It was heavily influenced by the American civil rights movement and focused on environmental racism within rich countries. The movement was later expanded to consider gender, international environmental injustice, and inequalities within margined groups.
The global environmental justice movement arises from local environmental conflicts in which environmental defenders frequently confront multi-national corporations in resource extraction or other industries. Local outcomes of these conflicts are increasingly influenced by trans-national environmental justice networks.
Undoubtedly, when the above definition/explanation is juxtaposed with the ongoing degradation in the country in the name of development, it becomes glaringly obvious that environmental injustice exists here in Nigeria and remains a sin that all must share in its guilt. But if this injustice which daily and harmfully impacts the poor and other vulnerable Nigerians is a challenge in other parts of the country, what is happening in the Niger Delta region, South South Geopolitical zone is a crisis.
It is a brazen unfairness planted by the government and signposted in areas such as; parade of multiple but obsolete environmental laws, poor enforcement habit and brazen lack of capacity to see through to programme monitoring and evaluation, discrepancy in application and implementation of environmental, policies, programmes and initiatives.
This environmental ill is further accelerated by corporate organizations, particularly the international Oil Companies (IOCs) noncompliance with international best practices in their day-to-day quest for profit maximization through crude oil exploration and production in the Niger Delta region and compounded by their erroneous understanding of call for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a dangerous fiction targeted at hand twisting the rich and mighty.
Out of many of such examples, this piece will highlight evidence of incapacity to enforce compliance to environmental regulations and demands.
Fundamentally, many Nigerians with critical interest had hitherto believed that the advent of Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021, which was signed into law in the aforementioned years, and arguably the most audacious attempts to overhaul the petroleum sector in Nigeria, will solve the real and imagined challenges in the nation’s petroleum sector, and turn Niger Delta region, particularly host communities to a zone of peace in their relationship with Crude Oil prospecting and exploration companies.
But today, facts have since emerged that instead of providing the legal, governance, regulatory and fiscal framework for the Nigerian Petroleum Industry and the host communities, the Act has contrary to expectation become a first line of conflict between crude oil prospecting, exploration companies and their host communities. Like other Acts that guided crude oil production in the past, PIA has similarly become a toothless bull dog that neither bites nor barks. In fact, analysts and industry watchers have come to a sudden realization that nothing has changed.
A tour by boat of creeks and coastal communities of Warri South West and Warri North Local Government Areas of Delta State will amply reveal that the much anticipated end in sight of gas flaring is actually not in sight. In the same manner, a journey by road from Warri via Eku-Abraka to Agbor, and another road trip from Warri through Ughelli down to Ogwuashi Ukwu in Aniocha Local Government of the state, shows an environment where people cannot properly breathe as it is littered by gas flaring points.
To be continued.
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Utomi, programme coordinator (media and public policy), Social and Economic Justice Advocacy (SEJA), writes from Lagos
