Keynote address delivered by Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), at the 3rd Niger Delta Climate Conference held at Port Harcourt, River State, Nigeria, on Tuesday, July 8, 2025
When we speak of building a resilient future, we have to look at the environment in which we live and examine the state of that environment. What are the living conditions for humans and other beings that we share the planet with? The Niger Delta is a deeply polluted environment, a deeply degraded territory, one of the worst polluted places on the planet.
Researches have confirmed this sad reality. The Environmental Assessment of Ogoni land issued by United Nations Environment Program in 2021 clearly shows the desperate pollution of Ogoni land – the land, the water, and the air. In some places, hydrocarbons have penetrated the soil up to 5 meters. By the time the cleanup started, pollution had sunk as deep as 10 meters.
In 2023 the Bayesian State Oil and Environment Commission, issued a report entitled An Environmental Genocide, Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria. Now, when we speak of environmental genocide, we have to understand this by looking at what genocide itself means. Genocide is an intentional attack and annihilation of a people, ethnic cleansing. An environmental genocide can also be termed ecocide. It happens when there’s an intentional and persistent destruction of a particular environment, as has been the case of the Niger Delta over the last 68 years.
The Niger Delta is a territory that the inhabitants are literally the living dead due to horrific environmental degradation. Consider Bayelsa State that has 40% of mangrove forests gone and there is a 1.5 barrels of crude oil spilled per capita. Imagine that about 14 million cubic meters of natural gas is flared every day at 17 facilities in Bayelsa State alone releasing toxic elements into the air and causing cancers, breathing illnesses and acid rain.
Oil related contaminants such as chromium are present in groundwater at a level 1000 times beyond the World Health Organization limit, and then shockingly, total petroleum hydrocarbons exceed safe levels by a factor of 1 million. Think about that.
Now our topic is on building a resilient future. What is resilience? Other words for resilience could be toughness, strength, tenacity, power, persistence. Now, when you are resilient, it doesn’t mean you are tough to receive any kind of beating. That’s not resiliency, just being helpless, but strong.
No, resilience is a situation where you overcome hazards, where your vulnerability is removed, and disasters are not the norm. It’s a situation where what you lost is restored and what was damaged is paid for. To build an excellent future, we have to map that future. We have to change our imaginaries.We have to determine what the future would look like and then we build towards attaining that future. We need to be passionate about this. We need to be conscious of where we are, and act to get to where we want to be.
We are considering building a resilient future by integrating climate action and community empowerment. Now, what are the key climate actions that are being taken globally today. One is adaptation, and second is mitigation.
Simply put, adaptation means adapting to changing situations, making accommodation with what is coming at you, while mitigation means taking action to stop the change from happening or to reduce the change that is occurring. When we speak about climate change, sometimes our focus is on the carbon in the atmosphere, but we must also speak about the carbon in the ground that is being extracted and burnt to put that carbon in the atmosphere. If we keep looking only into the skies and forget to look at the ground, then of course, we will not really tackle the problem that affects our people on a daily basis. And so we have to look at where the rain started beating us.
That deluge drenched us when the first oil well was drilled and exports began in the late 1950s at Otuabagi in the Oloibiri oil field. Now those early oil wells have since been abandoned. They were abandoned in 1970s but they’ve never been decommissioned. The area has never been cleaned up, and as we speak, they are still contaminating the environment, and this happens because of lax regulation. Lax regulation is not accidental, just like ecocide is not happenstance. It’s all about profit for international oil companies and their Nigerian counterparts.
The Niger Delta is a sacrifice zone where anything goes and the people just manage and struggle to survive. Those of us who live in the area don’t have to be told about the level of pollution here. The reports are there, the Ogoni report, the Bayelsa report, even the Niger Delta Environment Survey that Shell commissioned in the 90s, but never released, and many others including the one by Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre, which studied blood samples of women from Otuabagi area, and found them all loaded with hydrocarbons. people are literally the walking dead.
In November to December 2021 over a period of six weeks, there was an oil blowout on the Santa Barbara river, a well run by Aiteo. That spill all happened in public view. The polluters and NOSDRA claimed that a mere 3,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled. Imagine a spill from a well head at high pressure for six weeks. Experts estimate that about 500,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled in that incident. And how about Ororo-1 oil well off the coast of Awoye in Ondo State? That oil well blew up 5 years ago and is still burning and spilling as we speak – a clear indication of systemic neglect.
How can we be serious about climate action when we have an oil well burning and spilling crude for 5 years? It’s an open sore, burning, spilling in broad daylight, destroying livelihoods of communities along the coastline of the Niger Delta, especially at the Awoye area. In sum, the Niger Delta is not just a sacrifice zone, it’s a zone that holds the history of colonial exploitation, extractivism, expropriation and extermination of the people on a daily and continuous basis.
How can we speak of community empowerment in this sort of environment? What would community empowerment look like? What is community empowerment when perpetrators of environmental degradation are abandoning their responsibilities in the so called divestment moves? What kind of transition would that be? If a polluter leaves the pollution, hands it over to his allies or other companies that they set up, and moves deeper offshore to pollute from offshore and maybe turn the offshore into a situation that is akin to what they’ve left in our onshore the Niger Delta is not only suffering from loss and damage. It is a lost and damaged territory. It is almost a lost and damaged, totally damaged, irreversibly damaged territory.
And our work in community. If we want to do real community empowerment, we must take real climate action to avert a continuation of the sacrifice of the zone. And there are things we must do. Number one, there has to be a clear environmental audit across the entire Niger Delta, what has gone wrong? Who is responsible, and how can people live in that kind of society? Environment number two, health audit. What has been killing our people?
How come we don’t have adults? Children have become adults and we don’t have elderly people. Number three, remediation, we’re not only going to audit the environment, or did the health. There must be a cleanup of the entire Niger Delta. There must be reparations. There must be payment for the damage that has been done to lives and to the environment.
Gas flaring must be stopped and halted. It’s an illegal activity. It’s a crime against humanity. It’s crime against the environment, against Mother Earth. It must be stopped. The so called divestment must be started and reversed, it is time to empower the communities and take real climate action by bringing into play community control, renewable energy provision, supporting food sovereignty, building resilient infrastructure.
Still speaking about building resilience through climate reparations, it’s a time to right the wrongs in terms of energy provision, United States a very challenged environment, and electricity penetration is very low, and so to reach hard to reach communities, there must be community controlled renewable energy.
In other words, we have to bring energy democracy to the Niger Delta, so that the people who only see glimpses of light from gas flares would now have electricity with which to engage in productive activities and to light up the territory. Now, the land, the water and the air has been so contaminated, if gas flaring is stopped, pollution is cleaned up, then the people have a chance to engage in agriculture in a way that is resilient and a way that helps tackle global warming, and that would be having food sovereignty with a key focus on agroecology, cultivating crops according in line and in harmony with nature.
And then finally, one clear action that must be taken to build resilience is to encourage community democracy and have community development agencies that are truly driven by the people and not manipulated through divide and rule and rule system by either the oil corporations or the governments at various levels. And so we’re speaking about community agency the people must be on the driving seat to build a resilient future, to take real climate action and to empower themselves the people are going to empower themselves when the conditions are right, and this starts by building social cohesion and resilience through inclusive approaches to resource management, accountability and ownership, communities must be in a position say this cannot happen in our territory.
This can happen in our territory. They must be in charge of what resources are extracted in their territories and how these are extracted. And finally, we have to work to promote restorative justice. In other words, community in Agile data can only be empowered and build resilient future when there is environmental justice.
Those who do the harm the most harm must do the most to write those harms, to correct those harms. They have to pay for the harms done.
We need ecological justice. We need species justice where we understand that we are not alone on this planet. We’re not alone in Niger, there are other beings that we share the environment with, and they must be intergenerational justice. We have to keep in mind that the future we’re talking about belongs to the children yet unborn, and so what we do now must be such as would ensure that they can they’ll have a repaired resilience, strong ecosystems, ecology, systems, a week to thrive. These are some of the, these are the thoughts.
Let us take a pause here.