The Niger Delta

I want to thank Joel Bisina for the article, ‘Environmental Degradation in the Niger Delta’ which helped deepen our knowledge and understanding of all the processes going on in the Niger Delta. As we learned from Ike Okonta in previous articles http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/38119 published on Pambazuka News, we are witness to a socio-economic and political tsunami whose proportions are difficult to describe, let alone measure.

As a way forward, I would plea for us not to forget that processes such as those described by Joel,have a history which goes as far back as the process of stealing the land from the Native Americans, killing off the Arawaks in the Caribbean, and then stealing people in Africa, enslaving them in order to replace the most sought after resource of those times: labour, hunting it, maintaining it as cheap as possible has been going on ever since.

Native Americans are speaking up after, as some of them say, keeping silent for five centuries.

What is going on in the Niger Delta is just a microcosm of what James Lovelock has been describing in all his books about Gaia. Now, we hear from Al Gore in “Inconvenient Truth” (book and film) that the destruction of Earth cannot go on. He argues that the way of thinking which has led to this state of affairs has to stop, but I have yet to hear Al Gore say something like this: "Long before my great great grand father was born there were people in North America, who did see that this way of thinking advocated and propagated by European discoverers was not only killing people, but it was also killing Earth/Gaia. I suggest that we, the discoverers/destroyers atone for what our ancestors did, by taking those voices and today's, seriously." Would Al Gore, be willing to discuss with the people of the Niger Delta, with the Native Americans, with the Haitians, in short with all of the people and their descendants who have been screaming NO to a system which was born and continues to reproduce itself by way of a mind set which says it is ok for poor people to die?

Thank you Joel for letting us know about the kind of world your mother lived in, one we urgently need to hold on to.