By Omoniyi Salaudeen

A concerned group in the Niger Delta, Ijaw Professionals Association (IPA), has urged the Federal Government to go beyond mere political rhetoric and urgently address the issues of pollution and other attendant environmental problems in the Niger Delta region.
In a statement made available to Sunday Sun, the group lamented decades of unregulated oil and gas exploration due to the inaction of the successive governments, adding that “the Nigerian government should stop seeing the oil as theirs and the pollution as ours.”
This is coming on the heels of the 2017 World Environment Day. The statement read in part: “We remind them again today that the over 60 years of reckless ecological destruction of the Ijaw homeland and the Niger Delta from environmentally unregulated oil and gas exploration is possible only in a failed or fatally flawed nation state.”
While blaming the previous administrations for the prolonged neglect of the region, it urged Acting President Professor Yemi Osinbajo to go beyond the shallow steps of the past by implementing policies that would ensure sustainable protection of the environment, ecosystems and communities in the Niger Delta region in general and the Ijaw homeland in particular.
The group further blamed the impunity of the multinational corporations operating in the region on the institutional weakness of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), saying that the Federal Government must order the relevant agencies to regulate the behaviour of the oil and gas producing and allied corporations. It added that the government must make December 31, 2018, as the final irreversible deadline for gas flaring in Nigeria.

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