By Donu Kogbara
Last week, I complained about justice being delayed. I was referring to the fact that the Federal Government and Ministry of Petroleum had not even started to implement a 3 year-old United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) report.

The report focused on the terrible damage that Ogoniland – my home terrain – had suffered because of badly managed oil exploration and production activities; and it strongly recommended various crucial remedial measures.

The Federal Government had, in response to this UNEP report, established the Hydrocarbon Pollution Restoration Project, HYPREP, a body that was domiciled in the Ministry of Petroleum and headed by Mrs Joi Okunnu, an Ogoni lawyer.

My beef was that HYPREP had not achieved anything beyond making statements containing very annoying mere platitudes and feeble excuses about its inertia; and I expressed disappointment in President Goodluck Jonathan, the Minister of Petroleum Resources (Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke) and Mrs Okunnu……on the grounds that all three of them are fellow Niger Deltans who a) have first-hand knowledge of the devastation that pollution has wreaked on our region and its inhabitants and b) ought to be taking this problem much more seriously.

Just before my complaint was published last Friday, Mrs Alison-Madueke made it obvious, in a public forum, that she no longer wished to work with Mrs Okunnu.

The Minister also issued a press release on September 16, via Mr Ohi Alegbe, the Group General Manager Public Affairs of her key parastatal, NNPC, in which she admitted that the implementation process had started late, but explained that this delay was caused by a need to enthrone Due Process.

The following comments and promises were made in the press release:

•The Federal Government is now ready to fully execute the clean-up of Ogoniland, as recommended in UNEP’s assessment report.

•The Government in its renewed commitment to the environmental restoration effort, will review extant frameworks set up to undertake the process. This structural review is necessary for government to guarantee an appropriate and accountable restoration programme.

•Parts of the structural adjustments in the implementation efforts will include the setting up of an independent body, as recommended in the report, to deploy and disburse funds meant for the restoration exercise.

•The UNEP report recommended that the Government and oil companies contribute $1 billion to the clean-up exercise. This fund will be managed by a new independent authority with a fixed initial lifespan of 10 years.

•It has become clear that Ogoni communities and relevant stakeholders have not been properly consulted or incorporated into the implementation processes of the UNEP report. Accordingly, Government has been deliberately cautious by carefully reviewing the HYPREP structure to determine the best way to rejuvenate the programme to fully restore Ogoniland as it is envisioned in the report.

•The Government will quickly move forward with these plans “in a very aggressive manner”…and will create a major steering committee…and face the restoration process in a way that will achieve visible results and make it clear that the authorities are fully behind the Ogoni clean-up.

•Impacted communities, traditional rulers and the President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP, have said that they will cooperate for as long as Government exhibits convincing sincerity and matches its words with actions and transparency.

HMM!

I really want to believe that this press release marks the beginning of a dynamic new dawn and a genuine interest in the welfare of my Ogoni brethren. But most government officials are better at talking than doing; and I won’t breathe a huge sigh of relief and relax or stop complaining until I see concrete results.

I will soon establish a blog to supplement this column; and one of the issues on which the blog will ferociously focus is this UNEP implementation matter.

In the meantime, I will give Madame Minister the benefit of my many doubts and give her a reasonable amount of time in which to prove her mettle within an Ogoni context, while closely monitoring developments with an open mind.

But I must confess to being extremely concerned about the treatment that has been meted out to Mrs Okunnu. A Ministry of Petroleum contact has assured me that Okunnu, previously a devoted Ogoni daughter and activist, needed to be ditched because she was “the main obstacle to progress in terms of HYPREP.”

And I am REALLY struggling to buy into this official explanation.

Like most Nigerians, I am instinctively prone to ethnic or regional biases. But I am also rational and fair-minded enough to be aware of the fact that it is morally wrong to automatically support someone just because he or she happens to be from your tribe or your part of the country.

And there have been times when I have roundly condemned folks from my own backyard for misbehaving…and times when I have regarded individuals who are neither Ogonis nor from the South-South as superior job candidates.

However, Okunnu is highly intelligent and has always passionately espoused Ogoni causes; and I haven’t spoken to her recently, but I have known her since we were both children and have discussed HYPREP with her in the past.

And I gained the impression that she desperately wanted HYPREP to work wonders for our -eople; and when I challenged her about the lack of progress, she told me that she was working hard to get the project off the ground.

She also lavished praise on Madame Minister and Mr President and told me that they were as enthusiastically dedicated to the Ogoni clean-up as she was. But I still suspected that she wasn’t telling me the whole story and that her hands were being tied by her non-Ogoni bosses; and I’m wondering how she suddenly became the main obstacle to progress on the UNEP implementation front.

The delay in implementing the UNEP report is a disgrace; and I hope that Okunnu has not been used and dumped by those who are looking for scapegoats!