LET THE NIGER DELTA ENVIRONMENT BREATHE.
Independence Day Statement by Miideekor Environmental Development Initiative – MEDI
1 October 2026
Today, Nigeria marks 66 years of independence. Across the country, there will be parades, speeches and talk of progress. In the Niger Delta, the land, the rivers, the air and the people who depend on them are asking a different question: independence for whom?
For more than six decades, this region has carried the weight of the nation’s wealth. Since oil began flowing from Oloibiri, the Niger Delta has given crude to the treasury and received poison in return. Our rivers carry sheen where there should be fish. Our farmlands are scarred where there should be harvests. Gas flares and open leaks foul the air our children breathe. Flag-raising ceremonies celebrate freedom from colonial rule, yet the Niger Delta environment is still held captive by an extractive order that treats it as expendable.
The environment of the Niger Delta is begging, and it is also fighting. It fights through mangroves that struggle to regrow in oiled soil. It fights through communities that refuse to forget Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni eight, who paid with their lives to say that this land must be protected. It fights through a people who, even now, keep asking for what independence should have guaranteed: clean water, breathable air, safe homes and a livelihood that does not poison them.
For the communities of the Niger Delta, the dividend of independence has not arrived. What has arrived instead is contamination without remediation, promises without delivery, and companies that profit and then divest without accountability. Bille Kingdom shows how long this neglect has lasted. Gas continues to erupt in a community under OML 18 and OML 24. Operators have claimed no responsibility, and regulators have yet to name the cause, the culprit or a solution. A resident, Joy Amos, has died. A people cannot call themselves free when their homes can catch fire without warning and no institution answers for it.
On this Independence Day, MEDI calls on the Federal Government, the Rivers State Government, regulators and the oil and gas industry to act:
- End the cycle of impunity. Companies responsible for pollution must clean up, compensate and be held accountable. Shell and other operators must not divest without remediation.
- Stop the expansion of harm. Oil activities must not resume in Ogoniland, while the 2011 UNEP recommendations remain unfulfilled.
- Respond to Bille without delay. NUPRC, NOSDRA and the relevant ministries must establish the cause of the gas eruption, identify who is responsible and act decisively to protect lives.
- Clean up and protect the entire Niger Delta. Ogoni will not be clean until the entire Niger Delta is clean. Establish a permanent institutional framework for remediation and stop the drilling of new oil wells in the Niger Delta.
- Implement the Bayelsa Report. The recommendations of the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission Report must be urgently implemented to address decades of environmental devastation and protect affected communities.
- Put communities at the centre. The people who live with the damage must have a real voice in the decisions that shape their environment and their future.
Independence must mean more than a date on the calendar. It must mean the freedom to drink water without fear, to farm and fish without loss, and to raise children in a place that does not slowly harm them. Until that freedom reaches the creeks and communities of the Niger Delta, the celebration remains incomplete.
MEDI stands with the people of the Niger Delta, with the Ogoni struggle that lit the way, and with every community still waiting for its share of independence.
Free the land. Free the water. Free the air.
LET THE NIGER DELTA ENVIRONMENT BREATHE.
Comrade Celestine AkpoBari
Executive Director
Miideekor Environmental Development Initiative – MEDI