Nnimmo Bassey

Nnimmo Bassey (born 11 June 1958) is a Nigerian environmental activist, author and poet known for his long-standing work on environmental justice in Africa. He chaired Friends of the Earth International from 2008 to 2012and was executive director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. His work has focused on advocating for communities affected by oil exploitation in the Niger Delta and strengthening transnational networks opposing destructive extraction across the Global South. Quotes It’s been a very dramatic year but we’ve learned never to be taken by surprise by things happening around us. A lot of this happening in the world are contrived by humans – human activities, by systems that humans have built, by corporations who have life when it is pleasantly convenient and not when it means taking responsibility for actions. On the whole, and as you’ve earlier mentioned, it’s been a very surreal year. And right now, through the covid-19 pandemic and the dramatic responses by governments, it feels like a script, like a fictional script being run by the invisible hands around the world, quite invisible anyway. My conclusion in the early days of the pandemic was that nothing was going to change except we take action to make that change happen. The virus itself provides background for mobilization but it’s not going to change by itself. In an interview Nigeria is a very bad example for Africans, I must say, in terms of modern agriculture, about technology. In 2016 when the first permits were given, they were for genetically modified cotton – cotton that is modified to act as pesticide, BT cotton. It was the same variety that has just failed and was abandoned in Burkina Faso that was being approved across the board in Nigeria. It’s quite interesting. It shows how impervious to reality and to the needs of poor farmers who were caught in the trap of cultivating that cotton variety that ended up impoverishing them in Burkina Faso, just across the Nigerian border. It was really dramatic that that happened. Of course we opposed the application, sent objections, but the management agency just ignored everything, ignored the opposition and approved those varieties. I believe this is what, the kind of thing that we need to really challenge very deeply – that how could somebody say we’re going to capture carbon from the atmosphere, and we’re not talking about the release of carbon from where nature has kept the carbon. For example, why should keeping fossils in the ground be a cardinal climate action when we know that it’s extracting these fossils for the burn in them that is driving the crisis that we’re seeing in terms of climate change? You know, everybody goes “well, you got the carbon we have to burn it. There’s a lot of money attached to it. Africans, African governments, the politicians, declare that if anybody tells Africa not to extract crude oil and burn it, such people can be said to be unpatriotic and talking nonsense, “so we have to burn it. We have a right to development, we have a right to progress.” But we have to define what is development, we have to define what is progress. If progress means alienation from nature, I think that doesn’t make sense. We find engineers saying, “well you know we can take carbon out of the atmosphere using more trees.” Of course we want more trees, I love trees, we all love trees. We like to sit on the greenery, we like fresh air. But this idea is not just about trees. It’s about genetically engineered trees to have enhanced capacity for photosynthesis. It’s like saying nature is inefficient. When someone says that nature is inefficient, my first reaction is that that person’s brain is inefficient because if you brain is disconnected from nature, you actually need to see a doctor. And the best doctor may be a native doctor, as we call them the sangomas, who would have to get you back into shape. In an interview Nigeria is a very important country on the African continent for size and population and for this kind of energy conversation. In fact, we always point people, those who want to open up new oil wells, to look at Nigeria to understand why they should not go that way, because the energy — they say, “Oh, look, energy is passion in Africa.” You know, Kavango in Uganda, in the Saloum Delta in Senegal — everywhere you look, new oil or gas facilities are being opened. And they’re open for export, not for use of the resources on the continent, as it’s all about money, and without any care about the people or about the environment. External links