Daily Independent  

Any further extension of the deadline on gas flaring will aggravate the already precarious environmental, health and economic problems experienced in the, the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has warned.

The environmental justice group's position is on the heels of demands by oil majors operating in the Niger Delta for an extension of the deadline to 2010, citing insecurity and poor funding of gas gathering infrastructure, among others as reasons for the delay in ending the flares.

The companies have in the last five years been breaching several deadlines on zero flares and only agreed on the January 1, 2008 date after pressure from non-governmental organisations and the international community.

ERA/FOEN Executive Director, Nnimmo Bassey, in a statement, urged the Federal Government to impose stiffer penalties on any oil firm that breaches the 2008 deadline as well as shut down production facilities where flares could not be shut off.

"Time has come for the lives of Niger Deltans to be weightier than petrodollars. Gas flaring is a monumental waste of our natural resources, an assault on the lives and health of the people of Niger Delta and a mark of unacceptable double standards by the oil companies," Bassey said. "Asking for shift of deadlines is the usual game of oil companies. They will never willingly honour any deadline. Oil companies continued dilly-dallying on the date matter makes nonsense of our judicial system because there is a subsisting judgement on the matter," he added.

The Federal Government has sued British-American Tobacco PLC and two other tobacco companies for N5.3tr for the alleged havoc done to underaged smokers in the country.

According to a News Agency of Nigeria report on Tuesday, the two other companies are Philip Morris International and International Tobacco Ltd.

Two affiliate companies of BAT, British-American Tobacco (Nigeria) Ltd., and British-American Tobacco (Investment), were also sued alongside the parent company.

In the suit, filed by the Attorney-General of the Federation before a Federal High Court in Abuja, government said tobacco-related products manufactured and sold by the defendants were addictive and hazardous to public health.

On 10 November 1995, the Nigerian military regime, under General Sani Abacha, hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and minority rights activist, and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) after a judicially flawed trail.

The hangings were a critical event for the Nigerian junta and for Royal Dutch/Shell, the major international oil company operating in Nigeria’s Niger delta, which played a key role in shaping the Ogoni tragedy. When Citizens Revolt re-examines the evidence concerning the Ogoni struggle for self-determination and raises questions about its origins and implications as a case study of the emergence and persistence of ethnic identities and the communal politics they engender in postcolonial Africa.

Ike Okonta disagrees with the arguments of such leading Africa scholars as Mahmoud Mamdani and Donald Horowitz regarding the provenance and dynamics of ethnic politics on the continent and submits that ethnicity is not necessarily antithetical to democracy, and indeed that it may be a necessary aspect of democratic citizenship in multiethnic states like Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. The Ogoni story, he contends, is the classic case of a people, who in order to secure their civic rights as citizens in a state increasingly resorting to rapine despotism, became “tribesmen” in their struggle to become citizens.

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