Nnimmo Bassey: Friend of the Earth, Peaceful Revolutionary

One of Time Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment 2009, Nnimmo Bassey is a modern day revolutionary, who speaks of the resistance and the defence of human rights in the same breath. The intersection between human rights and environmental rights is fundamental for him and, in this exclusive interview, the Friends of the Earth chair talks about the situation in the Niger Delta.

How did you get involved in the environmental movement?

I started from the human rights community. I found that many of the human rights issues we were campaigning against had roots in the horrible, irresponsible behaviour of transnational corporations extracting resources in our communities. For example, the extraction of oil in a very mindless manner exposes communities to very severe conditions where their livelihoods are completely destroyed. I’m talking about the Delta [oil rich region of Nigeria], where you have a dense population and 51 years of oil exploration and extraction that wouldn’t pass any kind of standards at all. You talk about an environment where, if you say the oil corporations are operating in an inhuman way you will not be wrong at all. We see environmental racism right before our very eyes. We see a situation where corporations are working in league with our governments. They do not see the people; they do not see the environment. All they see is profits and dollars. This has been the reason why communities have built resistance to both the governments and the corporations. But the resistance has been basically and fundamentally that the environment should not be polluted and that the pollution should be cleaned up. These are the organising pillars for the resistance.

Nnimmo Bassey speaks to thousands of Friends of the Earth International campaigners and volunteers from 20 countries demanding 'climate justice' in a peaceful, colourful march during UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen. Photo: Christoffer Askman / FoEI

Is it easier to get people involved in environmental issues by talking about human rights and vice versa?

There’s no way that you can distinguish one from the other because environmental rights are human rights. The Africa Charter, article 24 declares that “All African people shall have an environment that is satisfactory for their development”. A satisfactory environment is a basic human right, to have a safe and clean environment that permits you to develop. Whenever anything is missing from your environment your human rights are infringed. So the people themselves say the environment is our lives. That captures it all. When you impact the environment in any way you are clearly sentencing the people to death. Polluters at a certain level, especially those among the transnational corporations and their directors, ought to be made to face the International Courts of Justice. What they do is nothing less than the war criminals who are accused facing war tribunals. They should equally face this because, while they are not killing people with guns - although they do when they use security forces against communities - they are killing people everyday with oil pollution, gas flares and toxins that they release into the environment.

How do you get environmental issues high on the political agenda of developing countries who have big development issues to contend with, for individuals and for governments?

When you talk about the environment in Nigeria today people immediately identify with the issue because it’s a matter of survival.

Even in the city?

Well in the cities people think they are living the good life but really the cities are so heavily polluted. For instance, when I go to some cities I don’t want to eat some of the food. I don’t want to eat fish or chicken because I ask them ‘Where was the fish caught from? Which river? Is it a polluted stream?’ I don’t want to be loaded with heavy metals. So in many parts of Africa, gradually, people are becoming able to speak up about environmental issues and they see it as something very important. However, our politicians have yet to catch on. What we, as environmental activists are doing, is trying to push and open the space for the environment to be a major and key issue. We still have a lot of work to do.

And how are you doing that?

In Africa we have the Oil Watch network. We’re organising with communities where oil is being extracted and where oil is about to be extracted. We’re expanding to Ghana and Uganda, Sudan and the rest. What we’re doing is teaching the people how to defend their land, defend their rights, defend their environment and teaching them that they don’t have to accept destructive development.  Everybody is looking for development but if it’s going to destroy your environment, you don’t need it. You don’t need a refinery to be set up behind your house because it’s going to be poisonous. We let people know the environmental impact of certain kinds of industry, certain kinds of development and infrastructure. So, before anything is ever done, people are now going to demand to know about the environmental impact assessment and all these kinds of things that you can use to either reject or accept a project. So it’s getting more central by the day.

One of the local campaigns we have right now is the campaign to leave new oil in the soil. We’ve just put a proposal to the Nigerian government to build a post-petroleum economy in Nigeria and to stop looking for new oil. We’re telling them that they will not lose revenue, we’re showing them that you can actually do this and make more gains, get more revenue and actually avoid new pollution. We’re demanding of the people to also pay a price for this, to buy barrels of oil and leave it in the soil so that the government [doesn’t] get the revenue. They’re looking for the money so give them the money. And then the money will be called the people’s money, no longer oil money or government money. So there will be greater accountability, greater responsibility and the environment is protected at the same time. Of course, climate change and global warming will also be reduced because if we don’t bring out the oil from the ground you won’t be putting carbon into the atmosphere.

Realistically, what would you have liked to have seen come out of COP15?

Civil society needs to build the platform of post-Copenhagen. Certainly, we’ve not come to the end of the road. But the politicians are displaying a level of myopia that I never could have dreamt of. I knew that they would be slow in making decisions but to come here and think of a non-binding political deal that they could draw up behind closed doors while the delegates and the technocrats are debating the nitty-gritty of the other documents I think it will be a big shame if we come out with that. But again we’re not too surprised. We were hoping that there will be some binding commitments to cut emissions at source, not by offsetting, not by planting tress in Africa, Asia, Latin America, then polluting the north. But politicians are playing politics with climate change and refuse to know that time is up then we’ve gone beyond injury time [like football]. We’re now at sudden death time in the case of climate change. Politicians have to know the severity and that’s what we hoped. Whatever they decide they have their consciences.

Is there a need to make the environmental movement more diverse?

It depends on how you look at it. The environmental movement in the global south is really grassroots-based and that’s the essential difference with the movement in the north. In terms of organising and building the movement, it’s already quite diverse but we still need to expand and enlarge. That’s what needs to be done right now – to expand the movement, to deepen the discourse and to use the environment as an organising idea and for political change.

Credit: FoEI

What’s next for you in terms of how you’d like to steer Friends of the Earth?

We have a large agenda. We’re working on mobilising communities around the world, building solidarity. We’re resisting neo-liberalism. We’re resisting destructive activities around the world and we’re working to transform society. It’s a big agenda so we have a big space to work in and we’re building this one block at a time.

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