Inside Lagos community where residents drink, cook with fuel-polluted water

Inside Lagos community where residents drink, cook with fuel-polluted water

AMARACHI OKEH writes about the plight of residents of the Iludun community in Lagos State whose contaminated water source has left them in a dire situation

Three years ago, Mrs Omolara Ramoni noticed the borehole water in her block of apartments had started reeking of petroleum. For the first five years after she moved to Iludun, a community in the Ifako Ijaiye Local Government Area of Lagos State, she and her neighbours enjoyed good and clean water before the slowly travelling underground petroleum spillage hit their water source.

was by growing plants or vegetation, they would not be used for any domestic use because that vegetation would absorb those heavy metals, and pollutants from that place.

“After they are grown, they would be uprooted and burnt and cannot even be used for firewood because they are planted for a purpose,” he added.

A professor of Environmental Law at the University of Benin, Sunday Egbodo, advised the community to seek legal redress.

“The principal party there is the contractor because those pipes, I’m sure, must have been there for many years and so when the contractor came to do the bridge, they should have carried out an environmental impact assessment of that project.

“This is a case where contractors negligently destroyed those pipes and consequently caused the oil spillage in the society. That is based on the fact that they failed to carry out an environmental assessment of the project, which is negligence,” he added.

Meanwhile, a non-governmental organisaiton, Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, which has been engaged in seeking solutions for the community, criticised the state for not taking into consideration the federal assets on its path before awarding the contract.
CAPPA’s Programme Director, Sefa Ikpa Ikpa, stressed that the NNPCL pipes were federal assets mapped out but were overlooked in the contract process, leading to the damage.
“There is a comprehensive map for all federal assets across the country so is there no form of collaboration between the federal and state ministries of works and infrastructure? If you give out a contract, you are supposed to know what is on the ground in the first place but that wasn’t done which is why the contractor punctured the pipeline,” she said.

We are aware – LASG

The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, established in 2006, under the Ministry of Environment is the agency responsible for monitoring and responding to oil spills in Nigeria.

The zonal office of the agency in Lagos was contacted through the number on its website. An official who declined to give their name asked our correspondent to visit their office because they needed to dig into their archive to get information on the community.

The officials also said the agency would only provide any information physically.

However, the General Manager of the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, Dr Babatunde Ajayi, told our correspondent that the state was aware of the contamination, adding that “it is one of those lines of overlap between federal and state responsibility”.

Ajayi said the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, had the responsibility to mop up oil spills and do remediation from pipelines.”

“What we usually do when we have such cases like this is to escalate such cases to responsible agencies of the Federal Government. At the very least, once the leakage is sealed, we can advocate remediation.

“I suspect the state would have done a proper community engagement and some kind of test to know what went wrong. When things like this happen, the responsible agency would have done an extensive check to know who caused what and how it went down,” he added.