Managers of Nigeria’s Environment Focus on Personal Fortunes, Says Adegoroye
Managers of Nigeria’s environment make huge personal gains to the detriment of the nation, says Dr. Goke Adegoroye, a retired Federal Permanent Secretary and former Director General of the defunct Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA), a fore-run
Dr. Goke Adegoroye said he undertook a soul-searching journey intended to figure out what was actually wrong with environmental management in the country and that he came up with a harrowing conclusion that it was man-made.
The verdict... According to Adegoroye, “in line with the normal expectation of career and business progression, while the operators of environmental management in Nigeria, from researchers to consultants, managers, contractors and political heads, have all seen their respective fortunes rise, the environment has been left poorer, depleted, filthier, more toxic and less safe than before the commencement of their respective professional journeys through its portals.”
The former manager of FEPA reached his conclusion in a 51-page paper, titled ‘From Research to Policy and Vision to Action, The Challenge of Environmental Management in Nigeria’, which he delivered, recently, at the 2017 Annual Lecture of the School of Environmental Technology, Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA).
He said it was the result of his “three-month study of the current state of our nation’s environmental management, what is amiss and what needs to be done to move it forward.”
He stated that after carrying out a critical analysis of what has happened in environmental management over the past 25-30 years, including the notable increase in institutional establishment from one agency in 1989 to a full-fledged Ministry and four agencies in 2017 and the plethora of regulations that have been churned out by those agencies, his conclusion is that the environment sector has been grossly short-changed.
Ineffective institutions... He noted that “increasing the numbers of our environmental management institutions and regulations has not produced marked improvement in compliance monitoring and enforcement and by inference our environmental management, as investments in environmental enforcement infrastructure have been grossly lacking.”
The result in many cases, he noted has been a downward trend, explaining that “Nigeria committed to the establishment of Integrated Waste Management Facilities (IWMF) as far back as 1997 and 20 years later in 2017, not one has been built; The once thriving Government Reference Laboratory for environment in Lagos has been pilfered and rendered a carcass of its old self; Nigeria was celebrated in 1997 for repatriating from the Philippines to Nigeria drill monkeys earlier stolen from Nigeria through the Kano Airports in 1995 but in 2005 the country had to be banned for the next six years by the CITES secretariat for several infractions, including the granting of official permit to take out of Nigeria two primates that were smuggled out of the University of Ibadan Zoological Garden.” CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is an international agreement between governments. Its aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.
Adegoroye said, “If anyone is in doubt as to the impact of this down ward trend on the environment itself, our 2012 County Report to Rio+20 is an eye opener. Quoting directly from the report, here is the verdict: “Within the last 30 years, about 43 percent of our forest ecosystem has been lost through human activity. Close to 96 per cent of the original 20 per cent forest cover has been cleared and only two per cent of what remains is undisturbed. The number of threatened and endangered species has also been on the increase. In addition, about 10-12 species of primates are now threatened.”
He identified 10 key challenges that have been the bane of environmental management in Nigeria over the past 25-30 years, as: Intra-Agency Establishment Crisis; Unstable Institutional Arrangement; Leadership Instability; Inter-Agency Role Conflicts; Intra-Ministerial Role Conflicts; Federal-State Role Conflicts; Enforcement Infrastructure; Funding; Integrity of Enforcement Officer; and Effective Judicial Process.
Way forward... Adegoroye made 18 recommendations as the way forward, which include among others that: Nigerian academics and researchers must abandon the regimentation of knowledge that has continued to subsist in our institutions of higher learning and adopt the new global method of appreciating and deploying knowledge within the holistic and inter-disciplinary practical approach of providing solutions to societal problems, as that is the only way of assuring the national relevance of knowledge in the 21st century; Governments at all levels should endeavor to make concrete investment in the development of infrastructure for environmental management as the only viable and indispensable insurance against looming disasters as exemplified in such hidden benefits as healthcare costs saved, natural and man-made disasters avoided, as well as the human and natural resource productivity improved, all of which with their multiplier effects are in the order of magnitude that are better imagined than suffered;