Mkpoikana Udoma
Port Harcourt — Renowned environmentalist and Executive Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, Rev. Nnimmo Bassey, has issued a searing indictment of Nigeria’s oil governance system, declaring that crude oil has brought “no real development” to the Niger Delta despite decades of extraction and trillions in revenue.
Speaking at the Ken Saro-Wiwa 30th Anniversary Memorial Lecture in Port Harcourt, Bassey challenged the Federal Government to identify a single Niger Delta community transformed by oil wealth, insisting that the resource has instead left a legacy of pollution, poverty, and pain.
“Let the government of Nigeria show us one community that has been transformed into a haven because of oil,” he said. “I can show you thousands that have been reduced to nothing because of oil. Oil is not development.”
Bassey said the Niger Delta’s exploitation mirrored the historical colonial plunder of Nigeria’s natural resources, tracing the roots of environmental injustice back to 1895 when the British burnt Akassa in a battle over palm oil monopoly.
“The colonial merchants destroyed Akassa in 1895 because they wanted sole rights to palm oil,” he recalled. “One hundred years later, in 1995, our leaders were murdered for crude oil. The exploitation pattern is the same, only the resource has changed.”
He described Ken Saro-Wiwa as a visionary whose prophetic warnings about environmental degradation and economic injustice had all come true, validated by the UNEP Environmental Assessment Report on Ogoniland in 2011 and the 2023 Bayelsa Environmental Damage Report.
“Ken saw the future because he was rooted in the present,” Bassey said. “He fought for justice, and everything he said has been proven right.”
Bassey lamented that the first oil-producing community, Otuabagi in Oloibiri, remains abandoned and leaking decades after production stopped.
“If oil were development, Oloibiri would be a city today. Instead, it is a museum of neglect, a place that proves oil has failed the people.”
He called on the Federal Government to prioritize human and environmental security over extraction, insisting that “real wealth” lies in the well-being of the people, not barrels of oil.
