5000 RISE AGAINST GAS FLARING, INSIST ON YEAR END

 * Lobby Yar'Adua, Mark, Bankole on December 31 Deadline

 OVER 5,000 community persons, and activists opposed to continued gas flaring in Nigeria, have join Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria and other concerned citizens of the country to call on President Umar Yar'Adua, Senate President David Mark, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Dimeji Bankole, attention that the December 31, 2008 deadline to end gas flaring in all Niger Delta communities be honoured.

advertisement

The anti-gas flaring campaigners say they are deeply concerned that - since 1969 - the Federal Government has not enforced the various administrative directives and laws it enacted to end gas flaring in the Niger Delta region. Rather than enforce those laws and a subsisting court judgment against the practice, the government in countless instances allegedly succumbed to excuses from oil companies for shifts in flare-out deadlines.

''Gas flaring causes acid rain which acidifies the lakes and streams and damages crops and vegetation. It reduces farm yields and harms human health, lives and livelihoods. Gas flaring increases the risk of respiratory illnesses, asthma and cancer. It often causes painful breathing, chronic bronchitis, decreased lung function, body itching, blindness, impotency, miscarriages and premature deaths'', they said.

According to the protesters who are being galvanised by Nnimmo Bassey, a frontline environmental rights activist, ''while nearly three-quarters of Nigerians live in desperate poverty, Nigeria loses $2.5 billion every year through flared gas. The practice is also a major factor in the tension and conflicts raging in the Niger Delta region''.

Continuing, they said on November 14, 2005, ''the Federal High Court sitting in Benin and presided over by Justice V.C Nwokorie ordered stoppage of gas flaring in Iwerekhan Community (Plaintiff) by April 2007, saying the practice “violates the fundamental right to life and dignity.”

''It is extremely troubling that, despite the court order, gas flaring has continued unabated in the Niger Delta, thereby continuing to put the local communities and the entire world at risk.

''The government must put the human and environmental rights of the people of Nigeria above corporate profits. We are demanding that government should adhere to the December 31, 2008 executive deadline for ending gas flaring in Nigeria''.