THE Director General, National Oil Spill Detective and Response Agency, NOSDRA, Idris Musa has said
that a sum of one billion dollars has been allocated for the clean-up of Ogoni land.
He explained that a sum of $200million will be used every year for five years thereby bringing the total to $1billion for the five years cleaning plan.
The DG disclosed this at the weekend in Abuja during a media parley, lamenting that most people misunderstand how this thing work.
He observed that the total restoration of the cleanup areas will cost that much and again, by the time the government plants a seedling it will take 25-30 years for the trees to grow and replace the withered ones.
He added that the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP has fact sheets and accurate information’s on these cleanups of Ogoni.
He said, “The fact sheet has detailed information on how the pollution happened, the medium used and again the dept and area of the pollution and how far it has gone.
“The fact sheets are accurate and are classified into three areas, there are some areas that the pollution was not much, they fall under category B, very critical areas are under category A, there are areas that are category X these are neither here nor there but requires more work to be done to be placed under any category.
“We start with areas that are less polluted for cleaning, areas heavily polluted are within the water bodies where it was easier for people to do refining and to also tap on pipe line to ferry crude oil away. These are under category A the impact has gone down and hit the ground water.”
