Niger Delta: Bassey urges voters to reject candidates without environmental restoration plans
,,,Warns critical minerals rush could surpass oil devastation
By Editor 
Environmental activist and Executive Director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nnimmo Bassey, has urged Nigerians to deny electoral support to presidential and governorship candidates who cannot present concrete plans to remediate and restore the Niger Delta’s severely damaged environment.
Bassey, who spoke in Port Harcourt, also warned that Nigeria’s growing drive to exploit critical minerals for the global energy transition could reproduce, or even surpass, the environmental devastation caused by decades of oil exploration in the Niger Delta if communities are not protected and held at the centre of decision-making.
He challenged voters to make environmental accountability a decisive consideration at the ballot box, arguing that politicians who fail to address persistent oil pollution, gas flaring and the destruction of community livelihoods should not be entrusted with public office.
“With 240,000 to 260,000 barrels of crude oil spilled annually into the Niger Delta environment and with routine gas flaring ravaging the region for decades, we have it as a key duty to demand all presidential and governorship candidates to clearly state what their focus on the environment would be when elected,” he said.
“Any candidate that does not have concrete plans for the remediation and restoration of the deeply damaged environment should not be given a single vote by the electorate.”
Bassey spoke at the 8th Graduation Ceremony and Annual Leadership Lecture of the Kebetkache/Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development (Centre-LSD) Leadership School for the 2025/2026 session. His lecture was titled Leadership for Environmental Justice in the Niger Delta.
He cited persistent oil fires and gas eruptions in communities across the region as evidence of the failure of political leadership to address environmental emergencies affecting residents and their livelihoods.
He questioned why voters should support politicians who had failed to resolve the fire at the Ororo-1 oil well off the coast of Awoye community in Ondo State, which he said had persisted for more than six years.
He also raised concerns about gas eruptions in Bille community, Degema Local Government Area of Rivers State, and what he described as an uncontrolled crude oil fire burning on the water surface at Oil Well 9, OML 18, in Ofiomina-Ama Alakiri community, Okrika Local Government Area.
For Bassey, the continuing environmental crises underscore a fundamental problem with the distribution of the benefits and costs of resource extraction in the country: while wealth is generated from the Niger Delta, many host communities remain burdened with pollution, declining agricultural productivity, damaged fisheries and lost livelihoods.
“The wealth extracted from the region has not translated into a life of dignity for many of its people, and this is not simply an environmental problem, but a question of justice, power, accountability and the meaning of development itself,” he said.
He argued that environmental injustice was sustained by a system in which profits and benefits flowed elsewhere while the social and ecological consequences remained with the communities from which resources were extracted.
Describing this model as colonial and neocolonial, Bassey said the development of responsible leadership must also involve challenging inherited systems of exploitation and empowering communities to determine their own futures.
He maintained that leadership should not be measured by official titles, political positions or public visibility, but by the willingness to confront injustice and defend the rights of affected people.
According to him, leadership is equally demonstrated by women organising their communities to protect water sources, young people documenting oil spills, fishermen demanding investigations into polluted creeks and residents refusing to accept environmental destruction as the price of survival.
“Leadership is concretised through consistent and repeated repudiation of environmental crimes,” he said.
Bassey particularly emphasised the role of women, who he said bore a disproportionate burden of environmental degradation through their responsibilities in farming, fishing, water collection, food preparation and sustaining family livelihoods.
He lamented that women, young people and marginalised communities were frequently excluded from decisions concerning land, energy, natural resources and development, despite bearing many of the consequences.
He called on leadership institutions to cultivate leaders who would challenge such exclusion, share power and ensure that affected communities had a meaningful voice in decisions shaping their environment and economic future.
The environmental activist also warned that Nigeria’s ambition to become a major producer of critical minerals needed for the energy transition could create another cycle of exploitation if the mistakes associated with the oil industry were repeated.
He recalled the lead-poisoning disaster associated with artisanal gold mining in Zamfara State in 2010, which killed hundreds of children, as well as fatal mine collapses in Plateau State. He further cited the reported arrest of 37 teenagers over alleged illegal mining in Niger State, claiming that all but one died in detention.
These incidents, he argued, pointed to a serious leadership failure in the management of natural resources and the protection of vulnerable communities.
Bassey cautioned that replacing fossil fuels with minerals used in supposedly green technologies would not automatically produce a just energy transition if the same extractive practices continued to dispossess communities, destroy ecosystems and concentrate benefits in the hands of powerful interests.
He said the reported $700 billion memorandum of agreement between Nigeria and the United States concerning critical minerals should therefore prompt greater scrutiny of the terms of resource exploitation, the safeguards available to host communities and the distribution of economic benefits.
“Without strong environmental justice leadership in our communities, and nation at large, the recently announced $700 billion memorandum of agreement between the USA and Nigeria over the country’s critical minerals endowment should ring alarm bells,” he said.
He warned that communities could be sacrificed to ensure uninterrupted extraction and the movement of minerals out of Nigeria to meet the needs of other countries.
“The questions that must be answered are whose interests our energy systems serve, who controls them, and who pays the price?” he asked.
Bassey urged political leaders, regulators and community representatives to demand transparency, meaningful community consent, compliance with environmental laws and accountability from companies involved in resource extraction.
He also called for environmental remediation to go beyond contracts and technical reports, insisting that damaged ecosystems must be restored, livelihoods rebuilt and affected communities empowered to participate in decisions concerning their territories.
Turning to the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), Bassey criticised the governance arrangements for host-community development funds, particularly the provision allocating three per cent of oil companies’ operating expenditure to host communities.
While acknowledging that some leaders had praised the provision, he questioned the power granted to oil companies to appoint executive members of host-community development trust boards.
He also faulted provisions that allow trust funds to be used to repair oil company infrastructure damaged by third parties, arguing that such arrangements raised questions about accountability and the potential collective punishment of entire communities for acts allegedly committed by individuals.
“Who determines when a facility is damaged by third parties and why criminalise entire communities for an offence that may be committed by an individual?” he asked.
He said the effectiveness of the PIA and other policy frameworks should be judged by their actual consequences for communities and the environment rather than the promises they contain.
Bassey charged the graduating students to use their leadership training to confront uncomfortable truths, resist the capture of public institutions by private interests and ensure that development delivers measurable improvements in people’s lives.
He said development should not be assessed solely by the number of roads, buildings, boreholes or the volume of revenue generated, but also by whether people could breathe clean air, drink safe water, feed themselves, preserve their cultures and live without fear of environmental destruction.
“Justice is not a favour granted to communities by those in power. It is a right that must be respected and defended,” he said.
He urged the graduands to take their knowledge into decision-making institutions and the communities affected by public policies, stressing that the Niger Delta needed leaders prepared to dismantle the conditions that perpetuated injustice rather than merely manage its consequences.
Bassey congratulated the graduating students and welcomed incoming students, commending Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre and the Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development for investing in leadership education.
He said the ultimate measure of leadership was whether communities, institutions and ecosystems were left in better condition than they were found.
