Nnimmo's Reflections (Oil Politics)

Witnesses to Impacts of pollution from Chevron's gas rig explosion

2012-02-27T10:06:00.001-08:00

Guest blog

ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS ACTION/FRIENDS OF THE EARTH NIGERIA
Tel/Fax +234 52 880619 e-mail:eraction@eraction.org website: www.eraction.org

Witnesses Recounts How Chevron North Apoi Incident Happened… As Ezetu Communities Suffer Impacts
Location: Southern Ijaw local Government Area of Bayelsa State
GPS Coordinates: Elev:4m, N04°42.675’, E 005°33.949’ [Ezetu 1 community],…..Elev:9m, N 04°44.776’, E 005°32.634’ [Where the Pennington river empties into the Atlantic Ocean], …Elev:12m, N 04°43.295’, E005°34.657’ [Ezetu 2],…Elev:11m, N 04°41.613’, E 005°34.409’ [Ekeni Community]
Elev:10m ,N04°41.459’, E 005°34.304’[By the ocean shore at Ekeni].
Date of Visit: February 25, 2012
Report by: Alagoa Morris, Akpotu Ziworitin & Oluwatosin Obiuwevbi

INTRODUCTION

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) decided to visit some communities along the Atlantic coast to ascertain the spread and impact of the Chevron’s January 16, 2012 North Apoi gas wellhead explosion.
Having visited Koluama kingdom and the site of the explosion thrice, ERA/FoEN field monitors decided to feel the pulse of people in other communities, get testimonies and carry out independent observation.
Monitors visited Ezutu 1, Ezetu 2 and Ekeni which are fishing communities in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. The three communities share the same coastline with Koluama Community and are neighbours to other communities including Forupa. The three communities are settled around two great bodies of water: The River Pennington and the Atlantic Ocean.

Chevron’s major oil exploitation facilities are found off the coast of the communities, including the Pennington platform. The visit to the communities confirmed that the pollutants from Chevron’s explosion site have reached their shores and started impacting the health and livelihood of people. Testimonies of the impacts include dead fishes seen within the shoreline and events of the very last minutes at the K.S Endeavour [American drilling rig] before the explosion and resultant inferno and pollution that have lasted for over a month now.

At Ezetu 1:

After receiving the ERA/FoEN team and hearing the motive behind the visit, the community folks led the team round the community, and to the site of their only source of drinking water [a shallow pond-like body of water] and a health facility built by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation /Chevron joint venture. The water pump has not functioned for a day. While responding to ERA/FoEN mission to Ezetu 1, the Vice Chairman of the Community Development Committee of the town Mr Laghabo Salvation said: We see your visit as a positive development and wish to commend you for the visit. We are part of communities impacted by the explosion that occurred on January 16, 2011 at the Chevron facility. Though we also heard the explosion that particular morning and saw the ensuing fire, we never knew the impact would have been so grave on the environment, our health and livelihood. Right now as we speak most of the strangers who lived here with us and going about fishing has departed the community because since this incident we can’t engage in real fishing anymore; as a result of the chemical pollutants in the environment, on the ocean and shoreline. We are a fishing community but we are now buying fish instead of selling same. In terms of health, we are impacted and some who could afford have travelled out to seek medical attention either in Warri in Delta State or in Yenagoa, our state capital. Those who cannot afford the means or have where to run to have remained here to face the pollution as if nothing happened. This is our predicament. Apart from fish of different sizes that were either dead or in throes of death floating around here, we also saw a whale here that was washed ashore. And because of its state of decomposition, the waves swept it back into the ocean. Some youths took photographs of it with their mobile phones.

Corinthians Duoduo, Esq.:

We have a health facility built here for us by NNPC/TEXACO/ CHEVRON and commissioned by the first civilian governor of the state in the current dispensation, Chief D.S.P. Alamieyeseigha on October 20, 2001. That was all. Since that time till now no equipment or staff has been sent to this beautiful structure you see. The place has been overtaken by grass. The community used to remove the grasses around voluntarily but due to the lack of confidence about its benefit, things have degenerated to what you now see. Is this good? Is this how oil-bearing communities should be treated by government and the oil companies? I guess your answer will not be in the affirmative. And to that extent, it is unacceptable to us. Our sick ones are now taken to Warri or Yenagoa for medical attention instead of being treated here. We are calling on Chevron and the government to come and make this health facility functional and save our people from untimely deaths and pains.

At Ezetu 2

Moses Kaiser, Vice Chairman of the Community Development Committee:
The Chevron incident occurred on January 16, 2012. Since that day we have been suffering the impacts. We can no longer go out to fish anymore. Even my elder brother took ill because of the gas explosion almost three weeks ago and, I have been trying to see him treated. The doctors were talking about complications around the chest, respiratory problem. Even if you go into the high see, the creek and river, you get nothing these days. As you see me dressed in rain boot, am just returning from the bush and the river, yet nothing. We are dying. Sometimes too we feel sensation on our skin and scratches here and there, mostly the children. The children are even impacted in the eyes, especially early in the morning. We are suffering a lot from this incident and, in conclusion I want the government to consider our plight and ensure that we are adequately compensated for all our losses.

Rose Noah:
Since this thing happened we have not been killing fish as before. In this community, we used to kill fish well but from January till now, that is no longer the case. Apart from the lack of fish, our people have been experiencing health complications such as gastrointestinal problems and some of them are now receiving treatment in Warri. Even yesterday there was another case. The situation is really tough for us as a result of this gas wellhead explosion. And this is now our problem….

At Ekeni

Madam Ruth Bunozimor:
The people of this community are mainly fishing folks. Right now our fishing activity has been drastically reduced due to this Chevron pollution that has impacted our environment. We don’t know which way to turn again. There is no other occupation we know here. If I have access to Chevron and Government I will demand that they pay us monthly for what we have lost. Yes, we should be compensated for all these weeks that we have remained at home. And we are starving

Chief John:

After the explosion occurred at Chevron’s North Apoi, we woke up in the morning and found that our shoreline has been flooded with strange oily chemical. It affected all the fishing nets that we left around the shore overnight. Dead fish and those on the throes of death were washed ashore while some were seen floating, big and small. Some of us took photographs of the scene as the environmental disaster unfolded right before our eyes. It impacted even neighbouring communities such as Ezetu. Here in Ekeni we have twelve settlements and none was free from the impact. When our sons in the city heard of the calamity that befell us and came, we took them round all the settlements in the kingdom and showed them the damage. They even recorded it on video. We could no longer go to fish again because the very fish that we ought to go out for are being killed by pollutants from Chevron’s facility daily. Besides, being afraid of consuming these poisoned fish, we now buy fish from other places. Very sadly, when Chevron sent some food items, we saw the gesture as another attempt to cause conflict amongst us. Yes, because even the food we received was not enough for one compound or the smallest settlement in the Ekeni kingdom. We received just one cow for the whole kingdom to share. They just wanted us to kill ourselves because of what they sent. Chevron promised to send medicine and a medical team to take care of the health implications that arose from the North Apoi explosion but we now realize they just deceived us. Now that you are here, it is proper to let you know this. If Chevron thinks that they can toy with us they are making a grave mistake. We are only restraining out youths. Right now plans are on ground to go and stop the company’s operation in our environment. If the government and Chevron will take the crude oil and gas from our environment and make other places look good and allow us to suffer the negative impacts, then even if all of us die fighting for our rights, that would be more acceptable to us...

Chief Feifidei Morgan:

Let me start by saying that our community is one of the most seriously impacted communities. It was as if the water current brought the pollutant straight and deposited here on our shore. It is a fact that the North Apoi facility is located within Koluama environment, but the chemicals got here first. It was from here that those who came to collect samples took their first samples for test. The wind also brought the pollution directly here. And, we are all sick people now. As you are seeing me, I was also on board the rig that was drilling [the K.S. Endeavour] when the explosion occurred. It happened around 5am on January 16, 2012. The owner of the rig and one Indian lost their lives in the incident. But it was the owner of the rig that gave all of us the alarm and ensured that we left whatever we were doing and run to the live boats. Bruno is the name of the head of the rig and he was the one who saved all of us. When it was clear to him that there was a serious gas buildup that was likely to lead to an explosion and fire he alerted everybody to take off to the live boats. At this time the gas pressure was high and he was trying to reach out to some of the valves to reduce the gas leakage to enable us escape before fire or explosion. But within a short period of about five minutes, as he was quickly doing that [closing some of the essential valves] the gas had already covered the rig. There were four live boats in the rig. We quickly entered into three of them. As we were leaving the rig in a hurry in three live boats, living the last one for him and the Indian, the rig exploded. In that scenario some of us fell into the Ocean and Bruno and the other Indian were caught in the fire and did not come out. It was the fishing folks who saved some of us who found ourselves in the water in the morning light. That was how it happened. I was part of the maintenance crew on the rig before the explosion occurred on January 16, 2012.

OBSERVATIONS/CONCLUSION

One very obvious fact is that while the testimonies may not have any significant variance from those obtained from Koluama kingdom, it is most significant that a member of the K.S. Endeavour rig that exploded on January 16, 2012 recounted the experience. Field monitors were able to confirm the spread of the pollutant from Chevron’s facility and its impact on the environment: aquatic life, livelihoods and health of the people.It was observed that the people were drinking from shallow bodies of water in the community as there was no pipe-borne water. It was observed that most canoes have nets that are just lying idle at the water front of the communities. The visiting team went as far as the point where the Pennington River empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Fisherfolks and a large number of fishing nets and hooks were seen also.

ERA DEMANDS
The Federal Government rise up to the occasion and ensure Chevron cleans up the impacted environment after proper investigation of the spread.
Chevron and the Federal Government take care of the health and livelihood loss of the people in impacted communities.
Adequate compensation be paid to all who suffered in one way or the other, considering specific and general damages.

NIGERIA: Climate Change Challenge

2012-02-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

(Closing remarks at the National Roundtable on Climate Change and Energy- How prepared us Nigeria? Abuja, 09 February 2012)

Many Nigerians may not be able to say the causes and meaning climate change means, but they certainly do experience and know the impacts. They do know that the climate is changing and that their livelihoods are being severely threatened. Paradoxically, responsible government officials do have the knowledge of the causes, consequences and trajectories of climate change and yet are not inclined to interrogate these critically or to act in ways that would fundamentally address the crisis.

The impacts are all around us and some of these include: intensified desertification, changed rainfall patterns leading to unusual floods, sea level rise and increased coastal erosion. All these directly impact our fragile infrastructures as well as the capacity of our peoples to reap expected fruits of their labour in the area of agriculture due to both loss of arable lands and the increasing salinity of coastal water bodies.
The fundamental causes of climate change are well known and documented. The basic drivers are anthropogenic actions, especially the use of fossil fuels for energy production resulting in the release of huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is important that we note the fact that while the bulk of the polluting activities have occurred and continue to occur in rich industrialised world, the impacts are mostly felt in nations and regions contributing least to the problem. We note that 50 per cent of the carbon in the atmosphere has come from just the USA and the European countries whose populations add to just 10 per cent of the world’s population.

Small island nations and other vulnerable nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America are in the frontlines of areas that are most threatened by climate impacts. Sadly, these nations are forced to focus their energies on planning and taking actions to adapt to the changing scenarios foisted on them. They are also forced to seek ways of mitigating the impacts of climate change.

Climate change is fundamentally a systemic crisis that cannot be tackled through palliatives. It is a crisis of a civilisation built on the rapacious destruction of nature through massive consumption and waste of resources. It is the consequence of ruinous production and consumption patterns that are blind to the fact that planet earth is finite and that there must be a point when such a path becomes unsustainable in many ways.
Adaptation and mitigation acts taken to tackle climate change impacts are nothing more than palliatives – a term most Nigerians have come to grips with as something done to ease pains inflicted on the peoples by acts of poor governance as well as institutionalised perfidy. These palliatives do not in any way solve the problem; they only help you to cope to certain degrees with the crisis.

SYSTEMIC CHALLENGES, SYSTEMIC SOLUTIONS

The global nature of climate change necessitates actions of global proportions and across the earth. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was set up to provide guideposts and to urge nations to act together in everyone’s common interest: for the survival of the planet as we know it. The conferences of parties (COP) to the convention have quickly turned into talk shops for nations to display their power, arm-twist the poor and evade action. This became most obvious at COP15 in Copenhagen and became entrenched at COP16 in Cancun. What happened at COP17 in Durban must take the medal as a conference whose critical achievement was the blatant postponement of action while the earth burns.

Climate justice activists saw the Durban debacle as one where ordinary people were unabashedly let down by governments. Leading the betrayal were the governments of the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada and other developed nations who reneged on their promises, weakened the rules on climate action and strengthened those rules that allow their corporations to profit from the climate crisis.

At the close of the Durban meeting, Sarah-Jane Clifton of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) explained for example that the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding framework for emissions reductions, survived in name only, and “the ambition for those emissions cuts remains terrifyingly low. The Green Climate Fund has no money and the plans to expand destructive carbon trading move ahead. Meanwhile, millions across the developing world already face devastating climate impacts, and the world catapults headlong towards climate catastrophe. It is clear in whose interests this deal has been advanced, and it isn’t the 99% of people around the world. The noise of corporate polluters has drowned out the voices of ordinary people in the ears of our leaders.”

Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid summed up that the “Durban outcome is a compromise which saves the climate talks but endangers people living in poverty.”

The UNFCCC secretariat, on the other hand, saw COP17 as a great success and indeed called it “a landmark historical cop – not just the longest but also the decisions here have really marked a completely new trajectory for the climate regime. It has guaranteed a second commitment period but it has also laid the path for a broader regime applicable to all in a legal way and provided mechanisms for developing countries to address their needs of mitigation and adaptation.”

The response of analysts such as Pablo Solón, former lead negotiator for the Plurinational State of Bolivia, was clear and to the point: “It is false to say that a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol has been adopted in Durban. The actual decision has merely been postponed to the next COP, with no commitments for emission reductions from rich countries. This means that the Kyoto Protocol will be on life support until it is replaced by a new agreement that will be even weaker.”

The descent into non-binding pledge-and-review system places the world on the way to warming by as much as 4 to 7 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. If that happens, Africa will be cooked because the continent experiences fifty per cent more than average global temperature levels. The reluctance of rich and highly polluting nations to take real actions on climate change has rightly been described as a form of apartheid. This is Apartheid against Mother Earth and the species that she bears.

TEMPLATES FOR ACTION

Official negotiations have locked in action until possibly by 2020. By that time the world may already be in the throes of runaway climate change. Hope is not lost, however. Long before the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement showed that the regaining of peoples sovereignty over political structures is possible, there was an epochal World Peoples Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in April 2010 .

The Cochabamba conference produced the Peoples Agreement as a key outcome. It demanded that countries cut their emissions by at least 50 per cent at source without resorting to carbon offsets and other trading schemes. In terms of financing adaptation and mitigation, the Agreement required that developed countries commit 6 per cent of their GDP for these needs. It is clear that merely opening a Green Climate Fund or account with nothing in it will not begin to tackle the problems.

The peoples of the world equally highlighted the necessity of recognizing and paying the huge climate debt piled up by the rich polluting nations. Besides making funds available, it will be a step in the direction of decolonizing or democratizing the atmosphere of which developed countries have already taken up 80 per cent of the carbon space.

In order to work to restore the natural cycles of Mother Earth, the Agreement demanded the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. This is already being promoted in the UN systems.

FIGHT DESERTIFICATION: STOP GAS FLARING

Nigeria’s biggest contribution to global warming comes from flaring of associated gas in the oil fields of the Niger Delta. These flares of death have gone for over five decades now. The release a cocktail of greenhouse gases as well as health-impairing toxic elements. Complaints have trailed this unacceptable wasteful and toxic act right from the early days of oil extraction here.

The biggest culprit in this exercise, Shell, explains that “When The Shell Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC) built many of its first production facilities in the 1950s, there was little demand or market for gas in many parts of the world, including Nigeria. So, associated gas (AG) was usually burned off safely – a process called ﬂaring. This remained accepted industry practice as SPDC established a major oil operation across the Niger Delta… Today, most people agree that continuous ﬂaring of associated gas must be reduced signiﬁcantly. It contributes to greenhouse gases that cause climate change. It is a waste of resources that could help fuel development.

Gas flaring has been illegal, indeed unconstitutional, in Nigeria since 1984. Yet the act goes with the country being second only to Russia in the global league of gas flaring nations. The volume of gas flared in Nigeria in about one-sixth of total gas flaring in world. She flares about 8 times more gas than the USA. Globally, the annual volume of gas flared between 1996-2006 ranged between 150-170 billion cubic meters of which Nigeria contributed approximately 24.1 billion cubic meters. The direct financial loss of sending the gas up in smoke has been estimated at $2.5 billion a year.

Oil/gas field accidents also add to the massive release of climate inducing carbon into the atmosphere. An example is the ongoing fire from Chevron’s gas rig explosion that occurred on January 16 at their Apo North field off the coast of Bayelsa State. While our regulatory agencies wring their hands in apparent helplessness, livelihoods are being decimated, health impacts are being felt and the ecosystem is being severely affected.

The Nigerian must act now. About 50-70 per cent of the landmass of 9 Nigerian states (Bauchi, Borno, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara) is estimated to be impacted and under severe threat of desertification. Actions to halt this menace must include and the stoppage of gas flaring in the Niger Delta.
Fighting climate change requires political action. It does not end in seeking finance at climate conferences and returning with promises and empty bowls. If politicians will not act, the people cannot afford to stand by and watch.

On Genuine national leadership

2012-01-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

An extract from my book To Cook a Continent - Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa, Pampazuka Press (2012). See http://www.fahamubooks.org/book/?GCOI=90638100628980

Late November 2009, while visiting the Nigerian Minister of Information, the Venezuelan Ambassador, in a one of case of suspension of diplomatic niceties, spoke openly from his heart about what he felt about his host nation. It was particularly striking as the Nigerian Minister of Information’s pet project was the rebranding of Nigeria, a project that some observers equated to using colourful bandages to make a festering sore appear acceptable. This is what ambassador, Enerique Fernando Arrundell told the minister:

In Venezuela, since 1999, we’ve never had a raise in fuel price. We only pay $1.02 to fill the tank. What I pay for with N12, 000 here (Nigeria), in Venezuela I’ll pay N400. What is happening is simple. Our President (Hugo Chavez) decided one day to control the industry, because it belongs to the Venezuelans. If you don’t control the industry, your development will be in the hands of the foreigners.
You have to have your own country. The oil is your country’s. Sorry I am telling you this. I am giving you the experience of Venezuela. We have 12 refineries in the United States, 18,000 gas stations in the West Coast. All we are doing is in the hands of the Venezuelans.
Before 1999, we had three or four foreign companies working with us. That time they were taking 80 percent, and giving us 20. Now, we have 90 percent, and giving them 10. But now, we have 22 countries working with us in that condition.
It is the Venezuelan condition. You know why? It is because 60 percent of the income goes to social programmes. That’s why we have 22,000 medical doctors assisting the people in the community. The people don’t go to the hospital; doctors go to their houses. This is because the money is handled by the Venezuelans. How come Nigeria that has more technical manpower than Venezuela, with 150 million people, and very intellectual people all around, not been able to get it right? The question is: If you are not handling your resources, how are you going to handle the country?
So, it is important that Nigeria takes control of her resources. We have no illiterate people. We have over 17 new universities totally free. I graduated from the university without paying one cent, and take three meals every day, because we have the resources. We want the resources of the Nigerian people for the Nigerians. It is enough! It is enough, Minister!

It is enough, Minister! It is enough, President! These words could have been spoken to any minister of any of the resource-rich countries of Africa wallowing in self-delusion of greatness while kicking around in the mire of corruption and wastefulness. The Venezuelan chastised the Nigerian official for wasteful utilisation of funds from crude oil. We take this as a metaphor for wasteful use of funds from any natural resource and keep in mind that best value of fossil fuels is actually to leave them in the soil. Revenue derived from crude oil exploitation, for example, can hardly finance restoration efforts that may be needed following years of impacts on the environment and peoples.

Great African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Julius Nyerere and others would be shuddering in their graves if they were to witness the plunder that has ripped Africa into bits due to the connivance of leaders led by the nose by transnational corporations, venture philanthropists and international financial advisors. Sankara illustrated the African spirit needed to realign the continent from economic and political poverty and into the arena of liberating ideas and peoples’ sovereignty. Some may think Sankara was an idealist and thus kept his flanks far too open to deadly bullets from guns wielded by friends. But though they may be killed, their ideas cannot be killed – as Sankara himself declared a week before he was assassinated.

Apart from his friends who were ready tools to snuff out his life, the ideas that Sankara espoused rattled many of the corrupt presidents and ministers on the continent. The ideas are still potent today and can only be ignored to the continent’s sorrow. He was engaged in a struggle against corruption, long before it became hypocritical singsong from the lips of the World Bank and the IMF. He realised quite early that corruption was used as a tool by the international capitalist mafia for conquering markets and pillaging the resources of the global South. Talking about the debt trap, he could not be faulted when he declared “If we do not pay the debt, our lenders will not die. However, if we do pay it, we will die…” He demanded the repudiation of all odious debt, as nothing short of modern day slavery.

Sankara equally realised that the mobilisation of the people was vital for the emancipation of the continent from the clutches of destructive extractors. To him, the people held the key in the struggle with a full understanding of both the glory to be gained and the pains to be borne in the process of regaining control over their lives, environment, resources and destiny. His conviction was that there was no sense in speaking on behalf of the people, but rather to stand in solidarity with them, have them integrated into the struggle and, as Sean Jacobs describes,

develop an identity forged in the fire of action. For Sankara: ‘I think the most important thing is to bring the people to a point where they have self-confidence, and understand that they can, at last…be the authors of their own well-being… And at the same time, have a sense of the price to be paid for that well-being.’ To a great extent, the Burkinabé Revolution was an original experiment in profound social, economic, political and ideological transformation. It was a bold attempt at endogenous development through popular mobilisation.

Permit us to linger a bit in the memory of Sankara and the reforms he instituted after coming to office in 1984.

• He changed the country’s name from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso – the land of the upright people.
• He believed in economic self-reliance, promoted local food and textile production and refused World Bank loans. His targets were policies concerned with the real needs of the people and not the dictates of the World Bank or the IMF.
• He embarked on a land reform whereby the land belonged to those who cultivated it.
• He was one of the early leaders to be seriously concerned with environmental protection – especially against desertification.
• Sankara banned the system that allowed tribute payments and obligatory labour to village chiefs, abolished rural poll taxes, promoted gender equality in a very male-dominated society (including outlawing female circumcision and polygamy), instituted a massive immunisation programme, built railways and kick-started public housing construction. His administration aggressively pushed literacy programmes, tackled river blindness and embarked on an anti-corruption drive in the civil service.
• He declined to have his photos displayed in public buildings, in stark contradistinction to what those who usurped power after his murder do.
• Sankara earned a small salary (about $450 a month) and eschewed luxuries including first class flight tickets.
• He fought corruption and carried out administrative reforms for good governance.
• He believed in women’s emancipation and participation in various facets of national life.

Many African governments operate as though the people do not exist except as objects to be exploited or as subjects to be suppressed. This happens because they do not derive their mandate or legitimacy from the people. They remain in office according to their personal pleasure. This is never a problem for the extractive industries that are happy to deal reinforce the thrones of dictators as long as it provides them with a stable atmosphere for unmitigated exploitation of the territories. This is the tragedy of Africa. The appeal of Sankara is that his people were his forte and his vision was to make them stand, proud and with integrity.

Experience in the field shows that resistance to destructive extraction has to be built one block at a time. When all blocks link together, there forms a wall – sometimes protecting a whole nation – to block the tide of rapacious exploitation.

Tell it to the President

2012-01-12T05:47:00.001-08:00

The Nation-wide strike in Nigeria against petrol price hike, enters Day Four as this is being written.

Nigerians woke up at the dawn of the New Year to learn that price of a litre of petrol had been jerked up by about one hundred and twenty per cent. Petrol now costs 141 Naira and 200 Naira (about one US dollar) per litre in an economy where the minimum wage is 18,000 Naira (about one hundred and ten US dollars). We note that even before the organised labour call out workers on strike, citizens had already hit the streets in protest against what they see as an insensitive and unacceptable action by the government.

The response of government to the massive uprising has been rather worrisome. First of all the government presents a face that says there are no options to the move they have made. The speeches by the president and the many presentations by the governor of the Nigerian Central Bank, the ministers of Labour/Productivity, Petroleum Resources, Information and the Minister of Finance, remain persistently paternalistic and convey the message that they do not hear the dissensions across the nation. In moments of dramatic expression, the Minister of Petroleum Resources demonstrated on television how the government’s hands are tied on the matter of fighting the rot in the petroleum sector. It would be interesting to know why the government allows itself to be bound hand and foot by thieves!

The major anchor on which the petrol price hike has been tethered is that government is spending a disproportionate amount of the national wealth on subsidizing the importation and circulation of petrol in Nigeria. The number one reason given by the Minister of Finance in her Brief on Fuel Subsidy is that from 2006 to 2011, about N3.7 trillion was spent on subsidy and that a whopping N1.348 trillion was spent in the first ten months of 2011. She projected that the figure would reach N1.436 trillion by the end of that year. This figure is said to be 118 per cent of the nation’s capital budget.

The debates that run alongside with the protests show that a huge chunk of what was paid as subsidy in 2011 was actually “arrears from 2009 and 2010.” Veteran activist lawyer Femi Falana raised this issue on a recent television debate (11/01/2012) and posed the critical question about the way and manner statistics are used by government in attempts to get Nigerians accept the huge leap in the pump price of petrol. The government has failed on this elementary point to use the figure of what was actually spent subsidizing the cost of petrol consumed in Nigeria in 2011. They prefer the bogus figure that includes arrears for 2009 and 2010.
Nigerians are beginning to believe that the size of the cash doled out in “subsidies” in 2011 can be explained by the fact that this happened in an election year.

Nigerians are also told that the only way to stop the smuggling of petroleum products is to get Nigerians to pay a higher price for the product. Really? One official even said that Nigeria’s boarder is so vast that it cannot be policed and therefore smuggling will thrive without a price hike. Really? And who is supposed to watch the boarders, to protect the citizens?

We hear over and over again that the lower petrol costs do not benefit the poor. The reality on the ground just a few days into the new price regime has shown that this is not convincing argument. Small-scale entrepreneurs, for example those who run barbershops, depend on small petrol-powered electricity generators to stay in business. With huge public power deficits, many homes are powered with same type of generators. Nigerians buy potable water from suppliers who own water boreholes. Some of these citizens’ water works are powered with the same type of generators. Because of absence of public goods and services we run autonomous or deregulated services at home and at work.

Another argument for the removal of subsidies on petrol in Nigeria is that in the league of oil producing countries the price in Nigeria is only higher than that of Brunei, Yemen, Oman, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. Whereas Ghana recently increased the price of petrol by about 20 per cent in Nigeria it is a minimum of 120 per cent. Do not forget also that the Ghanaian economy is not run on petrol powered electricity generators. Nigerians have seen that it is more helpful to extend the comparison to the minimum wage figures of the countries also. It is at that level that the hole in this argument becomes apparent.

OPEC Member countries Fuel Price per litre(Naira)/ Minimum Wage (in Naira)
1. Venezuela 3.61/ 95,639
2. Kuwait 34.54/ 161,461
3. Saudi Arabia 25.12/ 99,237
4. Iran 102.05/ 86,585
5. Qatar 34.54/ 101.250
6. Algeria 63.55/ 55,957
7. Libya 26.69/ 23,813
8. Iraq 59,66/ 25,813
9. Nigeria 140-200/ 18,000
NON OPEC countries
1. USA 157/ 197,296
2. UK 334.41/ 295,644
3. Oman 48.67/ 91,583

The Nigerian government continues to talk tough while the number of protesters on the streets swell. In fact some of the spokespersons manage to hiss out their disdain for the protest without moving their lips. The SURE (Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme) promises are taken with a pinch of salt by a populace who see these as the sort of political campaign talks they are used to hearing.

Nigerians are not opposed to making sacrifices that would put the nation on a sound economic footing. The government’s effort at taxing citizens so as to generate more revenue should not be embarked on without showing seriousness about halting profligacy by public structures. Why can our political office holders (executive and legislative) not take a 50 per cent cut in their salaries and allowances? Why the retinue of advisers and ministers?

Nigerians have been bemused by the amounts inn the 2012 national budget earmarked for expenditure on food, cutleries, newspapers and medical facilities for pets.

In and outside of government, immoral display of wealth is an indication of primitive accumulation through dispossession of the poor or some less than transparent means. We can keep pay attention to individuals that take up several pages in the newspapers to celebrate birthdays within the range of 30 to 50 years whereas simple birthday cards can do the job. The same indicators can be noted from newspaper page uptakes for individuals whose cronies take up several pages of newspapers to send congratulatory messages such persons get political appointments or receive chieftaincy titles, honorary degrees and other things that bloat their egos. There are many other ways to track the leakages in the economy where productivity brings poverty and non-productive "enterprises" yield scandalous wealth.

Tensions need to be doused and one way will be for public officials to watch what they say. It will be helpful if they would say nothing when they do not have anything new to say. There is enough anger in the land!

Oil Subsidy: Fight Corruption, Not the People

2012-01-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

The average Nigerian is very resilient and can face adversities with supreme tolerance. They can go hungry, sleep under bridges and still keep broad smiles on the faces. The general belief is that “as long as there is life there is hope”. However, these incurable optimists were offered a challenge of a different sort on the first day of the year 2012. Ordinarily the first day of the year is a day when good wishes are exchanged and when governments offer the people a ray of hope as well as assurances of dedicated service.

Nigerians got a shocker when the government announced an uncommon burden of an over one hundred and twenty per cent increase in the pump price of petrol. While anger is boiling over, many pertinent questions are being asked.

Government officials and apologists made a very bad attempt at selling the idea of increasing the pump price of petrol to the people. Because the move cannot be justified they resorted to making promises of palliatives that they will put in place to make their death pangs less painful – sort of singing a dirge to the sick. Moreover, whereas the funeral was promised to take place appropriately on Fools Day, 1 April 2012, Nigerians woke up to find that they were being pushed into the pit on January 1.

Nigeria’s coordinating minister for the Economy who also doubles as the Minister of Finance in her brief on the fuel subsidy matter shows that the whole question is predicated on the importation of refined petroleum products. Without importation there is no question about anyone subsidizing the products.

According to her, in 2011 the landing cost of a litre of petrol of PMS was about 123 Naira on the basis of the average market price of crude of 113.98 US dollars per barrel. To this she adds the cost of distribution, bridging and profit of 15 Naira per litre and gets a cost of 139 Naira for one litre of petrol.

For 2012, the minister’s calculations showed that the effective cost of petrol would be 120 Naira per litre after every sort of padding had been brought in. Thus, going by the calculations of Nigeria’s coordinating Minister for the Economy, if Nigerians were to be charged a fair price, this should be 120 Naira per litre. From the first day of January 2012, however, the pump price of petrol was upped to over 140 Naira per litre. Why?

This piece is not about the impacts of the price hike or the promised palliatives including the setting up of parallel structures to deliver basic services that government has so patently failed to provide. We are concerned that government action has left the problem untouched. And we need better explanations from government and its agents.

First of all, many Nigerians see a lot of loopholes in the subsidy story. Government officials have stated on record that some of the petrol purportedly imported into Nigeria is actually refined in the country, taken away from the coasts and brought back as imported fuel. One top official stated that there are accepted records showing where up to fifteen vessels are said to have loaded petroleum products at the same pump and at the same time and all would be factored into the subsidy arrangement. There are also issues about the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC)’s record keeping and ability to adhere to laid down procedures. Consider the fact that government agencies handling the nation’s oil keep their records with Microsoft Excel sheets and reconciliation processes are slow and few apart. They are also said to lack central information storage systems and rather keep information on workstations with all the attendant risks.

The system is fraught with risks and is suspected by many to be festering bed of corruption.

The KPMG Interim Report on the Process and Forensic Review of NNPC dated 22 November 2010 showed for example that the “NNPC’s subsidy claims and PPPRA’s verification are based on volume of petroleum products available for sale (volume of products imported and actual production from the refineries) as against duly verified volume of products lifted out of the depots (volume of petroleum products sold) as stipulated in the subsidy guidelines.” According to the finance experts, this has a “risk of subsidy payment on products not consumed by end users due to losses from pipeline vandalism, theft e.t.c.” They concluded that the “subsidy payment on product losses for the period under review (2007 – 2009) is estimated at N 11.8 billion.”

The analysts also highlighted that the “risk of payment of subsidy on locally refined products which is not the intent of subsidy may encourage inefficiencies in the refinery process.” In terms of payments of the subsidies, KPMG noted “There are instances of delays in receipt of subsidy advice from PPPRA resulting in the estimation of subsidy claims by NNPC which results in over/ under-deduction from proceeds of domestic crude sales.” They gave examples: “N25bn was deducted as subsidy estimate for September 2009 from domestic crude sales proceeds while PPPRA approved a subsidy of N23.8bn.” And “N35bn was also deducted as subsidy estimate for November 2009 but PPPRA approved a subsidy of N21.3bn.” The excess deduction for the two months in question amounted to N14.9bn. But “only N4.2bn was swept into the Federation Account by NNPC as adjustment for subsidy claimable in the two months. “

The experts further stated that based on their analysis, “subsidy over-deduction for 2007, 2008 and 2009 was estimated at N2.0bn, N10.3bn and 16.2 bn respectively.”

It is obvious that two things can be responsible for this level of shoddy handling of the country’ resources: ineptitude or corruption. It may well be a combination of both.

Several analysts, including a respected former Minister of Petroleum, Professor Tam David West, have shown that the subsidy arguments of government are bogus. They have also showed clearly that getting existing refineries to work would not take eternity to accomplish. The government needs to convince Nigeria that what is being paid as subsidies are actually based on reality and not on corrupt figures cooked by crooks.

We see also that since the entire subsidy saga is based on the importation of refined petroleum products, the ultimate winner is the cabal the government fingers as robbing the public coffers. Since the government still embarks on buying imported petrol rather than refining the product at home, the cost of importing the product will still have to be paid. And all the related expenditures will still be made. This means that nothing has changed as far as expenditure on the alleged subsidies is concerned.

The corruption in the sector and all the players will continue to flourish. The difference is that rather than feed this corruption form central public funds, the poor people of Nigeria are being forced to cough out the cash. We are being forced to subsidise corruption.

This affirms our conviction that President Goodluck Jonathan ought to fight corruption and not the people who voted him into office.

Shell's Bonga Bongo (and other beats)

2011-12-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

Although the oil company Shell has pronounced the cause and source of its oil spill of 20 or so December 2011 this has remained nothing other than a company statement. Since that spill the company has writhed and contorted in efforts to prove to the world that it is responsive to concerns surrounding its notorious despoliation of the Niger Delta environment.

In these efforts the company announced that “less than 40,000 barrels” of crude oil escaped its pipe while loading an oil vessel at its Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility on the day of the incident. The company announced it was fighting the spills, deploying two aircrafts and five vessels in the effort.

In a bid to assure the world that the spill was insignificant, the company also announced that over a couple of days fifty per cent of the spilled crude had naturally dissipated – meaning the crude evaporated or sank beneath the waves. The company’s chemical assault on the slick was thus to fight a negligible errant sheen.

Without the satellite maps and photos published by SkyTruth there was a near total lack of independent information on the spill. Shell has thus largely been in control of what people know and say of the spill. Even officials of the Nigerian Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) did not come up with anything different from what the oil major claimed. The agency apparently swallowed the line Shell had cast in the waters that this spill was the largest in a decade. This was a masterstroke by Shell’s information managers, a coup of huge proportions. They almost succeeded in their game of enforcing a collective amnesia and deflecting focus to Exxon whose 1998 New Year’s spill Shell appropriated as a benchmark.

As we have already stated, this may indeed be the largest offshore oil spill in a decade in Nigeria, but certainly not the largest when the onshore is considered. Moreover, onshore spills occur virtually everyday and most go on for long periods of time before they are halted. Clean up? Look at Ogoniland and tell us what you think.

The oil companies are masters at understating (and underreporting) the amounts of crude they release into the Niger Delta environment. We remind ourselves here that Shell spilled 570,000 barrels of crude oil at its Forcados terminal in 1979.

A week after the Bonga spill there is still no independently verified record of what transpired at the Bonga FPSO. How much crude was actually spilled? What was the actual cause of the spill? What chemicals have been used in tackling the spill? What are the impacts on the endemic bonga fish species in the area and what does this mean to the food chain? These questions remain hanging and the answers are yet blowing in the wind.
The mandatory joint inspection visit (JIV) routinely manipulated by the industry is again a sore issue in the Bonga spill saga. Information has it that the culprit oil company has been engaging in efforts to distort the focus of the JIV and may indeed be attempting to dictate to the team made up of officials from the Directorate of Petroleum Resources (DPR), NOSDRA, Delta State Ministry of Environment and the Nigerian Maritime Administration Safety Agency (NIMASA).

While the fundamental JIV was yet to be carried out, Shell got busy flying government officials and journalists over the Bonga region to prove that they had contained the spill and that other reported spills were not from the Bonga FPSO. Because the end of 2011 has seen intensified spill incidents onshore and offshore of the Niger Delta the company is having a hard time pushing public focus away from its environmental misdemeanours and convincing the public that its spill is not washing up everywhere.

Reports from a recent over-Bonga-spill-flight indicate that government officials refused to dance to beats from Shell’s bongo and conga drums. Fishermen and community environmental monitors had informed Environmental Rights Action (ERA) and others that they spotted crude oil in Exxon’s Inanga (name of another endemic fish specie) field off the coast of Akwa Ibom State, as well as in the Bisangbene River at Vanish Island in Odioma and St Nicholas areas of Bayelsa State. During the flight Shell reportedly sought to assure government officials that the thick crude they sighted on the waters was from a ship in the neighbourhood of the Bonga FPSO and not from Shell’s activities. The officials reportedly retorted that they could not exonerate Shell and blame the accused vessel from the air. Thorough investigations are needed, they rightly said.

The period has seen spills recorded at Otumara in Escravos area of Delta State where locals say it has been on for onward of two weeks without official records. Crude oil spills also hit River Ramos close to Escravos.

The season of spills also has one from AGIP’s facility at Okpotuwari in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. AGIP officials visited the spill location on 27 December 2011 but told the community people that they would return the following week to stop the spill. As we write this, the crude is spewing unchecked into the Okpotuwari environment. The people have no respite from these and other environmental assaults but the officials of AGIP and other oil companies must enjoy their New Year vacation undisturbed.

When will this ecocide be halted and the criminals docked?

Shell's Floating Monster Spill

2011-12-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

Nigerians wait, helpless, for the massive spill from Shell’s Bonga offshore oil field to hit the coastal waters, shorelines and swamps. Telephone links to some of the coastal communities are tenuous at best and most people will not know what has hit them until they are down and out. Nigerian regulatory agencies, ill equipped to handle independent monitoring of spills of this nature, tell the world they are on top of the situation. That is the officialspeak. We are on top of everything. And yet we are swamped and barely keep our heads above water all the time.

The spill from the Bonga facility is said to have occurred while a vessel was being loaded with crude oil. Analysts say that the operators were apparently busy pumping crude oil into the ocean rather than into the vessel until the crude began to announce its misplacement in a way that could not be ignored. Shell claims that 40,000 barrels were dumped into the ocean before they stemmed the flow. That figure is sure to be an underestimate going from what we know of the industry whose major concern is unchecked profit and not the environment. This figure may have been carefully selected to match Mobil’s claim on its 1998 offshore spill that washed all the way down to the coasts of Lagos.

If you think that the pollution in the Niger Delta cannot be used as a benchmark to reach the conclusion that wisdom is found in mistrust of the oil sector, then we can look elsewhere. Consider the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Checking the timeline of that spill along with the volume of spill admitted by BP shows a trend where figures got larger as the evidence became more visible on account of the spread of the spill and due to pressure for transparency and action from the US government.

With Shell’s Bonga spill there is no sign of pressure from the Nigerian government. Shell is simply coasting home on a resistance-free ride on the black gold train. Ayo Obe, former president of the Nigerian Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), tweeted recently “Will GEJ Obama up?” That question, like many similar ones will likely go unanswered.

Shell’s Bonga floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO) is situated about 120 kilometres off shore and in one kilometre deep ocean water. The deep-water facility is susceptible to high risks, comparable to BP’s Macondo field platform that exploded in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Floating on one kilometre deep water, ocean waves and other events can easily result in catastrophic incidents. To make matters worse, the offending company does not have an acceptable track record of handling oil spills in the onshore locations in the Niger Delta. Trusting Shell to handle the Bonga spill without vigorous monitoring is a mere pipedream.
So far the NOSDRA has not reported anything besides what Shell has announced. And everything Shell has announced presents a pretty face of a company pained by the accident and doing all it can to restore normalcy. It is deploying ships and aircrafts to tackle the spill. Chemical dispersants are being used in the fight and, oh thanks goodness, 50 per cent of the crude had already dissipated barely a day after the incident! Swallow that line and your mouth is certainly wider than that of the bonga fish.

Which brings us to the naming of oil fields after aquatic and terrestrial species. Bonga field is named after the bonga fish, a popular source of protein for most coastal communities in West Africa. Those flattish fish species are endemic in the Bonga field area. The implication is that Shell is actually shelling the bonga fish with her crude oil spill. And this has direct implications for local livelihoods – hitting the fisherfolks first and others down the line.

A quick check of names of oil fields in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere shows that oil companies are steeped in the sarcastic pattern of naming their oil fields after species that their operations threaten. Perhaps this is an appropriate way to ensure that future generations could track what species existed where at before the coming of the oil companies into those places.

The news being crafted around this Shell spill is that the current accident is the biggest in a decade. The fact is that we have to limit that comparison to off shore spills only. We have had quite recent massive onshore spills whose footprints remain indelible in the inland waters, swamps and forests of the Niger Delta.
Shells trans Niger delta pipelines spewed close to 400,000 barrels of crude oil at Bodo City, Ogoni in two spills in 2008 and 2009. And we do not have to limit our memory to a decade. In 1980 later, Texaco (Chevron) had a major spill at Funiwa and in that incident spewed 400,000 barrels of crude oil into coastal waters and destroyed 340 hectares of mangrove forests.

A rupturing at Shell’s Forcados terminal in 1979 dumped 570,000 barrels into the estuary and adjoining creeks. And the current spill going by satellite images is heading towards Forcados. At a point up to 400 square miles of the ocean was covered by this spill. The environmental and livelihoods destruction of oil activities cannot be continue this way.

Shell must reveal the exact amount of crude spilled and the names and types of chemical dispersants used in fighting the spill. The company should also be made to pay adequately for the damage done. More importantly, the oil sector is clearly yielding a negative to our economy as well as the global climate and environment. Leaving off opening up new oil fields is the sensible way to the future. Cleaning up existing mess onshore and offshore should be the focus of the regulatory agencies. The people simply need a safe environment to carry on with their lives. It is the least we can expect.

Durban's platform for climate inaction

2011-12-13T02:53:00.000-08:00

Nnimmo Bassey

The polluters enjoyed plenty of backslapping over the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action that emerged at the end of COP17.

The two-paged platform is very vague and will lend itself to interesting negotiating positions and interpretations. Clearly, however, a main problem with the Durban Platform is that there is no enhanced action plan in it. On the contrary, the platform is not for climbing, but for diving or rolling down a steep slope.
At the end of COP17, the nations came out with a mandate to negotiate an agreement with legal effect by 2015 that will cover emissions reduction efforts to be taken by 2020. This means that governments will now spend four years negotiating how far and how fast each country should cut carbon emissions either by changing technologies or by reducing polluting activities.

The key element of this new platform is that the notion of equity and fairness enshrined in the original convention is now eliminated. All countries will now step onto the same plate without any regard for historical responsibilities. Moreover, the original protocol required that industrialised nations should cut emissions to legally minding levels. In the new platform, there is no talk of legally binding cuts. Nations will pledge as they please. It remains to be seen whether there will be a review mechanism or whether such a mechanism would be effective.

Thus, the Kyoto Protocol is merely continuing by name only. Pledge and review is the stuff that pleases politicians. They now have four years of talks to draw up a new agreement that will require a further four years before coming into effect.

This procrastination does not send acceptable signals to a world in peril of catastrophic climate change. Hear the United Nations Environment Programme chief, Achim Steiner, “But the core question of whether more than 190 nations can cooperate in order to peak and bring down emissions to the necessary level by 2020 remains open — it is a high-risk strategy for the planet and its people.”

The UNEP chief’s worries are grounded in science. By 2020 global temperature may warm up to 3 or more degrees Celcius and the critical window within which urgent actions are needed is the same space within which the nations have agreed to do nothing.

The UNEP released an Emissions Gap Report last year showing that earlier voluntary pledges made by developed nations have so far led to increase and not a decrease in the levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Moreover, in November 2011 the International Energy Agency (IEA) last month warned that if current emissions are not reduced by 2017, the planet will risk suffering irreversible climate change.

Martin Khor of the South Centre believes that the “Kyoto Protocol was saved from extinction by a decision by mainly European countries (the EU and Norway) to enter a second period of emissions reduction commitments to start in 2013. The first commitment period of cuts end in December 2012.”

Khor adds, however, “The Kyoto Protocol implementation has been significantly and perhaps fatally weakened. Japan, Russia and Canada have pulled out of a second commitment period, while Australia and New Zealand notified that they may or may not join in.”

Green Climate Fund and a Post-dated platform

An agreement was reached in Durban to make the Green Climate Fund operational, and set up a work plan to mobilize significant climate funds from both private and public sources. The idea is to mobilise up to $100 billion per year from 2020. How this will be done remains vague until negotiations begin again. But there are fears that with the World Bank hosting the temporary secretariat and with a window for private sector facilities, ultimately the poor vulnerable countries for whom the funds are targeted my end up seeing priorities set by profiteers and speculators.

In sum, the Durban deal is a post-dated cheque with which only the incurable optimist would approach a bank. There were no agreements on any new quantified emissions reduction targets. There were no assurances that powerful polluting rich nations will peak their emissions by 2020 and work to bring them down significantly. Even if all goes to plan, any new targets won't come into effect until after eight years.

Durban was a moment to wrap the vulnerable planet in a safety turban. The moment was squandered on the altar of short-term profit. The planet has been squarely positioned to encounter catastrophic climate change.

An excellent summation of the outcome of the talks was made by Sarah-Jayne Clifton, Climate Justice Coordinator of Friends of the Earth International. She said,
“Ordinary people have once again been let down by our governments. Led by the US, developed nations have reneged on their promises, weakened the rules on climate action and strengthened those that allow their corporations to profit from the climate crisis.

She added that “The Green Climate Fund has no money and the plans to expand destructive carbon trading move ahead. Meanwhile, millions across the developing world already face devastating climate impacts, and the world catapults headlong towards climate catastrophe.
It is clear in whose interests this deal has been advanced, and it isn’t the 99% of people around the world. The noise of corporate polluters has drowned out the voices of ordinary people in the ears of our leaders.“

The way forward appears to be for the climate justice movement to intensify work at the grassroots, national and regional mobilizing. African rural women, youths, unions and Waste Pickers showed a great capacity and resilience at COP17. These energies should be harnessed for future confrontation of a system that needs urgent change. First steps should include the Conferences of Peoples (real COPs) as against the Conference of Polluters. A second round of Cochabamba is urgently needed.

Are Durban climate talks worth the borther?

2011-11-27T12:17:00.001-08:00

http://www.newint.org/blog/2011/11/25/durban-climate-talks-worth-bother-cop17-nnimmo-bassey-foe/

Are Durban climate talks worth the bother?

With climate talks set to open Monday, African civil society activists are alarmed. The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zewani, who is the spokesperson for the African Union, is credited with saying that Africa will be ‘flexible’ in the negotiations.

This announcement would considerably weaken the hands of African negotiators who have taken a strong stance against the failure of developed countries to deliver on their moral and legal obligations for climate action.

Besides the highly vulnerable small island states, Africa is really set to be worst hit by catastrophic climate change. The impacts are already here: droughts and famines have raged in the Horn of Africa; a rise in unusual rains and floods; increased desertification. It is also uncontested that Africa will experience heightened levels of temperature increases above global averages, further compounding the damage.

These ominous predictions set the scene for the 17th round of UN climate talks, or ‘COP17’, due to open in Durban, South Africa, next week. The city itself sits under a thick cloud from its coal fired plants. Last year, South Africa’s public electricity company, ESKOM, received a huge loan from the World Bank to build one of the largest coal fired power plants in the world.

The World Bank is embedded in the financial architecture of climate change, and the inherent contradictions of South Africa’s energy policy in this vulnerable continent make it the ideal host for the contested COP17 talks.

The general feeling among people coming to Durban – official and non official – is that COP17 will not deliver anything significantly different from what came out of the ineffective negotiations last year in Cancún, Mexico.

Little surprise then, that some activists are wondering whether to bother engaging at all. On Wednesday I attended a fascinating debate at Dirty Energy Week hosted by Friends of the Earth South Africa, where a panel considered whether there was any point in civil society groups turning up.
Many feel that climate talks sap a lot of energy and only set the stage for catastrophic climate change in Africa and around the world.

The other side argued that if civil society does not engage with the UN talks, then that space would certainly be taken up by polluters and by those who see climate change not as a crisis but as a business opportunity, such as carbon traders.

Others characterised the continued participation of civil society at the UN talks as a manifestation of the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ where the kidnapped marries the kidnapper and would not see an open door of escape even if the door were wide open and unguarded.

Bobby Peek, Director of Friends of the Earth South Africa, sees the fight stretching far beyond the talks themselves. He compares the struggle against climate change to the mass efforts that saw the defeat of apartheid in South Africa.

‘Once again our communities need to organize, mobilise,’ he said. ‘We need to help build a new just and sustainable world that puts the interests and needs of ordinary people and communities first.’
The question is not so much whether COP17 will deliver an acceptable climate agreement, but whether the peoples’ uprisings in the world will echo in Durban. Are politicians prepared to listen to the demands of the people or will they only hear the polluters?

Will this be a Conference of Parties, or will it be a Conference of Polluters? Will carbon trading and its accompanying array of market mechanisms run rampant? Will the so-called Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) be finally seen as Corporate Development Mechanism, Corrupt Development Mechanism or Crimes Development Mechanism?

Oil thefts, Subsidies and Cost of Crude

2011-11-15T02:55:00.001-08:00

Oil thefts, subsidies and cost of crude

IF we accept the basis on, which deregulation is being pushed and agree that public institutions and other entities cannot be run in an acceptable manner, I vote that we privatise government itself. Let the most efficient and profitable private corporations take control of our government houses including Aso Rock. Before we do that, however, it will be good to show how many of the private pockets and outfits that are making huge financial killings are doing so from visible and productive labours.

The stories of how the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) sidesteps constitutional stipulations and holds back huge sums of money that ought to be paid into the Federation Account but are slipped away into other accounts makes one wonder how parastatals can become more powerful than the state. Add to this the revelation from the RMAFC that the NNPC operates on a different foreign exchange rate than the prevailing one and through this has short-changed the Federation Account by as much as N12 billion within the first eight months of 2011. It is obvious that the ongoing oil thefts in Nigeria is not only happening in the murky waters of the creeks of the Niger Delta, but also in deft moves by white collar dealers in financial institutions. The figures we hear of how much crude oil could actually be stolen daily in the Niger Delta is conflicting, but even the least canvassed figure is huge.

Recently an industry source said that about 150,000 barrels of crude oil is stolen from their fields of operation alone daily. A former presidential aide claimed earlier this year that about 300,000 barrels are lost to thieves every day. More sobering was the estimate given by the former Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives, Mr. Dimeji Bankole, that as much as half of the nation’s daily production might actually be lost daily to thieves. Right now the figures being bandied by politicians suggest that 150,000 to 200,000 barrels may still be slipping through despite the vigilance of the various security outfits swarming the swamps.

The fact is that local people cannot be justly blamed for the bulk of this stealing. Even if fingers are pointed at the bush refineries, it is not plausible that these set ups can handle this huge quantity of crude freely taken in the creeks. Recall that a few years ago a ship with a foreign crew was arrested with a load of 11,000 barrels of crude illegally lifted from the creeks. That ship eventually escaped from the custody of the Nigerian Navy and when later intercepted was found to contain seawater - one of the lesser miracles of Nigeria!
The oil subsidy debate reveals the deep problems of corruption in Nigeria. It is not an issue of public institutions or organisations being incapable of doing things right. Public run refineries can function just as well as privately owned and run ones. Government owned airlines and railways could be profitably run. The question is not about the nature of the set up, it is about who is running it and what the context or environment is.

A quick check on what petrol costs per litre in various countries clearly shows that the so-called subsidy is not the problem. There are countries where petrol still costs a mere N4 per litre. The Nigerian Ministers of Finance and Petroleum Resources cannot convince the people that pump price of petrol should be anything more than the current N65 using the so-called subsidy arguments. Even the claim that the money that would be saved would be used to develop our rotted infrastructure does not inspire confidence in the people. We have heard all that before. The subsidy question has been a pet focus of the World Bank and it is one of the tools the bank and the IMF wielded to wreck many African economies through their failed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP). Would we be right to guess that the Minister of Finance may be an apostle of subsidy removal because of her World Bank background?

From what we have read of the debate so far, it is obvious that the so-called subsidy crept in because we lack refining capacity. So we export our crude, have it refined and then import it again. Vested interests of plunderers of our national wealth keep this system going and squander their loot through riotous living and perhaps in obnoxious birthday self congratulatory publications and parties to massage their bloated egos.
The subsidy debate is the wrong debate at this moment. The real debate should be on the true cost of crude oil. And this is not just about how much is currently spent in refining a litre of petrol in a Nigerian refinery or whether we can justify any plan to raise the pump price of a litre of petrol to N144 or more.
The true cost of oil must include the environmental costs that have been externalised and dumped on the poor communities of the Niger Delta. The UNEP report on Ogoni environment has been with President Jonathan for three months now; even though there is a clear need for emergency actions to stop people from continuing to drink water loaded with cancer causing pollutants. The UNEP report indicates that it will take a lifetime to restore the Ogoni environment and by extension the Niger Delta.

Some of us believe that all the wealth generated by crude oil and gas into our Federation account is not enough to restore the environment of the Niger Delta battered by half a century of reckless exploitation. We conclude that it is the suffering communities of the Niger Delta who have been subsidising our profligacy. Stop the oil thefts. Control the NNPC. Factor in the environmental restoration costs and tell us what the price of petrol should be.

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First published Wednesday, 09 November 2011 @

http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=66942:bassey-oil-thefts-subsidies-and-cost-of-crude-&catid=38:columnists&Itemid=615

In the Classroom of Life

2011-10-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

A talk on Literacy and sustainable development presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair LitCam International Conference, Frankfurt, 10 October 2011
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Primacy of the environment in sustainability

In this presentation we will be looking at environmental literacy and the implications for sustainability. Our standpoint is that when we lack knowledge of the intricate linkages in the webs of life, then our actions can actually work against sustainability no matter our professed good intentions.
The world needs universal literacy. This requires going beyond learning to read and write. It will involve among other things socio-environmental literacy. It will require economic and cultural literacy. We believe that it will also require scientific literacy. There is an urgent need for a relearning of the basis of the promotion of sustainable development from Stockholm (1972) to Rio (1992) and the huge back stepping that is leading the world to Rio+20.

The rise of forces promoting climate change denial, for example, is a sign indicating that both literacy and illiteracy can be promoted or undermined. It is also obvious that the trend firing the train of ostrich posturing in the face of global crises is not happening by chance, but is systemic and deep seated. Denial blunts learning and inquiry but promotes staying on the same path and staying on the same path secures promotes the sort of growth that has kept the world largely on an unsustainable development path.

The path to sustainable growth is possible only when the environment is made the primary concern and social and economic development are built on this foundation. Where economic concerns become the primary consideration then the very base on which it is constructed becomes faulty. The notion of economic growth suggests a limitless pursuit of accumulation in a finite world. Our literacy must of necessity help citizens examine what is truly best for them and whether their desires leaves room for future generations to have a harmonious existence in their environment.
It does not require rigorous argument before we agree that life and living is degraded when the environment is degraded. Article 24 of the African Human and Peoples Rights stipulates, “every African shall have a safe and satisfactory environment in which to develop.” What we read as the intent of the drafters of that article is that without a safe environment, development is jeopardised.

Existence Value

The current global trend where the market has become a god portends grave danger. The situation has gone so far or should we say so bad that everything is considered in mercantilist terms. Humanity is fast losing the knowledge of the existence value of things. The two tracks that have gained currency (no pun intended) is firstly the exchange value of objects and even nature. The second track is one of service value. Estimates of service value are predicated on the assumption that humanity fully understands the true services provided by the rather complex mix of parts of the webs of life.

We note that “existence value is the non-use value and does not require that utility be derived from direct use of the resource: the utility comes from the resource simply existing. Many species exist without us fully understanding their ‘service value’ to us, which does not diminish their value. Biota hidden in the depths of the sea may have no direct impact on our lives, but the loss of it will impact other species…” If the scale of loss is big enough the impact may become obvious more quickly than we can imagine.

The loss of our ability to recognise the existence value of life has made us consider everything in terms of their perceived service or exchange value. As already noted, our computation of service value is based on our assumed knowledge of that service. Exchange value on the other hand is largely based on what arbitrary baselines that we set as market value of objects and life.

One example of how our understanding of life is dramatically altering life itself can be seen in the way nations and their leaders tend to see the possible solutions to the climate crisis. Rather than making legally binding laws to that would prohibit certain production and consumption patterns, the policy direction is one of voluntary actions that leave huge leeway for polluters to avoid real actions. One of such methods is the so-called carbon offsetting path. This allows polluters to continue their polluting actions while paying for steps to be taken elsewhere through the delineation of carbon sinks, for example. To a large extent, this largely desktop action allows polluters to carry on with business as usual on the basis of supporting actions that bring about no additionality whatsoever. Sometimes this allows crime to actually pay.

Today modern energy production and use can be compared to slavery of old. You will recall that salves were basically energy generators. Resistance to abolition of polluting acts, comparable to resistance to abolition of slavery a couple of hundred years ago. Economies did not collapse. Companies veered into other trades and business. A business tract can be shut down without diminishing the stature of the enterprise as can be seen in Siemens closing its nuclear power arm.

The CDM can sometimes be applied to ridiculous extremes. We take for example the marketing of gas flare stopping projects as CDM projects. Through such projects, oil corporations and the Nigerian government hope to claim carbon credits for helping fight climate change. The reality is that gas flaring has been an illegal activity in Nigeria since 1984 when the Nigeria law on Gas Reinjection came into effect. Any reduction or stoppage of flaring is simply a reduction or halting of a criminal activity and brings on no additionality as the CDM process requires. Any compensation for such an activity flies in the face of reason. Gas flares are the most cynical manifestations of corporate insolence in the face of climate change and environmental health.

The fact is that there is no certainty about how much carbon a particular tree absorbs. In any case, when the tree eventually dies, where will the carbon go? Offsets allow industrialised nations to take no step to halt their polluting actions, including consumption reductions, at home while undertaking hypothetical cuts elsewhere in the developing world. Although developing regions like Africa may receive some economic incentives through the offset markets there is no indication that the amounts transferred are adequate, fair or enough to mitigate the relentless pollution going on in the north.

GMOs and false claims

Agricultural modern biotechnology favours industrial farming and singularly leads to erosion of genetic diversity. The loss of biodiversity carries with it loss of knowledge nurtured and built over the centuries of seed selection and preservation. Loss of seed creates holes in cultural literacy and sentences many into poverty by a direct erosion of their means of livelihood.
The claims of the modern biotech industry has remained consistent over the years even though they have been largely and constantly discredited. Friends of the Earth International research and publications and the work of other NGOs have clearly shown that the claims of the industry are nothing but myth. The myths persist because of corporate capture of policy institutions and governments.
• The myth of higher yield. Groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists of the USA have shown that GE crops at best have equal yield with natural varieties. In other words, they hold no advantage in this area. This despite the fact that the industry starts off with the best seeds available. We must keep in mind that this technology works in monocultures and is not amendable to the mixed cropping, small scale farming that characterise African agriculture.
• The myth of less reliance on agrochemicals. The industry claims that with GE crops farmers use less pesticide, herbicides and other toxic chemicals. The truth is self-evident that farmers have to contend with increasingly resistant weeds called super weeds and stronger pesticides are needed to annihilate super bugs.
• The myth of substantial equivalence with natural species. The biotech industry claims that their drops are substantially equivalent to natural varieties, but if this were so there would be no need for patents. Patents indicate that the products are not natural, but fabrications of the industry.
• The myth of being more nutritious. This may well be one of the most audacious claims of the biotech industry. Their efforts at grabbing the market require new ideas. Rather than having people eat fruits for vitamin A and others, they claim that the way out lies in engineering enhanced levels of the vitamins into staple crops. The sad truth, as was shown by researchers including Ma Wan-Ho , is that a person would have to eat kilograms of genetically engineered golden rice in order to derive an equivalent amount of vitamin A that one can get from eating a few carrots. According to Vandana Shiva, The problem is that vitamin A rice will not remove vitamin A deficiency (VAD). It will seriously aggravate it. It is a technology that fails in its promise.

In order to push genetically engineered crops into Africa, the promoters of the technology work hard to ensure lax Biosafety laws, ignore the Africa Model Law on Biosafety and ensure a reign of lack of transparency while truncating participation.

Issues being fought over in the CBD include monitoring and identification, labelling of products and liability regimes. Efforts are being made by some international agencies to ensure that national biosafety laws in African countries are weak and the environments open for contamination.
In Nigeria those who should be legislating for strict controls on biosafety issues support the push for the introduction of GE crops and products. A weak biosafety bill was passed in May 2011 and is awaiting the president’s assent at the time of this presentation.

In 2009 the USDA complained about GE products from India, Brasil and China entering the US market on key grounds including: expected health impacts and environmental impacts. These are two of the serious grounds that people around the world have based their rejection of agricultural modern biotechnology. The precautionary principle in the Cartagena Protocol of the CBD was drafted to take care of the uncertainty inherent in genetic engineering. Proponents of the technology fight tooth and nail against labelling insisting they are similar to normal varieties. But they insist on patenting their “creation” thereby removing any claims of equivalence to normal varieties.

The false grounds on which GE crops are being promoted is that they are the solution to hunger in Africa because such crops yield better than normal varieties and can be manipulated to have higher levels of nutrients such as vitamins that our people lack due to dietary regimes. There are also arguments that GE crops rely on less pesticide as some are engineered to kill target pests. It is said that such crops need less agro-chemicals. Critical research has shown that these claims do not hold water. The Union of Concerned Scientists in the USA issued a report in April 2009 showing that the higher yields claim is fatuous. At best, the scientists said, GE crops yields are similar to those of normal varieties. As for some GE crops being pest resistant, it has also been seen that non-target pests sometimes get hit thus diminishing our biodiversity.

What Green Revolution does Africa need?

The website of the African Green Revolution Africa touts their plans to focus on Agro-dealer development, work on a Program for African seed systems (PASS) and release 1000 new crop varieties over the next 10 years, AGRA also aims to improve African soil fertility by increasing fertilizer use by 400 per cent.
Although AGRA does not espouse the use of genetically engineered crops they have stated in many fora that they would not discriminate between technologies. Their relentless push for export oriented agriculture and the use of “new seed technologies” obviously leave little room for doubt about their aims. Generally, the push for export and constant harping on value addition says little about meeting local food needs and instead points at a direction comparable to the colonial legacy of cash cropping for the metropole.
AGRA is engaged on a romantic move to recycle the Green Revolution experience of Asia. In doing this, they do not tell us the current status of that revolution in Asia. We share a bit of that here.
• Over 1000 local rice variety were lost in Indonesia during 1970 - 1990
• The cost of pesticide use is hidden in massive poisoning recorded every year.
• Contamination of water systems, soil and food
• Residue of pesticides in mother’s milk in Indonesia
• The Asian miracle depended on use of High Yield Varieties and agrochemicals. Besides government intervention was critical
• There has been a lack of policy coherence: and there have been conversion of fertile farmland to industrial and tourism complexes. Moreover agricultural resources (water, soil, seeds) are not safeguarded.
• Inequity: big farmers can afford input; small farmers run into debts and for many it has meant relocation to urban areas or suicide
• Some see that disparity in regional development and the fact that areas with fewer infrastructures were left out. They wonder whether this was because the Green Revolution was designed for richer areas.

Food sovereignty and gastronomic literacy

With the multiplicity of assaults on the continent, Africa's ability to feed itself depends on the careful use of its natural resources base and its environment. Present day interactions must be filtered through historical impact

African centres of endemism and their agricultural systems hold keys to utilising the huge diversities for food production. This is one reason why the push to erode the continent’s biodiversity through genetic engineering and monoculture must be resisted.

The 2008 report of IAASTD clearly shows that the future food needs of the world will be met through small-scale family farming and not modern biotechnology. This is the time for farmers and agricultural producers to come together for the push to secure the future of the continent. Government has a duty to support small-scale, mid-scale farmers/farming, provide the space for education, research and support of agro-ecological agriculture and block the entry of toxic technologies and actively support the human right to food

The global systemic crises manifesting in natural resource erosion, climate change, globalisation and financial crisis require a different approach to develop resilient agriculture and food security for communities and nations on the basis of food sovereignty.

Land grabs and the new colonisation

The food crisis of 2007/2008 as well as the financial spurred speculators to turn to land for cultivation of crops for energy or for food. This rush for land in countries in Africa, South East Asia and Latin America by other countries and corporations have led to atrocious land grabs. The scale and purpose of the land grabs show them as nothing short of a new wave colonisation. The crops cultivated in the grabbed lands do nothing feed the local population but are mainly produced for export back to the home countries of the “investors.”

Let us look at just one example of a land grab in South Sudan where one “paramount chief” signed off 600,000 hectares of community land, with a possibility of ceding a further 400,000 hectares. The deal was defeated through resistance by the people with solidarity actions from groups such as the Oakland Institute.

A Dallas, Texas-based ﬁrm had entered a deal with a cooperative in 2008 in South Sudan and through the deal was set to enjoy a 49 years lease of 600,000 hectares of land at a princely sum of US$25,000.

The terms of the lease offered the company full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land, including:
• Right to develop, produce and exploit timber/forestry resources on the leased land, including, without limitation, the harvesting of current tree growth, the planting and harvesting of hardwood trees, and the development of wood-based industries;
• Right to trade and proﬁt from any resulting carbon credits from timber on the leased land;
• Right to engage in agricultural activities, including the cultivation of biofuel crops (Jatropha plant and palm oil trees);
• Right to explore, develop, mine, produce and/or exploit petroleum, natural gas, and other hydrocarbon resources for both local and export markets, as well as other minerals, and may also engage in power generation activities on the leased land;
• Right to sublease any portion or all of the leased land or to sublicense any right to undertake activities on the leased land to third parties.

Happily this land grab was burst but there are others that are just as obnoxious and have not been stopped. This example contains a number of examples of how wrong thinking or wilful environmental illiteracy can lead to very wrong actions.

Conclusion: Relearning life

We cannot dig our way out of present crises by carrying on with the same patterns that created the problems. There is an urgent need for development literacy. This may have to start with our political leaders. Closely followed by their corporate partners.

A literacy that will promote sustainable development and growth will be one that teaches the unassailable primacy of solidarity over competition, of well-being over so-called growth. It will recover the status of humans as part of a cosmos and with as sacred trust of stewardship. This literacy will demand an end to global double standards, environmental degradation through exploitation and will demand that ecocide by placed on the same pedestal as genocide and other crimes against humanity. This process will be taught and learned in the classrooms of life.

What sort of literacy will support economic growth and environmental sustainability? Are the two objectives compatible? That is the question. How will the deliberate illiteracy in the world be overcome? What will be the tools? We dare to suggest that this will be pushed by the mass of the peoples around the world. Cultural tools and exchanges should play key roles. Poetry, story-telling, music and other art forms will call humanity back to the path of enlightened self-interest wherein humans recognise that they are just a tiny part of the cosmos and that our destiny is entwined with that of other species.

The new literacy will also be promoted by the enthronement of sanctions for the crime of ecocide at least to the same levels as crimes against humanity, genocide and the like. Ecocide as a crime would remove the corporate shield and expose directors of companies to personal liability just as political offices cannot shield perpetrators of war crimes.

The new literacy is one that must speak the truth in the face of immensely popular falsehoods. Clean coal? Carbon capture and sequestration rather than leaving the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sand in the land and laying off any gas fracking business. It is a time to affirm that sustainability can only be secured through the use of renewable energy resources, for example. The continued fixation on non-renewable resources cannot be sustainable in the short or long run. We have learned this in the classroom of life.

She saw Life in Trees (Tribute to Wangari Maathai)

2011-09-29T00:20:00.000-07:00

Wangari Muta Maathai departed these mortal shores on 25 September 2011 in a Nairobi hospital. She will be missed for many reasons because she led an active life that stood up to power, supported the oppressed and fought for the respect on nature.

Wangari Maathai was born on April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe, near Nyeri, in Kenya. She completed her secondary education at Loreto Girls’ High School in 1959, obtained a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and then a masters’ degree in 1966 at the University of Pittsburgh. Her Ph.D was in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Nairobi in 1971 where she later on got appointed a professor.

While being involved with some environmental and humanitarian organizations in Nairobi in the 1970s Professor Maathai became concerned about the deteriorating socio-environmental conditions in which the poor, rural Kenyans lived. She learned how the women lacked firewood for cooking and heating, how they struggled to obtain clean water ad how nutritious food was hard to get. This is when she lit unto the idea of tree planting as a solution to the web of problems confronting the women and the rural poor. She literally saw life in trees.

This was when the seeds that later on germinated as the Green Belt Movement by 1977 were sown. The women learned that trees provide wood for cooking, fodder for livestock, and material for fencing; stabilize soils and protect watersheds.
To her credit, Professor Maathai mobilized men and women to plant over 47 million trees in her lifetime. These have helped to restore degraded environments and uplift the quality of life of many.

The struggle for a better environment drew Prof Maathai into the political arena where she confronted the dictatorial regime of President Arap Moi in the 1980s and 1990s. These manifested in her campaign against the erection of a skyscraper in Uhuru Park in Nairobi and the grabbing of public land in Karura Forest close to Nairobi city centre. She stood with mothers of political prisoners in a yearlong series of vigils and saw the release of 51 men from government’s gulag.

She suffered personal attacks, arrests, incarceration and insults in the course of her campaigns for democracy in Kenya. She was elected Member of Parliament at the elections of December 2002. That election was hailed by some as the first free-and-fair elections in Kenya for a generation. Her political career continued with her being appointed Deputy Minister for Environment in 2003 by President Mwai Kibaki. She raised her voice for peace, accountability and justice in the violence that followed the contested 2007 Kenyan elections.

I first met Prof Maathai in person at the Global Greens Congress in Canberra in 2001. A high profile African, everyone literally hung unto her words. My second encounter was in 2008 at the 10th anniversary reunion of winners of the Sophie Prize – an environmental award given to individuals and organizations that “in a pioneering or a particularly creative way, has pointed to alternatives to the present development and put such alternatives into practice.” At that reunion, her ideas on causes and solutions to climate change were rooted in her experience e and practice. She was always such an inspiration and remains so even from the other side.

Her achievements include the work she did with the GBM and other allies to ensure that the new Kenyan constitution, ratified by a public vote in 2010, was prepared on a consultative basis and that it included the right of all citizens to a clean and healthy environment.

In 2006 Professor Maathai joined with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to launch a campaign to plant a billion trees around the world. After meeting that goal in less than a year a new the target of 14 billion trees was set.

Professor Wangari Maathai drew positive attention to Africa while fighting to better the lot of her people and the environment. She was the first African female Nobel Peace Laureate (2004). She was a great environmentalist, a scientist, parliamentarian and founder of the Green Belt Movement. She stood out also as an elder and peacemaker. She won several other awards including some bestowed on her by governments include: the Order of the Rising Sun (Japan, 2009), the Legion D’Honneur (France, 2006), and Elder of the Golden Heart and Elder of the Burning Spear (Kenya, 2004, 2003). Professor Maathai also received awards from many organizations and institutions throughout the world, including: the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights (2007), the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights Lifetime Achievement Award (2006), the Sophie Prize (2004), the Goldman Prize (1991), the Right Livelihood Award (1984); and honorary doctorates from Yale University and Morehouse College in the U.S., Ochanomizu University in Japan, and the University of Norway, among others.

Her books reveal key milestones in her life and struggles: The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003); Unbowed (2006), her autobiography; The Challenge for Africa (2008), and Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (2010).

“Every person who has ever achieved anything has been knocked down many times. But all of them picked themselves up and kept going, and that is what I have always tried to do.”

“You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.”

As big oil gets set to sink their claws into Kenya soil, I am sure Prof Maathai would have asked that the trees be spared the inevitable spills and degradation.

If no one applauds this great woman of Africa, the tress surely will. Adieu African women par excellence. Adieu global citizen.

Nigeria's Nuclear Nightmare

2011-09-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

Following the Fukushima incident earlier this year the dangers associated with nuclear power generation have again been brought to the front burners. With heightened concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants, it is shocking to see the Nigerian President pushing Nigeria unto the nuclear path. This may appear like a dream come true for the Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission, but this has all the potential of turning into a nightmare for the country.The Nigerian government appears to be scheming to get deeper into the nuclear mire at a time when the world is inching, albeit slowly, from dirty and dangerous energy sources. The fact that Nigeria has one of the worst electricity supplies in the world, with only about 40% of the population having access to public power supply does not justify toeing the nuclear path. It calls for investing in safe forms of renewable energy production. It also calls for the wastage in the gas and oil fields.Having promised to overcome the electricity poverty in Nigeria, the president focus appears to have been captured by nuclear hawks and hawkers. While recently speaking to the Atomic Energy Commission, the president stated, "We all know the importance of atomic energy. We have plans to generate power from atomic energy and we must pursue it seriously.” He them charged the agency “to come up with time-lines for the delivery of atomic energy to our people” and assured that the resources needed for the task will be not be a problem.The problem is that apart from the vagaries of nuclear power plant construction, running and decommissioning, the Nigerian context raises unusual risks that should not permit anyone to bring this on at all.A good lesson can be learned from Germany where a realisation of the depth of the dangers of nuclear power plants has led the government to announce a phase out nuclear power by 2022. Siemens, the company responsible for fabricating the nuclear plants in Germany has also announced that it is closing that aspect of their business. This is interesting. Atomic power companies can retool and invest rather in the renewable energy business, for instance, rather than dump their toxic technology in gullible nations like ours. From recent nuclear accidents, including the one at Fukushima, it has become clear that when such accidents occur the authorities get very economical with the information about the levels of radiation released into communities. In a country where simpler environmental information is not readily available, it is doubtful that people would be warned at all of dangers in situations where nuclear incidents arise. As we write, thousands are protesting in Japan against the contamination of foods and water and are demanding a move from Nuclear power.With all the information on the dangers of gas flares and oil spills, no serious actions are being taken to curtail the spills or to stop the flaring. Even when communities (for example in Ogoniland) are informed that their water is poisoned and capable of causing cancers, government takes no action and allows the people to continue to slake their thirst with poison. Our cities, including Kano and Kaduna have heavily polluted rivers on which people depend; yet they are not told that the water they drink is not potable.When reactor cores malfunction nuclear meltdowns occur. Radiation released from meltdowns and other causes impact all biodiversity and pose serious ecological problems. The first recorded partial meltdown occurred in 1952 at a plant in Ontario, Canada. Radioactive explosion at the Soviet Union’s Mayak reprocessing site in 1957 contributed to 200 deaths and forced the evacuation of 10,000 people. The 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania became world famous until its record was eclipsed by the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1988 where lives were lost and 600,000 persons were evacuated. Some estimates claim that up to 4000 died from the ensuing radiation.The danger with nuclear power generation actually starts from the mining of uranium and goes right on to the disposal of the wastes. When it comes to maintenance issues, Nigeria’s track record is abysmal. How well have we maintained our existing hydro and thermal power stations? Nuclear power is neither cheap nor climate neutral. The heavy constructions of the facilities depend on the use of fossil fuels that are release massive amounts of greenhouse gases. Environmental, labour and human rights infringements accompany the uranium extractive processes. How would the Atomic Energy providers handle nuclear wastes, including wastes from materials used in the nuclear fission process? It is known fact that spent uranium rods have very high levels of toxins and radiation. It is also known that nuclear wastes can be stolen and can fall into the hands of persons who could use them in unexpected, unregulated ways. Another matter relates to cost overruns, political manipulations and corruption of the nuclear sort.At this time of planetary crises, the direction to go is investment in renewable energy generation. This would safeguard the climate, create sustainable jobs that are not dependent on dangerous destructive extraction and help build the foundations for movement on a green path. Our president certainly does not want to foist a nuclear nightmare on Nigeria.

Cleaning Crude Oil with Bare Hands

2011-09-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

Oil spill responses have not been a uniform exercise around the world. There are many instances were spills claimed to have been cleaned refuse to hide under the sand beneath which they had been shoved. At other places they are supposedly cleaned by being set alight in pits dug in forests.

The one thing that cannot be denied is that the spills are stubborn incidents to deal with. They leave persistent scars on the environment; degrade lands, swamps and water bodies as well as the quality of life for every living thing.

Responses to spills have sometimes played on the crude oil environmental impact illiteracy of many of the communities where oil is being extracted.

Let us take the case of Nuevo Sucre and Canaan de Cachiyacu Shipibo, two communities in the Peruvian Amazon. The communities have experienced six oil spills in their territory in the last three years. The spills resulted from the operations in blocks 31-B and 31-E in the Loreto region of Peru of Maple Gas Corporation del Peru SRL, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ireland-based company Maple Energy plc. The company is a U.K.-traded company registered in Dublin, Ireland. It expanded its operations in the Amazon in 2007 with $40 million US dollars of private sector financing obtained from the World Bank Group's International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The affected communities had filed a complaint to the IFC against Maple in April 2010 over issues of human rights abuses, widespread contamination, and compelling community members to clean up toxic spills without protective equipment.

Community sources say that it is the company’s practice to hire local men to clean the spills without any training or knowledge of the dangers in the materials they were combating. In the case in question, 32 local people and “forced” them to clean one of the spills without any protective equipment, literally with bare hands. As if the destruction of their environment was not enough, there were unusual outbreaks of diseases in the impacted area. Then followed a series of negotiations between the communities and Maple Gas Corporation.

First, the communities requested that the company should bear the costs of studies aimed at determining the level of contamination and health impacts on community members. They also demanded that the company should provide them with potable water and food until they could be assured of the safety of their water bodies.

Sounds like Nigeria, right? Our poor peoples hardly ever ask for anything more than what would ensure their basic survival. They just want very basic things to carry out with their livelihood pursuits in dignity. As is often the case in Nigeria, the company rebuffed all the requests.

Negotiations broke down two months after the last cleaning exercise and a month after the death of Luis Saldana, a resident of Nuevo Sucre who suffered from severe stomach pain after assisting the same company in the cleanup of another oil spill in April 2009 without any protective equipment. According the reports, a few days after the death of Mr Saldana, and as he was being buried on 10 July 2011, another spill occurred and the company again hired community men to clean up the spill without any warnings about the toxicity and health impacts of being exposed to crude oil without protective equipment. The people had to shut down negotiations because they did not see any serious sign that the company would bear responsibility over their actions or change their mode of operations.

According to Raul Tuesta, leader of the Shipibo community of Nuevo Sucre. "Maple has denied the problems with contamination and sickness resulting from their operations on our land and refused our requests for environmental remediation and medical treatment." He also said “No one has been able to give us an answer as to why Maple directed these men to work directly in the petroleum with bare hands, legs, and feet. We are very worried about what impacts this will have on their health. We are very concerned about the health of the workers cleaning the spill, our children who play and drink from the Mashiria daily, and all the members of our community that survive on this water.”

Maple Energy did not inform the community people of any pipeline rupture when it occurred and the people only got to know about the spill when children who were bathing on the banks of the Mashiria River reported seeing some oil in the water.

Locals say that the clean-up teams used equipment such as plastic bottles and buckets to clean up the spill and sometimes the only protection they could muster were barriers made of tree branches and leaves.

Right now the demand is for humanitarian assistance including medical assistance, provision of potable water and food. The people also demand a a thorough cleanup and remediation of the spill to ensure that they can continue to live in their territory “without contamination, and this is our right as an indigenous community.”

Amazon Watch’s Programme Director, Leila Salazr-Lopez sees this as “yet another example of the social and environmental cost of oil drilling in the Amazon. The outgoing Garcia administration has promoted a massive expansion of oil drilling in the Peruvian Amazon while the government clearly lacks the regulatory capacity to protect the environment and the rights of indigenous peoples."

If we see any difference between what has been recorded in Peru and what occurs daily in Nigeria, let us share it.

Flood for thought

2011-07-14T00:18:00.000-07:00

The following message was circulated on Sunday July 10, 2011, to residents of Lagos via blackberry and possibly other smart phones and social media, by the state's commissioner for Environment: "Today's downpour has been heavier than normal as the state govt. had earlier warned. It has been raining since 5am in many areas & it hasn't stopped.

The water level has risen incredibly so that the channels that r meant to discharge water from the roads & drainages r completely locked bcos of the high tide & bcos both d Atlantic Ocean & Lagoon that receive water from our channels have risen more than usual. Pls b calm & do not panic." We fully understand that an unusually intense rainfall cannot be blamed on the actions of a state government.

However, when cars are submerged on the streets and the highways present a picture of fast flowing rivers; when homes are flooded and you have to stand on tables or on your roof, it is difficult to keep your cool, even if a commissioner for environment tells you it is okay.

We must applaud the Lagos State government for issuing prior warning that unusually heavy rains were coming. They need to keep issuing those warnings, as the skies are obviously not spent of their loads of water. There must be commensurate preparedness to face the deluge.

Meteorologists and climate watchers have clearly warned of freak weather events occasioned by global warming. The clearest manifestations are changes in weather patterns in terms of when the rains come and when the dry spells start and end. Equally important in a changed climate is that even where the cycles remain the same, the intensity of weather events, such as rainfall, may be dramatically different. What was experienced in Lagos on July 10 may have been one of such events.

The problem with these heavy downpours is that they are not beneficial to farmers, as so much comes down in one rainfall and the ground cannot soak up much before the water runs off.

The message from the commissioner described an incredible rise of water level in the lagoon as well as the Atlantic Ocean. The meteorologists who foresaw the rains ought to have equally predicted the estimate volume of the downpour. There ought to have been nothing incredible about this.

The clear implication of that Sunday's weather event is that the Lagos State government and indeed the federal government of Nigeria should urgently prepare a Climate Impact Assessment for our nation. This should pay special attention to coastal areas, and vulnerable places in northern Nigeria. Urgent steps should be taken to build resilience to the menace. And while that is being done, the idea of Eko Atlantic should be banished.

While Lagosians are groaning from losses following the heavy downpour, in other parts of Nigeria and Africa, the story is one of prayers for rainfall.

Consider those in the Horn of Africa, where a severe humanitarian crisis is currently unfolding. Parts of countries like Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda and all of Somalia are experiencing the sort of drought they have not experienced in the last 60 years. Pastoralists there have already lost an estimated 60 percent of their animals and up to 500,000 animals may die this year. Already, environmental refugees are marching away from these drought-impacted areas.

Some meteorologists have associated the drought in the Horn of Africa to a La Nina event, a periodic shift in global rainfall patterns that contributes to significantly reduce rainfall in that part of Africa.

However, according to Doreen Stabinsky, a professor of Global Environmental Politics, at College of the Atlantic in Maine, USA, "to blame the drought on La Nina is to miss an important underlying cause - the slowly changing global climate that is drying out eastern Africa." In other words, the droughts can be attributed to increases in the temperature of the waters of the Indian Ocean due to global warming. The result has been that the rains fall on parts of the ocean rather than on land.

Ms Stabinsky adds that impacts of decreased rainfall are compounded by "the fact that with higher air temperatures, water evaporates more quickly from land. For this reason, droughts under climate change are expected to be more frequent and more intense." Floods and droughts both precipitate (pardon the pun) food shortages and increased food prices, thus deepening the crises.

Tackling climate change is not an option and governments cannot afford to continue with business as usual. The human causes of climate change are known and the significant step to avoid a runaway climate situation is to cut emissions. Although Nigeria does not have a historical burden when it comes to the production of greenhouse gases, as the industrialised countries do, the nation can show seriousness and leadership by halting the worst climate crime on our shores. The criminal activity that is placing Nigeria and the world at large at great risk is gas flaring. If the floods of Lagos have sent any signal at all, it should include that while we build resilience, this crime must stop.

+First publised at http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Columns/5730929-182/story.csp

The Business of Crude oil Thefts

2011-07-12T00:16:00.001-07:00

We have often heard that except oil exploration is intensified and new oil fields are developed Nigeria’s oil reserves would be depleted. This is basic logic. No applause for the Directorate of Petroleum Resources (DPR) for knowing or saying this. What the DPR really needs to tell the public is what the object of boosting reserves is when no one knows for sure how much oil is actually being extracted from the oil fields? If wanton stealing is condoned, you can boost crude reserves all you want, your reserve figures will at best be fictional.

The DPR claims that as at June 2010, Nigeria’s oil reserves were being depleted at the rate of 2.81 per cent based on estimated annual production volume of 894.79 million barrels. What measures did they use to get to this conclusion? And when they suggest that the “life index” of the remaining oil reserves is 35.55 years we must ask how do they know this? Could it be that the wells will run dry much earlier? The chorus the DPR wants us to sing is “drill baby drill!”

The recent declaration by Emmanuel Egboga, a former Special Adviser to the President on Petroleum Matters, that 300,000 barrels of crude oil are stolen daily in Nigeria is surprising only to the extent that the figure is conservative.

Others who should know have made some statements about the wanton stealing of crude oil in the past and provide good reasons to be wary about this figure. The former speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, was reported in BusinessDay of 12 November 2009 as saying that about half of Nigeria’s crude oil production is stolen. He also warned that at the rate the stealing was being carried out Nigerian crude might run out sooner than expected. The lawmaker was suggesting a leak of about 1,000,000 barrels a day. That is more than thrice the figures currently suggested.

Underscoring the fact that the stealing is not being perpetuated by petty thieves as the oil companies would want us to believe, the Governor of Delta State, Emmanuel Uduaghan, said in a report on page 5 of The Punch of 8 November 2009, that oil companies were involved in the illegal activities. He also said that the international community was complicit in the thefts since there was a ready market for the stolen crude.

The surprise in the 300,000 barrels talk is that the government has been battling the thieves with military personnel. This is music to the ear. In January 2005 two naval admirals were demoted and sacked from the Navy for their disappearance of a tanker vessel transporting 11,000 tonnes of stolen crude under their watch. If that did not signify a link with the guys with official guns, we don’t know what would.
As we have argued before, simply intensifying oil exploration and exploitation will not assure anyone of reasonable reserves estimates. This is principally because the DPR famously does not have a way of measuring how much oil is pumped out of the oil wells. The lack of transparency in terms of crude oil production serves the interest of the thieves. It is a national scandal.

This lack of transparency led the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) in its 2005 audit report to recommend as a remedial measure that the DPR needs “to work together with operators to develop a transparent way of determining actual production from oil well to terminal. This is necessary to ensure that there is no loss of revenue between the volume of crude produced and what is captured in the data.” NEITI has mercifully reduced the technical audits into popular or simplified versions so anyone can read and understand the issues.

The audit also recommended “Annual audited cost reports submitted by companies to NAPIMS should include the production volumes.” It was also further recommended that the accounting for Government sales of crude oil should be made in simplified and computerized manner to conform to best practices.” You would be shocked to learn that the accounting of oil revenue in Nigeria is largely manual? If the tallying of election results could make some calculators in Lagos to overheat, you can just imagine how many pencils and calculators the accountants at the NNPC must contend with as they labour to keep track of the heaps of data passing through their desks.

These demands have been a recurring issue and NEITI is yet to get the cooperation needed from the oil companies who cry wolf over oil thefts. The companies would simply not allow the Nigerian government access to their wellhead pump figures. The DPR’s capacity deficit encourages it to depend on the oil companies for support even in monitoring exercises that should be independently carried out. We even hear that at least one country offered to train officials of the DPR and also offer them necessary equipment for wellhead metering of crude oil production but the offer was declined. Could it be that the DPR may have been assisted to reach the decision to reject the offered help so that the hole through which the business of crude oil thefts thrives may not be plugged?

OIL POLITIICS: Conference of polluters

2011-06-30T02:02:00.001-07:00

June 23, 2011

When the world met in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, to conclude negotiations on actions that needed to be taken to combat climate change, there was hope that an agreement would be reached that would see nations take it serious to avert catastrophic climate change. It was clear that polluting nations had to commit to ambitious steps to ensure emissions reductions as a major move towards blocking runaway climate change.

It was essential to get the biggest polluter on board if any climate change effort was to make sense. The USA knew this and insisted that they would only endorse the Kyoto Protocol if market mechanisms were enthroned as a means of tackling climate change. The nations of the world acquised. The USA reneged. The Kyoto Protocol limped into life after a lot of struggles. Carbon trading mechanisms began to flourish like the water hyacinth in our water ways.

Within this framework, countries had to commit to make emissions cuts predicated on the fact that global warming was largely driven by the release of huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These come principally from man's use of fossil fuels and related dirty industrial practices.

By 2009, at the climate talks at Copenhagen, there were heightened expectations that a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol would be negotiated to ensure that it comes into effect by the time the first period runs out in 2012. The protocol itself does not have an expiration date, as confusionists would like people to believe. The commitment period of the first reduction targets is what is coming to an end. New and more ambitious targets ought to be set at this time.

The high expectations of Copenhagen were shattered by the so-called Copenhagen Accord, which aimed to eliminate the requirement that nations make legally binding emissions cuts. The accord brought up a system of voluntary emissions reductions and threw in an ambiguous promise of making funds available to poor countries for mitigation and adaptation efforts.

But we must note that the emissions targets set for rich countries in the Kyoto Protocol countries were based on scientific computations of what needed to be done to begin to fight the climate menace. Such scientific calculations permit the analysis of possible temperature increases that would occur above preindustrial levels if all players kept their parts of the bargain. What the accord did was to discard the rational way of securing the interest of the planet and rather threw up a situation where nations would carry on with business as usual or do nothing but merely hope for the best - clearly a form of madness.

The Choreographed Cancun agreement stayed on the Copenhagen Accord track. It merely affirmed and gave the thumbs up to the non accountable system cooked up in Copenhagen. The next big climate conference will hold in Durban, South Africa at the end of 2011. As part of the preparations for that summit, two weeks of negotiations were recently conducted in Bonn, Germany.

At the end of the two weeks, the emission reduction ambitions of developed countries remained far below the bar. The voluntary pledge system remains. Summed up, the pledges place the planet on a trajectory to have a 5 degrees Celcius temperature rise above preindustrial levels. At that sort of temperature, Africa will more or less be incinerated. The temperature rise here would be higher than the global average. There would be acute crop failure, water stress and unparalleled human misery - assuming that the continent would be somewhat inhabitable that is.

In fact, global emissions must be reduced by a minimum of 12-14 gigatonnes to keep within a 66 percent chance of temperature rise below 2C - a level that the UNEP adjudged tolerable. Over 100 countries demand 1.5C maximum temperature rise.

While the most that industrialised countries pledged at the Bonn meetings amounts to a paltry 3 gigatonnes of reductions. On the other hand, poor developing countries have made pledges to cuts emissions by levels adding up to 5 gigatonnes. It appears the rich countries want to completely shun their historical and current responsibilities and force poor vulnerable nations to continue to pick up the bill. Gas flaring alone adds 400 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually.

One of the low points of the Bonn meeting was when Canada joined Russia and Japan to say that they would not endorse a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and would thus dishonour their existing legal obligation to do otherwise. There is an unmistakably deep aversion to accountability among the rich nations.

It appears that Durban will see rich countries shoving the planet to the precipice on uncontrolled skate boards. This is why South African environmental and social movements have characterised the forthcoming Conference of Parties (COP) as nothing more than a conference of polluters. Would it be anything different?

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/Business/5720523-147/story.csp

OIL POLITICS: The Volatile waters of Ibada Elume

2011-06-30T01:59:00.000-07:00

June 30, 2011

The young man bent down and dipped a piece of paper in the pond. Everyone watched with rapt attention wondering what he wanted to prove. Soon it was clear enough. He pulled the wet sheet from the water and struck a match and we all jumped back as the wet sheet went up in flames. No one needed to be told that refined petroleum products covered all the ponds before us. The fumes hung thick in the air, and striking a match in that situation was an invitation to disaster. No body wanted more of such experiments. No, not yours truly.

Welcome to what was once the farmland of the people of Ibada Elume in Sapele Local Government Area of Delta State. The situation here is that in 2008, a pipeline conveying refined petroleum products though the community sprung a leak and the leakage went on for about two full months before it was stopped by the Petroleum Pipeline Marketing Company (PPMC) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC). A huge fire that resulted from the spill left several hectares of farmland and fishponds destroyed.

The leakage was stopped but nothing was done to clean up the environment. That is why, three years on, the land is still a vista of bowed and charred trees, burnt out soils and troughs that were once fishponds. Community elders claim that about fifty fishponds were destroyed in that spill and fire of 2008.

The little experiment illustrating the volatility of the ponds of Ibada Elume was carried out on 28th June 2011 when this writer visited the location in company of members of oil and mining impacted communities from nine states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory. The astonished visitors could not believe their eyes as they beheld hectares of charred trees and oily ponds that covered both the right of way of the pipeline that runs through here and what was once the fishponds and farmlands of the community.

The visitors came from Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Plateau, Rivers and Zamfara States. While those from the Niger Delta said the spectacle was not different from what they were used to; those from Abuja,, Plateau and Zamfara were simply stunned. As they shook their heads, they wondered aloud what government had done about this matter? Seeing that three years had passed since the incident occurred, they wondered if the environment would return to its original state after about one hundred years? Two hundred years?

The situation, according to the local people, is that apart from visiting the spot where the spill occurred, to clamp the pipe, no one had visited or spoken to the community. No government official visited the community. There was no standard joint inspection visit or report. It is quite sickening that there can be this level of crass disregard of decency by the various arms of the NNPC that ought to have taken steps to visit the community to investigate the incident and clean up the mess.
It has to be accepted that the impunity of the NNPC and its subsidiaries threatens to be more offensive than those of the multinational oil companies. This can be seen by their nonchalant attitude to oil spills, refined products fires in Lagos as well as the Niger Delta. We also see this in the massive pollution of the communities on the fence lines of their refineries. Another sore point is that the NNPC is the highest gas flarer in Nigeria when considered in proportion to oil production, going by claims of their officials.

If an agency that is supposed to watch over the sector is itself so guilty of flagrant environmental abuses, it is clear why they are unable to bring erring oil companies to book.

It is also intriguing that no government official has visited the community three years after this massive environmental incident. They did not go to commiserate with the victims. Neither did they take steps to fetch out whoever may have tampered with the pipeline if it was a case of sabotage. However, even if the incident was caused by sabotage, the NPMC is not excused from environmental remediation. The law and common sense require that the environment must be restored irrespective of the cause of spillage.

An unmistakable impression from the visit to Ibada Elume was the consternation with which the visiting community folks viewed the conditions of living here as well as the environmental problems. One visitor from Plateau supposed that the Niger Delta people have not spoken up loud enough to be heard by the government. Really? One from Abuja was miffed by the attitude of NNPC and wondered how they hoped to secure their pipelines if they would leave devastated lands around their pipeline here.

The bottom-line was that if what has befallen this community is somewhat representative of the degradation of the environment of the Niger Delta communities, then they have to worry about the fate of other communities in Northern Nigeria when and if oil extraction begins there. Or the Middle belt when and if bitumen extraction begins there for that matter.

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5724190-182/story.csp

Shell's Fracking Adventures in the Karoo

2011-04-20T23:24:00.001-07:00

OIL POLITICS: Shell’s fracking moves in the Karoo
By Nnimmo Bassey
April 21, 2011

There are some words that those who develop dictionary software appear somewhat slow to catch up on. One of such words is ‘fracking’. While the word is still kept on the fringes of everyday discourse, the process it describes is already pitting citizens against corporate power in North America, Europe, and in Africa.

As the sound of the name suggests, fracking has to do with fracturing. The New American Oxford dictionary defines fracture as “the cracking or breaking of a hard object or material … a crack or break in a hard object or material, typically a bone or a body of rock…the physical appearance of a freshly broken rock or mineral, esp. as regards the shape of the surface.”

Fracking has already raised serious problems in the United States and is being questioned and resisted elsewhere. The nearest flash point is the resistance to Shell in their efforts to engage in fracking in the Karoo, South Africa. The community resistance in South Africa is especially interesting in the sense that Shell has been confronted there by their Nemesis: Ogoni activists displaced by their activities in Nigeria.

In the case of the plan by Shell for fracking in South Africa, they plan to bore holes 5 kilometres down into the belly of the earth in order to extract gas trapped in a layer of shale stones. This is another signal that the age of cheap oil is over.

Fossil fuels are being sought for in increasingly less accessible locations such as deep-water locations and in locations previously considered off limits to extractive activities. As someone said, some of the processes can be likened to a “societal scraping of the barrel.”

This process is not exactly new, as it has been going on in the U.S.A. for decades, according to some records. The causes of current anxieties are primarily two-fold. Companies involved in this business have not released the names and quantities of all the chemicals they use in the fracking processes.

Secondly, the process uses huge amounts of water, a serious concern in a season of water scarcity. After pumping in huge volumes of water, about half of this water is pumped out and the bubbles or gas are removed. The wastewater with all its highly toxic dregs is then disposed of. The question is whether this is handled in a manner that assures of safety.

According to the experts, Shell’s “proposed exploration will apparently entail drilling 8 boreholes in each precinct (i.e. 24 boreholes in total) of up to 5 kilometre depth over a three-year period, extendable to nine years.

It appears that each well will need between 0.3 million and 6 million litres of water (i.e. a scenario of between 7.2 million and 144 million litres of water required). Shell has been extremely vague as to its anticipated source of water, with no concrete indication being given in the draft EMP or in the public consultation meetings as to where the multinational intends to source the requisite water from.”

While some people argue that there are yet to be analyses showing actual water contaminations related to chemicals used in fracking, there are several confirming water contamination due to fracking processes.

For one, some of the chemicals used in the process are known as carcinogens. The US Environmental Protection Agency is examining the potential impacts on drinking water of the various stages in the hydraulic fracturing process. Such stages include when drillers mix water with chemicals and sand and inject the fluid into wells in order to release oil or natural gas.

Some 46 House of Representative Democrats sent a letter to the Secretary of Interior in which they stated, “communities across America have seen their water contaminated by the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process.”

Other concerns over fracking plans have been raised in Canada and France. A report from the Tyndall Centre in the United Kingdom, and an enquiry by the House of Commons, has trailed the fracking business in that country.

The Tyndall Report found a paucity of information on which to base serious analysis “of how shale gas could impact on GHG emissions and what environmental and health impacts its extraction may have; that there is a clear risk of contamination of groundwater from shale gas extraction.”

Fracking folks have enjoyed exclusion from regulation in the USA for years and are very reluctant to accept accountability today. With Barack Obama’s intent to accelerate the weaning of his country from heavy reliance on crude oil imports, the shift to fracking seems good to some investors, irrespective of its highly toxic and water-guzzling nature.

The exportation of that anti-regulation operational latitude to other lands is meeting serious resistance. The people of Karoo are basing their resistance, among other things, on the indelible footprints that Shell’s operations etched into the hearts, veins, and blood of the Ogoni.

The linkage between the Ogoni and the Karoo deserves an applause as ordinary people rise up to ask to know “what the frack is going on” and link hands across political boundaries to globalise the struggle and hope for the security of humankind in a globalised world.

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5691369-146/story.csp

Oil Politics: Gas flaring, hot air and fertilizers

2011-04-09T02:55:00.000-07:00

Last week, Goodluck Jonathan signed what has been described as binding memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with petrochemical companies from Saudi Arabia and India as well as with Chevron, AGIP, and Oando. According to the president, this step signalled the start of a Gas Revolution in Nigeria.

Coming a week before general elections, we cannot fail to note the political undertones in the timing of the launch. Past governments have made pronouncements on their determination to halt the heinous acts of gas flaring over the past decades. These have amounted to nothing but hot air.

Administrative measures to curb the menace started in 1969. Ten years after the initial moves, the 1979 Gas Reinjection decree set 1984 as the essential date when gas flaring became outlawed in Nigeria. However, the penalty for flouting the law was a slap on the wrist to the oil companies so that they continued flaring, poisoning the environment and maiming the people.

The last set dates for ending gas flaring were given by the late Yar'Adua in December 2008. Towards that deadline, Odein Ajumogobia, at that time the minister of state for petroleum, announced that a new flare out formula was being worked out to end gas flaring without hurting government revenue.

When an earlier target date of December 2007 was getting close, the same minister announced that zero gas flare was a moving target.

The gas revolution announced by Mr. Jonathan is replete with figures on how much money would be spent on the various projects, but as far as news reports go, we have seen very little of the volumes of associated gas currently being flared that the projects would take up.

The drums are very loud that foreign direct investments will bring in $10 billion and an aggregate investment of $25 billion over the next three years, with activities in fertilizer production, petrochemicals, and methanol manufacturing.

All these will add up to create about half a million jobs directly and indirectly. But statistics can be colourful, especially when they are of the Nigerian variety.

Except for Chevron, which says it would start by delivering 175 million cubic feet of gas a day "once the pipelines and infrastructure are in place", we don't see concrete gas utilisation figures associated with this revolution.

Undoubtedly, efforts have been made in the past by some oil companies to reduce the amount of gas flared. For example, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Mobil's East Area Natural Gas-to-Liquid (NGL II) project initiated in 2006 was completed ahead of schedule in 2008 and was designed to utilise 950 million standard cubic feet of gas daily.

Chevron also announced that the West African Gas Pipeline project (WAGP) would significantly dent the amount of gas being flared in the oil fields.

It turned out that this was not the case because, according to some estimates, less than 20 per cent of the gas on this pipeline is associated with crude oil production. The bulk of the gas comes from gas fields, rather than oil fields.

As for the oil company AGIP, their notoriety in the area of gas flaring is marked by their seeking to claim carbon credits for utilising some of the gas they have been flaring at Kwale in the face of the fact that the activity has not ceased to be illegal in Nigeria.

The same can be said of Chevron and their claims of the WAGP as well as of other companies such as Pan Ocean, which is making strides towards obtaining carbon credits through this route dotted with ethical and moral questions.

Nigeria's huge gas reserves, easily accessible in new gas fields, have made the stoppage of gas flaring unattractive to an industry that has admittedly taken the act as a routine matter since the 1950s, despite public outcry. Nigeria is said to have proven gas reserves of about 187 trillion cubic feet.

The 2005 estimates by the World Bank indicated that Nigeria flares about 812 billion cubic feet of gas daily. We can argue all we want on whether this figure has increased or reduced with the passage of time.

Oil companies sometimes make curious claims about how much reduction they have achieved in their flaring binge. Some have claimed up to 30 per cent reduction, but the reality on the ground has not backed up such claims.

The gas revolution also has an anchor on the stomach, as marked by the proposed fertiliser plants. Obviously, the existing fertiliser plant in Nigeria has not made a significant dent on supply of the product in the country and this has left the field open for above and below board games.

While launching the gas revolution project, the president declared, "We can only be successful if our actions impact on the common man in Nigeria. The agricultural revolution arising from the fertilizer and blending plants will create affordable food for Nigerians and a lot more for export. The LPG agenda will touch the lives of many households, as cheaper and cleaner LPG displaces kerosene. The disposable income that arises from the savings will result in the purchase of more goods and services, boosting GDP."

Good lecture, Mr. President. However, when it comes to wholesome food provision for the present and in the future, it has been shown that this will come through farmers who cultivate using agro-ecological methods, and will not be dependent on the use of artificial fertilisers that are climate changers and ultimately harm soils and water bodies.

Let the Gas Revolution roll, but let it begin by the release of the figures of associated gas to be used in the project, as well as the schedule for the environmental and other impact assessments for the project.

And, of course, the question remains, Mr. President: when will gas flares be quenched? Do we take that the revolution will begin to snuff some flares out in three years and continue over indeterminate years into the future?

first publisded in NEXT on 31 March 2011
http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/Business/5686350-183/story.csp

The betrayal at Cancun

2011-01-11T13:08:00.000-08:00

OIL POLITICS: The betrayal at Cancun
By Nnimmo Bassey
December 30, 2010 02:02AM
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It was obvious to observers that the climate negotiations at Cancun were wired to support commerce rather than tackling the climate crisis that the world is confronted with. This trend took solid steps a year earlier at the summit in Copenhagen when a handful of nations sidestepped the multilateral tradition of the United Nations and working through “green rooms” away from the conference floor concocted the so-called Copenhagen Accord instead.

The Copenhagen Accord could not be adopted at the end of the 2009 conference for the basic reason that majority of country delegations did not know how it was crafted and on what basis. Countries like Bolivia and Venezuela stood resolutely against it and that conference only agreed to take note that such a document existed.

The fact that the Accord was not adopted as a conference outcome did not deter its authors, principally the United States, from working behind the scenes, bilaterally, to get several countries to endorse it. Some analysts have said that the endorsement was achieved through arm-twisting tactics and promises of financial and other aids. Those who refused to yield were sanctioned by way of having climate or environment assistance cut.

From the beginning of the Cancun negotiations, signals were sent that its essence was to elevate the Copenhagen Accord to the level of being the conference outcome. The first salvo was fired by the delegation of Papua New Guinea who declared that a few nations with divergent votes from the majority must not prevent the conference from reaching a decision. They suggested that if a consensus became impossible a decision should be made by a vote. This position, as noted in an earlier article on Cancun, was immediately objected to by the delegations of Bolivia, India, Saudi Arabia and others.

At the end of the Cancun summit, with the Copenhagen Accord now dressed in new garbs, there was no consensus for its adoption. Not to be deterred, the Mexican presidency of the conference banged the gavel repeatedly on her table and rammed the document through, after redefining consensus as not necessarily meaning unanimity.

Empty promises

Nations yelped and cheered. Cancun had delivered; they enthused and backslapped each other. But what did Cancun deliver and how will the planet fare under the scenario set by what has been termed Copenhagen Accord 2?

The conference outcome avoided legally binding emissions reduction targets for the main polluting nations - the rich industrialised countries - and rather urges a voluntary pledge based system with no monitoring mechanisms. From recent WikiLeaks regarding discussions in France, it is clear that the rich countries are determined not to make binding commitments to act for the safety of the planet.

Looking for something to celebrate, some countries latched on the promise to create a Climate Fund within the United Nations climate change framework but having the World Bank as a trustee. The promised climate fund did not specify how the funds would be sourced.

The agreement did not review subsisting intellectual property regime that does not freely allow the exchange of green technology. It took big steps in paving the way for new market based mechanisms that would allow for speculation and avoidance of actions to reduce emissions at source and generally position the planet at great risks of catastrophic climate change.

Teresa Andersen of the Gaia Foundation, who wrote about the manner the Cancun conference ended, captures the disbelief of critical observers:

“We sat in disbelief as the crowds leapt to their feet, cheering, applauding, whooping and whistling the Mexican chair of the Cancun climate negotiations. Mexico’s foreign secretary, Patricia Espinosa, graciously bowed her head, her hands crossed over her heart in an authoritarian simulation of modesty, as we shook our heads, open-mouthed, at the eerie frenzy taking place around us. In the last hours of the Cancun climate negotiations, the world’s deluded leaders were cheering as they tossed the planet onto the bonfire.

According to Teresa, “The Cancun Agreement, we are told, has “saved multilateralism”. What it has not done though, is offer any meaningful solution to climate change. As it stands, the Cancun Agreement could mean global temperature rises of up to 5 degrees centigrade, and a possible 6.5 degrees in Africa.”

An initial analysis of the Cancun outcome by Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) saw the prospects of opening new market mechanisms as potentially creating practices that are more harmful to the climate than current ones.

According to FoEI, “the establishment of one or more market-based mechanisms over the course of the next year is to be considered, with a view to taking a decision to adopt these new mechanisms at COP 17 in South Africa. The new mechanisms could include a number of different types of instruments, some of which would be more destructive than others.”

Little gains

All was not lost in Cancun. Social movements pushed the path of climate justice in various venues in Cancun. The government of Bolivia, which had facilitated a Peoples Conference on climate change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April 2010, stood with the people, pushing the right analysis and solutions, right to the end of the conference.

Social and climate justice movements clearly stated that the causes of climate change are systemic and that the only way to tackle the climate crisis is through a change of the capitalist and patriarchal system that caused it.

With the clear indication that rich nations are not keen to tackle climate change, but would rather make bogus promises that poor vulnerable nations unfortunately lap up, it is doubtful if the 2011 conference to be hosted in Durban, South Africa, will produce anything different from Copenhagen and Cancun.

The South African government has dubbed COP17 the Peoples COP. It will be seen whether the voices of the people will prevail or if corporations and their surrogate politicians will hold sway in their market-based chariots.

First published at http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/Business/5659373-147/oil_politics_the_betrayal_at_cancun.csp

A tribunal for climate criminals

2010-12-11T08:59:00.000-08:00

I stand before you today, not just as an individual but also as a representative of suffering peoples in the oil fields of Nigeria and in oil fields around the world. I stand before you, representing peoples oppressed and devastated by the unyielding claws of mineral and other resource extracting companies in the backwaters of the world. They are often faceless. But today, in all humility, I stand to salute their courage and to declare that the recognition of my struggles by the Right Livelihood Award is a clear recognition of the just cause of the resistance of the marginalised peoples who subsidise the world’s insatiable lust for fossil fuels with their own blood and at the cost of their environment and means of livelihood.

I stand on the shoulders of the heroes of the struggles and recall at this time a very striking stanza of the National Anthem of my country Nigeria, which says, “The labours of our heroes past shall never be in vain.” I salute the courage of Ken Saro-Wiwa and all other heroes who toed the non-violent resistance path and laid down their lives in the process. Their labours shall indeed not be in vain.

With about 60% of the world’s crude oil reserves already exhausted it is stunning to see policy makers believing they can run into eternity on less than half tank. The search for crude oil and other fossil fuels has meant increasing focus on fragile ecosystems including offshore locations, nature reserves and other protected territories.

While UNFCCC gathers the nations of the world to talk about how to tackle climate change, the real structural causes are skirted and unacknowledged. With the world running on the machines of competition and massive consumption, it is clear that we need more than one planet earth to meet humankind’s appetites. It is also clear that for current levels of extraction, accumulation and consumption, ethics have to be overthrown and impunity must be enthroned. It could not be otherwise because as the world seeks cheap energy, someone has to pay for it. With regard to the fossil fuel sector, those paying the price for others to enjoy are the communities on whose territories oil is found, the degraded environments and of course the global atmosphere.

Last year the Copenhagen climate conference ended up with an Accord that was more like a cord lashed across bent backs of poor countries. Indeed many were pressured to sign up or lose financial support. What will Cancun throw up? We wait to see.
The drive to produce more and consume more continues to promote the release of more carbon into the atmosphere, leading to the climate crisis that the world is confronted with.

The struggle to wean the world of crude oil addiction has taken many forms and shapes. Recent milestones include the expulsion of Shell from Ogoni land in 1993 to the Yasuni ITT in Ecuador where the government has proposed to leave the oil in the soil in exchange for halve the value of the oil. In Africa, a growing movement of community activists are demanding that new oil be left in the soil to avoid the sort of scandalous environmental pollution and violent conflicts that the oil industry has hatched in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. This demand is also being made, as a direct pointer to the way climate change must be fought: cutting emissions at source, and sequestering the carbon where Mother Earth left it.

The world was awakened to the polluting propensity of the oil industry by the Deepwater Horizon explosion and accompanying spill in April 2010. The massive scale of the accident and the attendant media focus made it impossible for the responsible corporation to shirk responsibility. Contrast that with the case of the Niger Delta where Shell claims that an incredible 98% of the pollution is caused by third parties, principally local peoples.

The game of blaming the victim has been the style of the oil multinationals operating in places such as the Niger Delta. And such blames have not always ended in the mass media, some have led many to gross violence that have taken the lives of several people and sometimes the decimation of communities.

Climate crimes, environmental pollution and other acts of impunity will not end as long as people believe that they can assault Mother Earth and escape accountability. The preservation of the planet and the enjoyment of fundamental human as well as socio-economic rights will not be attainable until and unless the rights of Mother Earth are respected.

It is with this understanding that we applaud Ecuador for having already enshrined the Rights of Mother Earth in their constitution. At the moment, a proposal is before the United Nations to bring into existence the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Such rights would not be easy to attain in a world where relations are built or destroyed on the altar of competition and rapacious exploitation. It will take a change of heart on the part of humans to understand that just as we have rights, so does the Earth. Sustainable development will remain a mere phrase as long as people see sustainability as merely relevant to keeping their profit margins on the rise.

It is time for a global recognition that any harm inflicted on the planet directly corresponds to throwing the future of every inhabitant of the planet into jeopardy. Climate change is a clear manifestation of what can happen when a mode of civilisation is driven by factors that are clearly destructive. The fossil fuels driven civilisation has driven humanity to the brink, often termed the tipping point – with regard to the climate crisis.

The time has come for action to be taken to reverse the trend. The time has come for the world to look away from the carbon driven development path and its governing mentality. It is time to end carbon offsetting and carbon speculations as solutions to climate change. We have to see trees for what they are and not pretend that they are nothing more than carbon stocks.

The false solutions being paraded at the conference of the parties to the UNFCCC can get as shocking as when organised climate crimes are rewarded with carbon credits and cash. An insulting example is one where the World Bank plans to extend support through the carbon trade route to gas flare projects in the Niger Delta. The unethical base of this scam can be seen in the fact that gas flaring has been an illegal act in Nigeria since 1984 and there is no way the halting of an illegal activity should earn carbon credits. Except if the entire carbon trade bazaar is a scam.

It is time to say no to the pretence that agrofuels can replace fossil fuels or that they are renewable and green when it is clear that they are not. The focus on agrofuels has led to massive land grabs in Africa. This has meant marginalisation of the poor, pressures on food supplies, diversion of land from food crop production, deforestation and abuse of human rights to mention just a few. It has also been seen by the biotech industry as a crack in the door allowing them to introduce genetically engineered crops where such would ordinarily be resisted and rejected.

It is time to establish an international climate crimes tribunal as proposed by the Peoples Agreement drawn up in April 2010 at Cochabamba, Bolivia. Such a tribunal would function in a way comparable to the international court of justice where crimes against humanity are tried. The climate crimes tribunal would try any sort of environmental crime that harms mother earth and thus the right of people to a safe environment. These would be seen as crimes against humanity. Culprits to be tried would include polluters such as those in the extractive industry. It would put corporations as well as their directors in the dock for climate/environmental crimes, which are in effect crimes against humanity.

Permit me at this point to remember a man who fought courageously against environmental damage by a dangerous machinery of state and corporation. Ken Saro-Wiwa (a RLA1994 laureate) stood for non-violent resistance to erosion of environmental rights and socio-political justice. Although he lost his life at the hands of undemocratic forces, the path he charted remains the only viable option out of the Niger Delta quagmire. I salute the courage of all those who toe this path for the resolution of conflicts. I salute the suffering communities and peoples resisting destructive extraction. It is their courage that sustains our struggle. In solidarity we march ahead and will not give up.

- Nnimmo Bassey
December 6, 2010, Swedish Parliament (on receipt of the Right Livelihood Award)

The Amnesty Worked

2010-12-08T15:32:00.000-08:00

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/5651531-183/oil_politics_the_amnesty_worked_.csp
From Oil Politics: NEXT Newspaper, Lagos

The Amnesty worked

By Nnimmo Bassey

December 8, 2010 10:48PMT

The rise of crude oil price in the market raises hope of boom time for producers of the resource and fears of high-energy costs for others. Price thresholds above $80 per barrel also make investment in some forms of energy such as agrofuels appear attractive. For Nigeria, as the price of crude inches up, so must the gobblers of so-called excess crude funds be getting ready for the kill.

As the major supplier of government revenue, the crude oil price rise must be accompanied by increase in production to ensure maximum benefit to the government and the oil corporations. This would mean keeping all oil wells pumping at full throttle. It would also mean ensuring that peace reigns in the oil fields, even if it means exerting maximum firepower in search of a handful of renegade post-amnesty militants.

The popular spaces in Cancun began to fill up over the last weekend, even as the climate talks got ready for the home stretch. The environmental justice movement believes rightly that fossil fuels must be left in the ground, as their use is responsible for the release of much of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Leaving the fossil fuels in the soil would translate less pollutions and less toxic compounds in the environment. It would also mean rapidly transiting to renewable or less harmful energy sources and into a post carbon civilisation.

Negotiators in the climate talks are not listening to the clarion call to leave the fossil fuels in the soil. What is music to their ears, however, is how the carbon that is released when the fossil fuels are used can be captured and stored. No, they are not exactly debating the best technologies that can achieve this. So, what is on the table?

Climate negotiators are seeking to make carbon capture and storage projects eligible for carbon credits. Technologies for capturing and storing carbon are far from being ready for implementation at the moment. There are also issues over costs as well as doubts over their effectiveness. However, leaving the fossil fuels in the soil is undoubtedly effective carbon capture and storage. This option does not require technology transfer. Neither does it require any capital outlay.

Challenging the reckless nature of the oil industry, I was privileged to join a team of nature defenders to institute a case in the constitutional court of Ecuador against BP for their reckless activities and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The case opens a unique way for holding corporations and individuals accountable for their acts anywhere in the world. It is also a direct action in tackling climate change. Two of the key demands of the case is that BP should leave as much oil as they have spilled in the ground and should stop deep water activities.

Will the world’s addiction to crude oil allow the voice of reason to prevail? Will the climate negotiators pause to review all the false solutions plastered on the negotiating texts by corporate interests fuelled by greed as well as the creed that the market hold the solution to every problem?

Assaults in the creeks

While the price of crude oil increases and yields more revenue to both the government and the oil companies, the environmental and social impacts are still externalised to the poor communities. To ensure that oil must flow at all costs, it does not appear to matter how much human bloodletting happens in the process.

Over the years, conflicts have been orchestrated in the Niger Delta - and indeed other parts of Nigeria - either for economic reasons or for political ones. When the late President Yar’Adua announced an amnesty for the armed groups in the oil fields, popularly known as militants, critics doubted that the amnesty would work. Others simply prayed that it would work. And it did.

The amnesty programme had some foundational problems because of the nature of the conflicts on the ground. Usually, combats involve taking of territories or for political supremacy. The fights in the Niger Delta is not one for territorial control, neither is it for political power. It can be, and has been interpreted, as largely opportunistic and as means for capital accumulation.

However, it must again be stated that some sense of political disenchantment is also discernible. In all the expressions, the environment continues to suffer; the local communities continue to be carpeted through ground, sea, and air bombardments.

We remember what happened to Gbaramatu Kingdom in May 2009. After the assault, 3000 women with their kids became refugees for months at a health facility in Ogbe Ijoh. Now, with the latest levelling of Ayakoromor community, Delta State, the same health facility has again become home for displaced local people. That health facility is a clear metaphor for the jaundiced development efforts in the region. If it were functioning as a hospital, as it was designed, would it readily turn into a refugee camp?

The resumption of open hostilities says something about the amnesty programme. That scheme was built on mostly accumulated military hardware and personnel in the Niger Delta, and spending a tiny fraction of the overall budget on training and reintegration of repentant militants.

Reports have shown that many youth who requested to be trained and rehabilitated could not be taken on because of some quota system that had already established a ceiling as to how many could be trained. According to Dutch media reports, companies such as Shell have hired some of the retrained militants as welders and fitters. That also tells a story on its own.

But the real issue of deep environmental pollution is yet to be tackled and unless the environment is safe for local people to return to their normal means of livelihood, any declared amnesty is a smokescreen and is bound to blow up in smoke. However, when all is considered, we can submit that the current amnesty has worked beyond what it was designed to achieve.

Historic Moment in the defence of the Rights of Nature

2010-12-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

(Jointly prepared statement)

Quito, Ecuador, 26 November 2010.

A historic case was filed by an international coalition of defenders of nature’s rights at the Constitutional court of Ecuador against BP and its crimes against nature. Ecuador recognises the rights of nature in its current constitution adopted in 2008. The rights of nature are universal. This provides the fundamental basis for this legal case.

The case was brought with regard to the massive environmental disaster caused when BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, 2010. That incident exposed BP’s drive to maximise profit with total disregard of nature and its rights. The company constantly lied with regard to the scale of the disaster and toped this up by using unusually high amounts of toxic chemical dispersants to cover up the spill. This disaster was not limited to the Gulf Coast but has wider reach through the movement of water as well as atmospheric pollutions.

The defenders of nature are not seeking financial compensation since the harm done to nature cannot be compensated for in monetary terms. Some of the key demands in the case include that BP should release all data and information on the ecological destruction caused by the oil spill. Another demand is that they should also to refrain from extracting as much oil underground as they spilled in the Gulf of Mexico incident.

Besides this case the activists called for support for the Yasuni ITT proposal of the Ecuadorian government to leave the oil in that sensitive ecosystem underground. They also urged the US government to extend the moratorium on offshore oil drilling.
Speaking after filing the case, the defenders of nature insisted that phasing out crude oil as a major energy source should be an issue of critical importance at the climate conference in Cancun. It is the key way to phase out the current carbon economy, tackle climate change and halt the forces that are driving the current global crises.

The case was jointly filed by

1. Vandana Shiva, (eco-feminist and winner of the1993 Right Livelihood Award, considered the Alternative Nobel Prize)
2. Nnimmo Bassey (Friends of the Earth Nigeria and Coordinator of Oilwatch international and 2010 laureate of the Right Livelihood Award)
3. Delfín Tenesaca (President of ECUARUNARI, indigenous Andean ecuadorean organisation)
4. Blanca Chancoso (ecuadorean indigenous leader)
5. Líder Góngora (representative of the ancestral peoples of Mangroves)
6. Alberto Acosta (Ex President of the Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador)
7. Ana Luz Valdéz (representative of social movements from Chiapas, México)
8. Diana Murcia (Colombian human rights lawyer) and
9. Cecilia Chérrez (President of Acción Ecológica, Ecuador)

Can Cancun Deliver the Climate Promise?

2010-12-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

Going by the heavy traffic jams of the first day of the Climate Conference here in Cancun, one would not have been wrong to assert that the venue of the climate conference may have been selected principally to deter participation. Many observers endured hours of tortuous crawl on the lone expressway that leads to the venue due to blockages and diversions created by security forces. The traffic jam disappeared from day 2. Happily.

At the opening session of the conference of the parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), president Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa of Mexico stated that the world must embark on the pursuit of “green development” and “green economy” as the path to sustainable development. The president also stated that some of the steps to be taken to attain this ideal include progress on the negotiations on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) as well as development of technologies to reduce fuel emission. Another key point was that the financing of sustainable development should start with support for the poorest and the most vulnerable countries.

These were nice words but contentious ideas, according to civil society analysts. There are several red flags and concerns about REDD by indigenous groups and forest dependent peoples as well as mass social movements across the world. The idea of canvassing the extension of financial assistance to the poorest and the most vulnerable countries is also seen by critics as a possible way dividing those same nations and making them pliable to suggestions and decisions that may actually be contrary to their best interests.

Even before the Cancun conference opened there were concerns that efforts may already be afoot to rig the outcome, as was the case in Copenhagen in 2009. One concern is about the process that produced a text for negotiation that is emanating from the chair of one of the working groups. Another concern has arisen from a decision of the Mexican president to invite selected heads of states to the conference. The list is not openly available, but already it is becoming clear that some uninvited presidents intend to be in Cancun.

When the time came for delegates to speak, Papua New Guinea (PNG) suggested that where there is no consensus, decision should be made by voting. He referred to the rejection of the Copenhagen Accord at COP15 and subsequent signing on by 140 countries, implying that if there were a vote, probably the Accord would have been formally adopted. The delegate’s position was that only a small minority of states were holding others hostage. The suggestion by PNG was promptly opposed by Bolivia, India and Saudi Arabia among other states. They insisted that consensus must be maintained as a way to reach decisions.

The Copenhagen conference began and ended under a cloud of doubts and perceived undemocratic actions. At that meeting many delegations from developing and vulnerable nations believed that drafts of what would be the final outcome document were being discussed and circulated within privileged circles away from the standard practice where such negotiations took place on the open conference floor.

Many delegates in Cancun hope that Cancun will take a transparent pathway. In Copenhagen there was a steady flow of leaked documents allegedly prepared by the president of the COP. Already in Cancun there are concerns over draft text prepared by the chair of the ad hoc working group on Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) without due mandate of the Parties. The other major working group under the COP is the one that deals with the Kyoto Protocol and another text is being expected from the chair of that working group also possibly without a mandate from the working group.

The year between conferences is spent in technical negotiations and preparations during which delegations review texts prepared by chairpersons of the working groups on the basis of the submissions made by the delegations or members. This year has seen three such meetings before Cancun: two in Bonn and one in Tianjin, China.

The draft text circulated by the chair of the LCA appears to be anchored on the Copenhagen Accord and puts forward the ambition that may lead to an aggregate global temperature increase of up to 2 degrees Celsius as opposed to proposals made by a number of delegations that the target should be between 1 degree and 1.5 degrees temperature rise above pre-industrial levels. A 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase would mean catastrophic alteration to some parts of the world with Africa being particularly vulnerable. This is at variance with progress made in the preparatory negotiations.

A coalition of civil society groups complained about the text from the chair of the LCA and also raised concerns about “the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, where the Chair of that track intends to propose his own text that will postpone adoption of legally binding emission reductions targets by the developed countries in Cancun, risks the expansion of accounting loopholes and replaces a legally-binding system with a voluntary pledge-based approach reflected in the Copenhagen Accord.”

The first day of a conference may not be the right time to predict what the outcome would be after two weeks of talks. Nevertheless, questions are already being raised over what Cancun can deliver.

Welcome!

2010-12-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

Dear People

Events are unfolding so rapidly in the world today. We are so engrossed with fighting fires daily and we do not have time to see the bigger challenges advancing towards us, towards Mother Earth.

Let's walk together on these pages, fighting fires, yet looking at the bigger picture, building our common future!

Welcome.

Nnimmo