By Ike Okont
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!My first close encounter with Senator Duoye Diri, governor of Bayelsa State, was on 30th October 2024 at the Ladi Kwali Conference Centre, Abuja Continental Hotel, in Abuja. The occasion was the international conference on Petroleum Pollution And Just Transition In the Niger Delta and the public presentation of the book, “An Environmental Genocide: The Human And Environmental Cost Of Big Oil In Bayelsa, Nigeria” authored by members of the Bayelsa State Oil And Environmental Commission (BSOEC) City & Local Guides.
The Bayelsa State government had established the commission to take a hard look at the effects of oil production on the environment of the state’s towns and villages and come up with hard evidence and recommendations of remediation. Members of the Commission – Professor Michael Watts, Kathryn Nwajiaku, Anna Zalik, and Isaac Osuoka, among others, had flown into Abuja from all parts of the world. They are all long-standing friends and colleagues of mine, and I had also flown in from the University of Oxford where I was teaching at the time at their invitation to witness the important event.
Ladi Kwali Conference Centre was packed that October morning. Governor Duoye Diri walked into the hall at exactly 9am, followed by a retinue of aides. Also in the hall was his predecessor in office, Senator Henry Seriake Dickson. When he was called to the rostrum, it was a sober Governor Diri that faced the audience. Missing was his trade-mark smile. It was clear that he had grim news. Yet, when he began to speak, his voice was calm and measured. “What we are facing in Bayelsa State,’’ he said, “is an environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions.’’
The book, “An Environmental Genocide” is a searing account of irresponsible exploration and production of oil in Bayelsa State by the big oil companies licensed to operate in the country. Oil spills into the farmlands and fishing rivers of local communities, gas flaring falling back into villages as acid rain, creeks and mangrove swamps thoroughly depleted – the lens of the report focussed unwaveringly on these sundry ecological devastations and stated that workers in the big oil companies displayed total contempt towards the local people and their fragile environment and should be made to account for this tragedy.
Governor Diri spoke in a similar vein that morning in Abuja. He argued that a greater but unhidden tragedy was the fact that local people in Bayelsa State had been consuming fishes and food crops contaminated by oil pollution for decades and that these people come down with all manner of strange and uncurable diseases as a consequence. Governor Diri further argued it was not simply enough to investigate ecological atrocities and write a report, but that his government was exploring the possibility of resorting to judicial action to bring justice to his beleaguered people. On his return to Yenagoa after the conference, Governor Diri has since turned into a vocal apostle of ecological responsibility, making his office and his time available to environmental activists who are working to restore Bayelsa State and the wider Niger Delta to environmental health. City & Local Guides
It is important to state at this point that Governor Duoye Diri’s stance is not only uncommon; it is very brave. The tragic norm in the oil-producing states of the Niger Delta is for the governors and other elected politicians to stridently condemn the activities of the big oil companies when campaigning for office and then to make a complete u-turn when elected and actually join in perpetuating this tragedy in return for financial inducement. Oil-related environmental devastation persists in the Niger Delta because elected politicians allow this to be so. Governor Diri is cut from a different cloth, however. He knows that his home state of Bayelsa is bleeding, ecologically speaking, and he is anxious to staunch this blood-flow.
Members of the Bayelsa State Oil And Environmental Commission (BSOEC) returned to Yenagoa last June as part of their quest to advance the recommendations of the report and as usual Duoye Diri was on hand to receive them. Done with their visit, the members journeyed to various ecologically impacted sites and also listened to local people who were anxious to unburden themselves and narrate their ordeals at the hands of workers of the oil companies. Some of them reported that following the publication of “An Environmental Genocide” oil workers had come to their communities to taunt them and even warn them to desist from talking to ‘meddling outsiders.’’
This author had a similar experience in 2001. Oronto Douglas, the late environmentalist and human rights lawyer and I had written a book titled “Where Vultures Feast,” depicting the ecological carnage all over the Niger Delta as a result of oil production. The book was first published by Sierra Club Books, the biggest environmental pressure group in the United States. As soon as the book was out Oronto Douglas and I began to receive anonymous telephone calls, warning us to withdraw the book from bookshops or face the consequence. Of course we ignored the cowardly threat. Our book is still available all over the world, and is a regularly recommended text in American and European universities as a witness to what Big Oil does to unprotected people.
Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight were not so lucky. Oil had been produced in Ogoniland since 1958, putting billions of dollars into the coffers of the oil companies and the Nigerian government. What the Ogoni people got in return was a devastated environment and crushing poverty. It was this unfair state of things that Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders set up the Movement for the Survival Of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in 1990 to address. They faced instant opposition from Nigeria’s leaders and the oil companies who came together to devise a plan to destabilise MOSOP from within and also unsettle Ken Saro-Wiwa, its leader. By 1995 Saro-Wiwa and eight of his compatriots were dead and Ogoniland in ruins. Africans& Diaspora.
It is therefore important that we situate Governor Duoye Diri’s uncommon bravery in its wider national context. There are powerful Nigerians who are perfectly satisfied with the present state of affairs in Bayelsa State and the wider Niger Delta. As long as the big oil companies and the Federal Government continue to allocate to them lucrative oil blocks from which they make millions of dollars every year, they are happy to let the environmental carnage in the Niger Delta continue, and they would not hesitate to move against anyone, governor or not, who wants to return the beleaguered region to ecological sanity.
That is why it is important that Governor Duoye Diri be supported in his stance by environmental and human rights campaigners in Nigeria and indeed worldwide. Governor Diri’s fight is the people of the Niger Delta’s fight. It is Africa’s fight. It is the world’s fight, still grappling with the increasing impact of oil-induced climate change.
*Dr Okonta was until recently Leverhulme Career Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Oxford. He now lives in Abuja.
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