Nigeria’s foremost environmental rights advocacy group, Environmental Rights Action (ERA) says divestment is a major issue in the Niger Delta, the main oil and gas basin of Nigeria.
ERA also doubles as the country’s wing of Friends of the Earth (FoEN), a global federation of environmental rights advocacy groups.
Executive Director of ERA, Chima Williams, a lawyer, says it is a fact that divestment has become a major issue as the oil majors abandon their toxic onshore facilities and go offshore where they evade monitoring.
The environmental rights activist explains that the exclusion of communities and community concerns in the divestment discourse motivated ERA/FoEN to facilitate the dialogue.
Stakeholders in the vastly polluted oil region have however, faulted the reasons advanced by International Oil Companies (IOCs) divesting from onshore assets in preference for offshore fields.
They said that the divestment move by IOC was contrary to the energy transition advocacy to renewable energy sources and a ploy to evade development obligations and responsibility for polluting the area.
They urged the federal government to compel IOCs operating in the region to honour the Memorandum of Understandings (MoU), Global Memorandum of Understandings (GMoUs) and other agreements entered with communities.
These were contained in a communique issued after a one day “Community Dialogue on Unmasking the Motives of IOCs Divestment in the Niger Delta”
The forum which was facilitated by ERA/FoEN, was held in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital.
They argued that while global divestment advocacy was driven by the quest for cleaner energy sources, the same cannot be said of IOCs who are merely abandoning polluted sites to deep sea fields to escape scrutiny on the operations.
According to the stakeholders, the call became imperative following the divestment by the IOCs who have abdicated their social obligations to their host communities spelt out in the MoU and GMOU.
Oil community leaders, youth and women leaders, academia, environmental and rights activists and the media participated in the forum.
They held that “there is a need for a better understanding and deepened community engagements on the global environmental justice and community definitions of divestments vis-a-vis the model of the IOCs in the Niger Delta.”
They observed that community people of all classes have suffered exclusion in the divestment process, noting that the divestment process has largely weakened local struggles for environmental justice, divide communities.
The stakeholders noted that there was the need to integrate the communities to make them the central focus of the ongoing divestment process.
“There is complicit silence by the Nigerian state and the regulatory agencies as IOCs dictate the terms of divestment.
“The decision making on the divestment process and other matters relevant to the local communities in the Niger Delta and the IOCs and Nigerians government have excluded the communities.
“There is the need for the IOCs to decommission their toxic assets and carry out remedial actions monitored by independent bodies and civil societies in the communities.
“Need for de-militarization of the Niger Delta communities that are legitimately agitating for a safe environment for their development.
“The oil and gas companies in Nigeria should be held liable for nearly six decades of ecocide in the Niger Delta as precursor to remedial actions and compensation.
“Divesting from abandoned toxic assets, and complex problematic relationships with communities that the Domestic Oil Companies, (DOCs), have inherited and continued to perpetrate.
“DOCs have inherited and continued the tradition of impunity and lack of accountability to local communities.” The communique read in part.
Prof Teddy Adias, Vice Chancellor of Federal University in Otuoke, Bayelsa and Prof Sofiri Joab-Peterside, Sociology lecturer at University of Port Harcourt shared their perspectives on divestment to lay foundations for the dialogue.
