Visiting Ogoniland last week after my first visit in 1996 was a bittersweet experience. It was like traversing two worlds in less than three decades. Unbelievable! I went to Ogoni for the first time to chronicle the mess oil industry and the Nigerian state had made of Ogoniland.

Before oil was discovered in the Ogoni community of K-Dere, popularly called the Bomu oil fields, the territory made up of six kingdoms – Babbe, Eleme, Gokana, Ken-Khana, Nyo-Khana, and Tai – and now compressed into four local governments: Eleme, Gokana, Khana, and Tai, which covers approximately 1,000 square kilometers, with a population of about 832,000, according to 2006 census, was an agricultural and fishing society.

But all that changed with the coming of Bomu oil well 1 in 1958. Subsequently, Shell made more discoveries in other Ogoni communities, including Ebubu, Yorla, Bodo West and Korokoro, leading to the building of massive oil infrastructure, with crude oil pipelines crisscrossing the entire land. When the oil started spilling, nothing was done to mitigate the looming danger until it became a catastrophe. An environmental assessment conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP, documented over 2,976 oil spills between 1976 and 1991. Consequentially, decades of unchecked spills and unmitigated gas flaring, which contaminated land, water and air, impacting the health and livelihoods of the people, turned what was hitherto the world’s third-largest mangrove ecosystem into an environmental disaster zone.

Faced with an existential threat, the people came up with the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP, a non-governmental organisation with the mandate to campaign non-violently to promote democratic awareness and protect Ogoni environment, vesting themselves with the Ogoni Bill of Rights in November 1990.

Tragically, barely four years thence, a split in the ranks of its leadership turned MOSOP into a movement for the death of Ogoni people, with the gruesome murder by an irate mob, on May 21, 1994, of Albert Badey, Edward Kobani, Theophilus Orage and Samuel Orage, in Giokoo community, Gokana. More Ogoni blood subsequently flowed when the ruling military junta blamed Ken Saro-Wiwa, a social rights activist, and eight of his compatriots for the killings. Tried and convicted, Saro-Wiwa, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine, were executed on November 10, 1995, in Port Harcourt.

So, the Ogoni I visited in 1996 was a community under siege, occupied by the Nigerian military, with the people distraught, melancholic and forlorn. They walked about, their heads bowed in utter defeat and surrender.

That was until 2008, when at the behest of the Nigerian government, the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP, conducted an independent assessment of the environment and public health impacts of oil contamination in Ogoniland. Over a 14-month period, with over 4,000 samples collected for analysis from more than 200 sites, 122 kilometres of pipeline rights of way surveyed, more than 5,000 medical records reviewed and engagement of over 23,000 people at local community meetings, UNEP’s independent scientific assessment finding was damning: Ogoniland had become a wasteland, which, unless immediate remediation steps were taken, may well become the world’s worst ecological disaster.

The report, which was first published in 2011 indicated that pollution from over 50 years of oil operations in Ogoniland had penetrated further and deeper than many had thought. But nothing was done until the Federal Ministry of Environment in a 2016 Gazette, established the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, HYPREP, to undertake environmental restoration in Ogoni, building on the 2011 UNEP report. This environmental restoration is turning out to be one of the world’s most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up exercise given the fact that contaminated drinking water, land, creeks and important ecosystems such as mangroves are being systematically brought back to full, productive health.

With the dual mandate of remediating hydrocarbon impacted communities and restoring livelihoods in Ogoniland, HYPREP has done an incredible job. It is to the HYPREP restored Ogoni community that I returned to last week. And it was a soul-lifting experience. Contrasted with the 1996 experience, Ogoni is a land on the cusp of renaissance. The air was fresh, the vegetation was greener, the rivers had palpable aquatic life and the people no longer walked about with their heads bowed. They rather had a spring in their step.

And the reason is simple. As Prof Nenibarini Zabbey, the project coordinator, said: “HYPREP has achieved significant milestones,” working endlessly to address the devastation caused by oil spills, gas flaring and other pollutants in the area.

Besides, beyond the core value of remediation, HYPREP is adding electricity, healthcare delivery services and potable water facilities to spur economic activities. “What we are doing is a sustainable clean-up project and we are in conformity with the original mandate of UNEP while we are also adding values,” he said.




https://www.vanguardngr.com/2025/03/cleaning-up-ogoniland-the-hyprep-way-by-ikechukwu-amaechi/