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The Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), a Port Harcourt based environmental civil society organization, wants the Hydrocarbons Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP), the body responsible for the Federal Government’s clean-up of Ogoni land, to release its key performance indicators to enable stakeholders monitor the exercise.
Dr Kabari Sam, CEHRD’s head of Environment and Conservation, made the call on Tuesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital, in an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of a one-day review meeting on the environmental regulatory thresholds for polluted site remediation in Nigeria.
His call is coming on the heels of the confirmation of the Federal Government commitment to the clean-up exercise in Ogoni land by the Environment minister when he visited ongoing clean-up sites in Eleme and Tai local government areas of Rivers State last week.
Dr Sam said: “There’s no clean-up going on, but there’s remediation ongoing. And different sites are doing different things at the moment. What I’d say is that there’s activity going on in different sites. But what we don’t know and not sure of is whether actual remediation is ongoing.” He added that, “the reason why we don’t know, is because HYPREP has not given us the tools with which we’ll monitor what people are doing on the sites, and that’s the key performance indicators.”
He said HYPREP’s delay in releasing the key performance indicators in the nearly one year of its operations was making it difficult for environmentalists, civil society organizations and scientists to monitor what contractors involved in the exercise were doing on site.
He explained that governments clean contaminated lands for different purposes, and that different values are attached to these purposes, pointing out that the clean-up of Ogoni land should be mainly for agriculture.
“The lower the value, the higher the clean-up. From what we’ve seen from HYPREP and even the Nigerian government, it’s just one value they have. They’re supposed to have different values for all those things I’ve mentioned. So, we need to understand what that one value is for.
“My advice is for HYPREP to without delay release the key performance indicators to civil society organizations and people that have scientific backgrounds to be able to check on the key performance indicators and monitor people on ground, which will be to HYPREP’s credit because they’ll be able to tell that this company is doing well and this company is not doing well. So, until we have the key performance indicators, we don’t even know what to look out for at sites when we visit.”
A communiqué is expected at end of the one day meet which attracted participants from several civil society organizations across the state as well as HYPREP and National Oil Spills Detection and Remediation Agency (NOSDRA) and other government ministries and agencies.
All efforts to contact HYPREP spokesman, Mr Kpobari Nafo, to find out why his agency has refused to issue the needed key performance indicators proved abortive as his mobile line was unreachable as at the time of filling this report.
