The Director General, National Oil Spill Detective and Response Agency, NOSDRA, Idris Musa disclosed that one billion dollars has been set aside for the clean-up of Ogoni land.
The fund is broken down with $200million used every year for five years thereby bringing the total to $1billion for the five years cleaning plan.
The DG disclosed this at the weekend in Abuja during a media parley, lamenting that most people misunderstand how this things work.
According to him, the total restoration of the cleanup areas will cost that much and again, by the time the government plants a seedling it will take 25-30 years for the trees to grow and replace the withered ones.
People have been misquoting the whole information it is the restoration to its pristine state that will take up to that long not the cleaning of the land itself.
He added that the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP has fact sheets and accurate information’s on these cleanups of Ogoni.
“The fact sheet has detailed information on how the pollution happened, the medium used and again the dept and area of the pollution and how far it has gone.
“The fact sheets are accurate and are classified into three areas, there are some areas that the pollution was not much, they fall under category B, very critical areas are under category A, there are areas that are category X these are neither here nor there but requires more work to be done to be placed under any category.
We start with areas that are less polluted for cleaning, areas heavily polluted are within the water bodies where it was easier for people to do refining and to also tap on pipe line to ferry crude oil away. These are under category A the impact has gone down and hit the ground water.
There were 68 fact sheets. We were able to bring out 64 out of the 68 fact sheets. We also looked at 6 of the sheets and there was actually nothing much in the 6 sheets.
I want to use this medium to let Nigerians know that the Ogoni cleanup is not a political gimmick. It is presently still ongoing and we are working round clock to ensure a thorough work is done.”
