According to reports despite the provision of $1 billion funding for the Ogoni cleanup exercise in River’s state, the Federal Government agency set up to carry out the exercise ‘failed’ to carry out the mandate for years, a report by the Associated Press (AP), quoting leaked United Nations documents, has indicated.
The site, outside the city of Port Harcourt, was on a cleanup list kept by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and was supposed to be restored to green farmland as the Delta was before thousands of oil spills turned it into a byword for pollution.
Instead, the AP report pointed out that the land was left a sandy “moonscape” unusable for farming, according to UN files, with emails, letters to Nigerian ministers and minutes from meetings obtained by the news agency showing senior UN officials increasingly concerned that the Nigerian agency had been a “total failure.”
The agency, the Hydrocarbons Pollution and Remediation Project (HYPREP), selected cleanup contractors who had no relevant experience, according to a UN review, AP said, sending soil samples to laboratories that didn’t have the equipment for tests they claimed to perform.
In addition, auditors were physically blocked from making sure work had been completed, while a former Nigerian minister of the environment told the AP that the majority of cleanup companies are owned by politicians, and minutes showing similar views were shared by UN officials.
