Soot: Clean Air is Human Right – ERA

Blessing Okorite, Port Harcourt

The Environment Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, ERA/FoEN, has noted that clean air is human right, stressing that if humans are denied quality air, will amount to denial of human right.

Mr. Victor Washington stated on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, during a media briefing on the launch of the Soot Report by Young Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

Washington who is the leader of the group in Rivers State, a segment of ERA, stated that air pollution is killing people per second, adding that the effect of the pollution in man is worse than the dreaded AIDS.

He said “the Young Friends of the Earth Nigeria, investigated the causes of soot in Rivers state and observed that everybody needs to join hands to stop this menace, even if takes government to make a strong police that will end the cancerous substance on air”.

In his address, Dr. Godwin Uyi Ojo, Executive Director of ERA, disclosed that more than 6 million people dies of air pollution yearly across the globe.

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Dr. Ojo said “Air pollution kills more than 6 million people every year, most of these deaths occurring in Africa and Asia. The United Nations Environment Program says air pollution is fundamentally altering our climate with profound impact on the health and sustainability of our planet”.

He noted that for over two years Rivers State environment have observed the daily pollution on air by soot, stressing that the government has not given the challenge a strong fight to ending it.

“Over the last two years, Rivers people especially residents of Port Harcourt, Eleme and other adjoining towns and villages have observed the daily blanketing of the atmosphere by oily soot. Sadly, there has been no publicly available report from the government on the scary soot that is destroying lives and the environment.”

Also speaking at the event, Mike Karikpo, Programme Manager, ERA, disclosed that “This gathering is to launch the soot report. Many people have said a lot about the soot report, but nobody has done anything about the soot. So, for the first time, young people in the Niger Delta, who live in this community, have taken it upon themselves to do a scientific study of the impact of the soot.

“They looked at the impact of particulate matter on communities; they measured the level of particulate matter in the atmosphere. They did not just do this in their houses; they went to the swamps, they went close to the refineries, close to the petrochemical plants for 24 hours every day. For every hour, they are collecting ambient air quality samples and testing what the level of pollution is in the atmosphere.

“Sometimes, we misinterpret who the government is; we are government, we voted for them. It is important that as a people, we start organizing, mobilising and coordinating ourselves to ask for action to be taken. This is the first step. We now have the scientific basis for saying what we are saying. We are hoping that we can build a critical mass of young people in our communities, who will be able to use that as part of their negotiating strategies with political parties and politicians”.

Setting agenda for the government to stopping the menace, Karikpo said “We should be able to tell them that this soot is killing us; what is their strategy to deal with it? We should tell them to get us renewable energy and make sure that there is constant electricity supply, all those cars that are not good for our roads, especially the emission level of those cars; deal with it. These are things that countries all over the world have taken up.

“There are countries in this world where the emission level is almost zero; they did some critical things to achieve this. This is what we think our government should do. There is no new thing we are saying our government should do apart from what every other responsible government has done all over the world to ensure that people get access to clean, renewable energy.

“They should ensure that the emission level of the cars we drive on the road is controlled. All our petrochemical plants should be controlled. We want government to implement policies that will see to the reduction of pollution”, Karikpo advised.