•Dr Nnimmo Bassey
Being Dr Nnimmo Bassey’s Opening Comments at the State of the Ocean Workshop held at the NIOMR on Monday, February 3, 2025
Distinguished guests, community leaders, scientists, activists, and all those committed to justice.
We gather today to consider the state of our ocean—not as a commodity to be exploited, but as a common good that sustains life, livelihoods, our culture and spirituality.
Our oceans are under siege, and the communities that depend on them bear the brunt of pollution, displacement, and human rights abuses.
Across the coastline of Nigeria, community folks are being forced from their territories, deprived of their resources and left to grapple with the consequences of laxly regulated natural resource exploitation.
The economic forces driving this destruction prioritise profit over people, extracting resources beyond the ocean’s capacity, and leave behind a trail of ecological devastation. The infrastructure of Nigeria’s economy begins at our shorelines and extends to the deep waters where resources are extracted— and coastal communities who bear the pressures from the land and the sea remain trapped in poverty. We cannot ignore the countless oil well blowouts that have polluted our waters: Akaso Well 4, Atanba, Bonny Terminal, Buguma Wellhead 008, Santa Barbara, and the ongoing inferno at Ororo Oil Well 1 at Awoye, Ondo State, which has been raging for close to five years now, among others. These disasters are ecological crimes that contribute to climate instability, and a worsening scarcity of land and water, placing entire communities and livelihoods at risk.
We live with the struggles of fishermen and women who set out each day with their nets and baskets, only to find empty waters—enclosed and sacrificed for industrial dredging, multinational oil companies and corporate fishing.
A Community like Aiyetoro with its history of well organized governance and industrial strides is now a ghost of its former self, bashed and washed by unrelenting waves and left to grapple with unrelenting impacts of global warming and possibly heading for complete displacement unless we act.
We acknowledge the plight of Makoko’s communities, whose rights to housing, food, and health have been trampled by forces that would be happy to have the people displaced so the waterfront can be grabbed by speculators. Overall, the destruction of marine biodiversity disproportionately affects fishing communities, making them the most vulnerable to environmental degradation.
Our fight to defend the ocean is inseparable from the fight for human rights and justice. We must resist the unchecked advances of transnational polluters in our ocean and demand accountability.
We must protect our biodiversity, our land, and our water from the destructive forces of exploitative capitalism seeking to privatise the commons.
It is time to rethink our relationship with nature—to take only what can be replenished and respect the delicate balance that sustains us all.
Governments must act —not as enablers of destruction, but as stewards of the environment, ensuring that decisions about natural resources are made with the full participation of the communities who rely on them. Nigeria has signed so many conventions and treaties regarding the wellbeing of marine ecosystems.We even have designated Marine Protected Areas whose protection is disputable.
Our constitution may be said to have a tilt towards ensuring the right to life, but there can be no right to life without the right to a safe environment.
This workshop is more than a gathering—it is a platform for us all as oceanographers, marine scientists, government agencies, civil society organisations, and community leaders to reflect, strategize, and commit to the urgent task of defending our ocean. Coming on the heels of the International Wetlands Day, we use this opportunity to take a stand against so-called land reclamation which should rightly be named aquatic ecosystems conversion and grabbing. We have seen wetlands and dependent economies destroyed by urbanization and diverse speculators. We are also seeing swaths of the ocean and public beaches being converted into fenced housing estates or so-called superhighways. These disregard the fact that the state of the ocean directly affects the climate, reflects on the quality of our lives and the capacity of the Earth to maintain her cycles and support all beings.
Let us seize this moment to build a future where our ocean is protected, our rights are upheld, and our communities thrive.
*Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian architect, environmental activist, author and poet. He is the founder of Mother Earth Foundation, an environmental think tank and advocacy organisation.
