IJAW leader and a delegate at the ongoing national conference, Chief Edwin Clark, has raised the alarm over possible extinction of the Niger Delta region if something urgent is not done to address the environmental degradation of the region.
He spoke in Abuja during the debate on the report of the committee on environment on Monday.
This is even as a Federal Government’s delegate to the national conference, Annkio Briggs, said the cleanup of the Niger-Delta region would require $1trillion.
Chief Clark had spoken strongly about the untold hardship of the people living along the coastlines, while he further warned that something holistic was needed in order to minimise the biting effects of environmental degradation in the region.
He took delegates through the memory lane and concluding that there was nothing new in the report of the conference committee on environment.
He said the United Nations had, in 2011, submitted a report to the Federal Government, where it stated that it would take 30 years to clean up the oil spills in the Niger Delta.
Clark said the report recommended that $20 billion was needed to clean up the mess, lamenting that it took the Federal Government two years to set up a committee to consider the report.
The elder-statesman said it was not enough to come up with reports, adding that political will power was needed in order to implement their outcomes.
Clark further warned that soon, the region might cease to exist.
He told delegates to look beyond what the country got from the region, but to examine the effect the degradation oil exploration had caused in the region.
“Our environment has been polluted. We sit on top of water in the Niger Delta, yet we do not have water. When I was small, we used to put a calabash outside and fishes would jump in. Now, my people eat ice fish. There are no more farmlands, no fruits. We have lost everything in the Niger Delta,” he said.
Briggs, in her contribution, called on the Federal Government to commence the process of cleanup of the Niger-Delta with initial budget of $1 trillion.
She noted that what was happening in Niger Delta was destruction caused by environmental pollution and degradation as a result of gas flaring and oil spillage.
Chairman of the conference, Idris Kutigi, however, diffused the controversy that would have cropped up over comments on resource control as contained in the report.
Following remarks by Briggs that she supported the recommendation for resource control, a delegate from the North, Haruna Yerima, raised a point of order for Kutigi to allow the chairman of the committee on environment define what the committee meant by resource democracy.
But Kutigi, sensing that the discussion would generate trouble, asked Haruna Yerima to meet the committee chairman after the plenary for more explanation.
A delegate from Benue State, Dr Magdalene Dura, supported the recommendation for the creation of Environmental Restoration Agency to take care of the serious impact of environmental degradation in the country.
Meanwhile, the national conference has set July 7 to 10 for the consideration of the draft report, according to the modified work-plan of the conference.
This followed the approval by the Federal Government for an extension of the ongoing national conference by four weeks.
The work-plan made available to delegates on Monday and obtained by the Nigerian Tribune, indicated that the conference would be winded up on July 17.
Accordingly, the drafting of the report would be done in one week from June 27 to July 4.
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