The Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/ FoEN) has launched a community manual on International Oil Companies (IOCs) Divestment in the Niger Delta to boost a better understanding of the processes that have left communities out.
The manual was launched at a Civil society roundtable on IOC Divestment from the Niger Delta in Benin City, which had in attendance civil society and grassroots organisations.
In attendance also were Hon. Friday Ogierakhi, former Edo State House of Assembly member, and Prince Barbs Pawuru, president of the Host Communities Network of Nigeria (HOCON).
Ogierakhi, described divestment by the IOCs as a strategy of using and dumping of the people of the oil-bearing communities and their environment, adding that after the decisions of the oil firms to leave the region without remediating for oil pollutions was tantamount to sucking the juice from a fruit and leaving the chaff behind.
He disclosed that his community is a victim of the divestment process which left the environment degraded and the natives poorer than when oil was first struck in commercial quantity.
According to him, “interrogating the issues is about accountability in the Oil mineral industry. If you must divest, there must be something in return for the people for all that you have taken away.”
Barbs Pawuru noted that the joint venture agreements between the Nigerian government and the IOCs are better described as profit sharing without accountability and responsibility to the local communities.
He revealed that the IOCs are divesting because they no longer find the onshore fields productive, adding, “now they are leaving those fields to the domestic oil companies that do not even have capacity to manage the crisis brewing in the region”
Pawuru also disclosed that the current divestment exercises are skewed against locals and will lead to more oil theft and marine pollution.
He insisted that if at all the government wants to allow divestment in the oil sector, there should be a guaranteed process of reclaiming the environment and restoring it to how it was before the divesting entities began operations.
Chima Willaims, ERA/FoEN Executive Director, said that the Round-table on divestment was a continuation of a process that ERA had commenced to interrogate the reason the IOCs “suddenly started a divestment process that is leading to sale of their (IOCs) entire onshore assets and their going to the deep offshore where their activities are not adequately monitored”
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