… As Strange Diseases, High Death Rate Ravage Communities
Kelechi Esogwa-Amadi
The politics surrounding the Ogoni Clean-up exercise is taking a frightening dimension as the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP), the Federal Ministry of Environment’s agency handling the project, appears to be pursuing its own selfish agenda, thereby toying with the lives of members of the oil producing communities of Ogoni Land.
From all indications, HYPREP, by its conduct so far, has abandoned the recommendations of the United Nations Environmental Protection (UNEP) report.
For instance, the report recommended the establishment of an integrated management centre and provision of an alternative water scheme as an emergency measure, given the contamination of all freshwater streams in the area.
Also, the report recommended the establishment of a health care management centre to tackle the health challenges of the people of Ogoni, most of whose health conditions have deteriorated because of the contaminated water and polluted environment caused by the oil spill.
TPCN gathered that HYPREP has not bothered to implement any of these recommendations, yet it has commenced moves to award clean-up contracts, a development that is not going down well with the people of Ogoni Land.
As long as the people are concerned, how to stop the frequent deaths being recorded in their various communities due to the outbreak of strange diseases caused by their polluted environment and contaminated water should have been more paramount to HYPREP than the award of clean-up contract.
They are disappointed that rather than establish alternative water scheme and health care management centre to save them from strange diseases and premature death, HYPREP is busy looking for ways to spend clean-up funds.
Already, stakeholders in the area are complaining bitterly over what they see as the politicization of the clean-up programme and gradual extermination of Ogoni people through neglect and exposure to the destructive environmental hazards and strange diseases.
In a phone chat with TPCN yesterday, the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Fegalo Nsuke, expressed disappointment that HYPREP has abandoned the needful to only concentrate on the award of contracts for the oil spill clean-up.
“HYPREP is only desperate to spend the clean-up fund without thinking of the lives of the people,” he said.
Lamenting further, Nsuke said that HYPREP had already spent the ten million dollars ($10,000,000) paid into the clean-up fund by Shell, the oil company responsible for the pollution of Ogoni Land.
Confirming the high death rate in Ogoni Land, the MOSOP spokesman said that between fifty to sixty people die weekly in such communities as Bomu, Bodo, B-Dere, among others, due to strange diseases caused by their contaminated water and polluted environment.
On what he thinks is the solution to the strange diseases and high death rate destroying Ogoni communities, Nsuke said that HYPREP should, without further delay, provide an alternative water scheme and establish a health care management centre for the menace.
When TPCN called HYPREP GSM line, a man picked but said he lives in Warri and does not work with the HYPREP, adding that he does not know how his number found its way in the agency’s website.
