… Wants Africa to demand climate debt for ecological exploitation
Mkpoikana Udoma
Port Harcourt — The Health of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, has tasked African nations to urgently move to end destructive extraction of minerals, no matter the appeal of the capital, but rather focus on promoting and providing renewable energy in a democratised manner..
HOMEF also charged African nations to demand climate debt for centuries of ecological exploitation and harms, regretting that Africa was facing multiple ecological challenges arising from the actions of entities which see the continent as a sacrificial zone.
Director of HOMEF, Dr Nnimmo Bassey, regretted that African leaders would rather have their environments destroyed through extractivism rather than in building resilience and adapting to the environmental changes that result from corporate and imperial misadventures.
Bassey, in his address on the 10th Anniversary of HOMEF with the theme ‘Advancing Environmental Justice in Africa’, also urged African nations to commit to issuing an annual State of Environment Report to lay out the situation of things in their territories, and also demand for remediation of all degraded territories and that reparations is paid to victims.
According to him, African leaders must recognise the rights of Mother Earth and codify Ecocide as a crime akin to genocide, war crimes and other unusual crimes, and also ensure that all Africans enjoy the right of living in a safe and satisfactory environment suitable for their progress as enshrined in the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights.
“Thus, today people still ask: What would we do with the crude oil or fossil gas in our soil if we do not exploit them? In other words, how could we end poverty if we do not destroy our environment and grab all it could be forced to yield?
“We tolerate deforestation, unregulated industrial fishing and run a biosafety regulation system that promotes the introduction of needless genetically modified organisms and by doing so, endanger our biodiversity and compromise our environment and food systems.
“Plunder is presented as inescapable and desired under the cloak of foreign investment. Political leaders in despoiled regions pliantly offer ease of doing business templates, tax holidays, sundry lax rules, and other neocolonial governance policies,” he said.
He added: “We are in a reign in which condescension is the hallmark of multilateralism. The collective action needed to tackle global warming has been reduced to puny nationally determined contributions that add up to nothing. Rather than recognizing and paying a clear climate debt, we expend energy negotiating a loss and damage regime to be packaged as a humanitarian gesture. Pray, who negotiates what is offered as charity?
“Today, Africa is facing multiple ecological challenges. All of these have resulted from the actions of entities that have seen the continent as a sacrificial zone. While the world has come to the conclusion that there must be an urgent shift from dependence on fossil fuels, we are seeing massive investments for the extraction of petroleum resources on the continent.”
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