- By Mark Osonwanne
Our country Nigeria turned 63 years this year 2023. In the individual life, this is a significant benchmark for it signals the onset of midlife for some people. For most successful persons this age indicates the period when much of the earlier investments in hard work, creativity, enterprise development would have matured and fruits of success would have been seen. Thus the rest of life for many will be period of consolidation and much harvesting from earlier endeavours. It is a critical period in the life of an individual.
The Niger Delta Regions situated on the Gulf of Guinea which is now one of the world’s leading domains for deep water oil and gas exploration account for less than 10% of the land area of Nigeria. It is one of the large wetlands of the world whose diverse ecology provides a challenge to the concept of sustainable development given the relative fragility of the ecosystem and particularly the potential for loss of biodiversity. Since the area accounts for up to 95% of the oil production, approximately 2mbpd and proven oil reserves of Nigeria, approximately 25 billion barrels with a potential for up to 40 billion barrels; its development should constitute a national priority. It is Nigeria’s ark of development or circle of development if we include offshore. The development if properly executed has the potential to drive the economic development of the rest of the country. If this is to happen our approach to its development must be comprehensive and holistic. We must also take into account the damage that has already been done by over 63 years of exploitation of the oil and gas reserves in a period when the world was not as environmentally conscious as we are today.
There is now discussion of renewable energy and action. The ecological damage already done through loss of swamps especially of its flora and fauna, increase in turbidity of surface water, as well as the long term effects of gas flaring and potential environmental damage due to oil spills must be taken into account. The erosion menace and havoc in many parts of Southeast and South-south can be traced as a consequence of environmental degradation of the regions.
Situating Niger Delta region’s discourse in global ethical context
How is it possible that regions as resource-rich as the South-south and Southeast, with oil and gas streams that account for nearly 90% of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings, be ranked with the poorest in the world? What kind of distributive justice places emphasis only on the distribution of benefits without a commensurate attention to the distribution of burdens?
Put in another way, what world order purports and supports a global citizenship are enjoyed by only a few at the expense of the rest? The South-south and Southeast belong to, and is inalienable from, the world community under the United Nations Charter. The principle still holds that all nations within this community are by nature equal, irrespective of the levels of their political, socio-economic and economic development. This being the case, the fundamental values, outlined in the Millennium Declaration in September 2000, namely, freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility should apply in these regions as elsewhere in the world.
The international system that was founded on ‘cooperation’ rather than on ‘competition’ among and between states should actively pursue the path of collaboration among equal and reciprocally responsible partners on all issues, especially ones that lie at the very basis of the survival of mankind, not just nationally or regionally, but internationally. The absence of such international interest, cooperation and action on all issues, especially ones that concern indigenous communities who lack the political wherewithal, social connexion and fiscal means to resolve issues that adversely affect them, is a disturbing trend.
The environmentally destructive engagement of multinational oil corporations in the South-south and Southeast qualifies, to be evaluated internationally on account of its global consequences, present and yet to come. This is why the issue of responsible and accountable use of the resources of the earth as a ‘public good’ demands central importance in international discourse.
In the case of Nigeria, there appears to be a nexus between the collapse of public probity and the demise of environmental accountability, a potent mix at best. Operating on a faulty economic paradigm, successive policy regimes were primed into the blind quest for economic growth, with the hope that this would solve all the problems that development posed in the post-independence period and beyond. This has however not yet materialised, more than six decades later.
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Instead Nigerians have witnessed the jettisoning of their African ethics of mutuality, where every individual was a sacred person-in-community, the string protecting the weak and the rich in the context of the community; where the ‘one’ was an unalienable part of the ‘whole’ that accorded her/him the full dignity of personhood irrespective of his/her particular limitations; where the ‘one’ lived, scarified and died for this ‘whole’ in return for the assurance of security and fullness of life that this ‘whole’ represented; where progeny was desired, planned for and celebrated as the epitome of intergenerational longevity.
In place of this ethic, Nigerians have submitted, albeit grudgingly, to the official adoption of a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that subjects everything and everybody to assuaging the greed and ambitions of the powerful.
The massive resources needed for the development of the regions must involve the international community. However, the days of aid and charity are gone. Thus the resources that need to be mobilised must come as foreign and local investments. What programmes and incentives do we need to put in place to attract the massive foreign investments needed? Given the strategic location of Nigeria on the Gulf of Guinea and this at the hub of sea lanes of the South Atlantic and given the dominant position of Nigeria now and in the future in the international oil and gas industry, it must be our vision to build up the South-south and Southeast regions as the international hub for oil and gas industry in Africa and South Atlantic, much as Singapore has done for trade in the Asian region.
•Osonwanne, retired Oil and Gas professional, sent this piece from Saint Johns, Newfoundland, Canada
