As mankind marks the 2020 edition of the World Environmental Day, a member of the House of Representatives from Rivers State, Farah Dagogo, has lamented the unending danger of environmental pollution and exploration that have plagued the Niger Delta region and its inhabitants.
Dagogo maintained that the hazards emanating from the environment had become “so incessant and with no solution in sight.”
He lamented that the people had hopelessly accepted the situation as a way of life, even though it had been identified as the cause of varying degrees of health challenges and deaths in the oil-rich region.
Dagogo, representing Degema/Bonny Federal Constituency of Rivers State, made this known through ‘The Dagogo Initiative’, an organisation at the forefront of rewriting the sorry narrative of the Niger Delta environment, seeking an end to the devastation.
He said just like the 2019 theme that focused on ‘Air pollution’, that of 2020 which was centred on “Biodiversity”, was apt as it encapsulated what the Niger Deltans had been experiencing.
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Painting a pathetic picture, the lawmaker said it was not only the people’s lives that were at risk, species of freshwater and those of marine, as well as their habitats were being affected.
“As we join the rest of the world to celebrate World Environmental Day, it is imperative and paramount that we draw the attention of the world to the suffocating health conditions we are experiencing in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
“As custodians of the largest oil rich wetland in the world, the Niger Delta region had long been debated, documented and discarded by exploitative oil explorations that endorsed and enforced the incessant pollution of our riparian heritage while the people of the creeks sit in limbo, idling away in hopelessness, huddled together in socioeconomic inequalities as the treasure of our natural habitats is robbed by the Greenhouse flares of big oil interest.
“As the world marks World Environmental Day, we call for the promotion of Green-blue economic development footprints to secure the long awaited carbon neutral future for children of the depraved Niger Delta Region,” he added.
