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It is a very sad irony that communities in the Niger Delta that sit atop huge oil and
gas deposits have gotten nothing really in return.
Rather than any wealth or benefits, what the community members have been getting
is impoverishment, diseases, death, destruction of their livelihoods.
Where we rounded another corner, and there was a woman who had come, and she had a piece
of coconut, and there were like seven or eight children just around her screaming, and she
was breaking off little pieces for them because they were hungry and that might have been
sort of the first food they had had that day.
Pipelines and flow lines crisscross the landscape.
At every moment as we speak a pipeline that is old and corroded has given way
and is spilling crude into the fragile environment.
Fishes just disappear. Fishing was the mainstay of the local economy.
In the 70s, fishes were everywhere.
Fathers and their sons and mothers just go to the stream in the morning and just cast their nets
and just get fish for the day. But I tell that today all that is gone.
You have the oil works butted up against where the people live.
The fumes that come from those flares are quite noxious.
Government has made so much promises and failed over the past decades and they would not believe
that a government can deliver, can be of service anymore.
And it is difficult for the people to trust the oil companies
because for 50 years the oil companies have only brought so much hardship.
America takes 20 percent of Nigerian oil. That means virtually every time you put gas
in your tank or you turn on a light switch you are burning Nigerian fuel.
The Nigerian government has been receiving over $50 billion dollars annually from oil and gas exports.
This increase in revenues has not resulted in any development in the
Niger Delta.
The Nigerian government does not depend really on the taxation of its citizens. It depends
on the rent from oil companies. It is the Nigerian people that have sustained the Nigerian
society and Nigerian economy.
There are huge potentials for development if revenues from petroleum can be utilized
for national development and improve healthcare, the roads, education.
We will not fulfill this potential if citizens and communities do not participate
in how government prioritizes projects and development decisions.
We need to put more pressure, mobilize, strengthen citizens to ensure that there's more justice
in the way revenues and budgets are managed. And until these issues are addressed at the
constitutional level, at the political level, then whatever settlement of groups and individuals
that is going on will not achieve everlasting peace.
Because peace can only be founded on justice.