From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
The Federal Government has pleaded with all stakeholders involved in achieving the goals of the Ogoniland cleanup project not to relent until Ogoniland is completely cleaned up.
Minister of State for Environment, Mrs. Sharon Ikeazor, disclosed this while declaring open a retreat organised by United Nations in Abuja recently.
‘‘The set goals and objectives, which is primarily to clean up Ogoniland and provide the recommended deliverables as contained in the UNEP Report can be easily delivered when we act as a team with a single goal.
UNEP is facilitating this retreat and will at the discussion session clarify the different roles of each of the arms as contained in the gazette establishing the project. The governing council is empowered to manage and superintend the policies of ‘The set goals and objectives, which is primarily to clean up Ogoniland and provide the recommended deliverables as contained in the UNEP Report can be easily delivered when we act as a team with a single goal.
UNEP is facilitating this retreat and will at the discussion session clarify the different roles of each of the arms as contained in the gazette establishing the project. The governing council is empowered to manage and superintend the policies of Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP). HYPREP provide the general policy guidelines relating to her functions,’’ she said.
Also speaking, the project co-coordinator that supervised the assessment of Ogoniland (who also produced the UNEP report), Mr Mike Cawin, said that the lesson to learn is that HYPREP crashed because of lack of transparency and accountability.
‘‘We are very pleased to facilitate this. We see HYPREP as a table. A table has four legs. If anyone of the legs fails to perform, the table is non-financial and we are not going to succeed,’’ he warned.
In his remarks, the Managing Director of Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), Osagie Okunbor, assured that SPDC would inject enough funds to facilitate the implementation of the project.
‘It is absolutely important for we as a company to provide the enabling environment for it to function via the provision of funding as laid out in the gazette. We are a Joint Venture (JV) irrevocably committed to ensuring that we do just that. We have promised to accelerate work on the project so that we can make a visible project and secondly the fund is used judiciously.
‘I do believe that all the organs in this work have done everything they can. We started very slowly but over the past years, we have seen acceleration and that acceleration we want to continue to see. In terms of water project as well as livelihood project, we do believe very firmly that those three have to go hand-hand,’ he assured.