The Senator representing Bayelsa East and Chairman Senate committee on host communities producing oil and gas, Senator Degi Eremienyo has hailed the appointment of Professor Neninbarini Zabbey as the new coordinator of the hydrocarbon pollution remediation project, HYPREP describing it as a square peg in a square hole.
Senator Degi Eremieno made the commendation in a statement circulated in Abuja.
Recall that former project coordinator of the Ogoni cleanup program, Dr. Ferdinand Giadom was sacked last week by the government without any clear reason fueling speculations that he may have worked against the interest of some key stakeholders who have used the cleanup to polish the image of the government despite its obvious deficiencies and failures.
Giadom in March 2022 stated that 172 polluted sites which were not captured in the UNEP study were discovered in Ogoni. That revelation questioned the integrity of the UNEP report and exposed a plot to hide Shell’s monumental damage to the Ogoni environment.
Reacting to Giadom’s sack, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP, sack the decision was unfair and discriminatory. MOSOP argued that Giadom was not a key decision maker in HYPREP and so cannot singularly bear responsibility for any failures on the cleanup programme.
But Senator Eremienyo commended President Muhammadu Buhari and Minister of Environment, Mohammed Abdullahi for the sack of Giadom claiming that it rescued the project from implementational setbacks which he blamed on Dr Ferdinand Giadom as the Project Coordinator of HYPREP.
Senator Degi hailed the sincere outstanding commitment of the current minister of environment on the Ogoni clean up project and expressed confidence that the appointment of Professor Zabbey, a foremost and renowned Ogoni expert on hydrobiology and extensive experience and background on remediation-related activities with bias in bio-monitoring and restoration ecology will no doubt actualize the federal government plan of restoring the Ogoni land to its natural form.
Senator Degi equally commends oil multi-nationals; especially Shell, foreign partners like the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited for their technical and financial contributions while urging them to do more in faithfully implementing the terms and conditions of the project to the letter.
