Dwindling Budgetary Allocation Hindering Niger Delta Remediation — Ojogbo

Leadership

2 March 2012

Dwindling Budgetary Allocation Hindering Niger Delta Remediation — Ojogbo

Interview

Engineer Andrew Ojogbo is the Director of Environmental Management in the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, saddled with the task of linking the once neglected region to the national grid. In this interview with CHRISTIANA ESEBONU, he speaks on how the dwindling budgetary allocation to the ministry has hampered the ministry's effort to remedy  the region's oil-impacted environment.

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In recent years, we have studied about 33 sites so far, except in Ogoni land where the ministry deliberately didn´t get into due to some issues. We have 33 very highly impacted sites.

We have started remediating one site and contractors are in the site presently. We have almost completed procurement of heavily polluted sites but due to financial constraints, we have not started work on those new procurements.

In the east-west zone, the impact of integration management is on-going and the consultant has highlighted areas where impact of the ongoing road construction project would  be migrated to. We hope to do more impact migration exercises on our ongoing projects in 2012.

Recently, the minister insisted we pay a visit to oil-impacted areas (oil  spills) and there are three areas affected, one at Nembe, one at Forcadoes, and a major one in Bonga. In the course of this visits, the ministry got to know the efforts put in by Shell to remediate the affected sites.