AN ENCOUNTER WITH DIRTY FUEL
If there are about 20 persons in Nigeria today who should know the deadly impact of the importation of dirty fuels to West Africa, I should be among the lot. Recently, I took my power generating set for repairs. It was not starting and part of the problem as well was that the fuel tank had started leaking. My neighbour helped drain the fuel and off to the repairer I went. While there, I was required to fetch some fuel from the station, to use it to at least clean the carburettor and perform allied activities. Apart from the fee for repairs, the technician wanted me to part with more money to buy a ‘chemical’ (which turned out to be a high-sulphur content fuel) for a thorough wash of the fuel tank. At first, I didn’t want to oblige him, and not wanting to join issues with someone who’ll likely accuse you of teaching him his job, I let go. But after he was done for me to take my power generator home, I began to feel a certain itch around my nostrils, and before I knew it, I was sneezing uncontrollably. Up till about 2am that night, I sneezed to near asphyxiation – my ribs hurt, my nostrils were blocked and I dared not take off my clothes.
My wife thought I had pneumonia. So, she shipped me off to see the doctor. But it wasn’t pneumonia or nothing of the sort like we feared. The good doctor checked me up and down, and before giving me a clean bill of health announced, ‘This was just some allergy, sir. Were you exposed to anything toxic recently?’ It was after I answered in the negative that the nickel dropped! It was the ‘chemical’ at the power generator repairer’s shop blimey!
In December last year 2016, the organisation I work for, the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice (ANEEJ) was part of a high-powered delegation which worked assiduously to generate the kind of momentum leading to the July 1, 2017 plan by the federal government deadline for the import of toxic fuels into the West African sub-region. The background to those series of meetings was from two catalysts: one, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had identified four Nigerian cities – Onitsha, Aba, Umuahia and Kaduna – the leading air-polluted cities in the world. Two, a Swiss NGO, Public Eye, formerly the Berne Declaration, had carried out an investigation and when it published its report, it indicted major and minor Swiss commodity traders Trafigura & Vitol, Mercuria, Glencore and Gunvor, that they deliberately exploit very weak regulatory fuel standards to import fuel with extremely high sulphur content into West Africa. While accepted sulphur content in Europe and the Americas is just about 10 parts per million, the level in West Africa is outrageously high, at nearly 3,000ppm. Apart from the danger this poses to the health of West Africans, car engines suffer heart attacks and sneeze the way I did last week.
Therefore, before that meeting held in Abuja, the Public Eye Report said that African governments must move quickly to ‘protect the health of their urban population, reduce car maintenance costs, and spend their health budgets on other pressing issues’. The report recommended that by moving to ultra-low sulphur diesel, Africa could prevent 25,000 premature deaths in 2030, and almost 100,000 premature deaths in 2050. But after the Abuja meeting which took place on December 1, 2016, with representatives from the ECOWAS sub-region, together with the African Refiners Association, I knew something had been left out of the deliberations leading to the decision of July 1, 2017 as deadline was wrong.
The thing is, if we were going to stop the importation of dirty fuels and diesel by 2020, what is the state of our refineries? Had any of these meetings undertaken to visit our refineries to ascertain that they could be put to use to regulate fuels we consume here at the least? These were the issues I tried to look at in an earlier published article, Issues with ECOWAS Energy Security. In that article, my argument was twofold: one, the July 1, 2017 deadline may not hold and two, instead of expending time to revamp our refineries, I said that we should be looking to seriously develop our renewable energy sources and potential. I made this suggestion because I know for a fact that by 2030 or thereabouts, Europe will no longer be needing our oil.
ANEEJ, Benin City