The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency says it is making moves to make oil spillage a criminal offence to control the nation’s environmental pollution.
The agency’s Director-General, Peter Idabor, told the News Agency Nigeria in Abuja on Tuesday that the National Assembly had been helping the agency to review its law.
Idabor said both the Senate and the House of Representatives had started helping the agency to amend its law to make it a criminal offence for any company that pollutes the environment.
He said: “What we are doing now is actually to make it a criminal offence.
“Now, it is just a civil offence and since the companies know it is a civil offence, they do it with impunity.
“If they know that it is a criminal offence and they can be sentenced to jail for polluting the environment, they will be more careful in their operations.
“If we can do that, it will significantly help to reduce the incidence of oil spills in the country.”
He said that the law would reduce the number of spills on the environment, which, according to him, endangers the lives of Nigerians.
The director-general said most chemicals inside the crude oil were cancer-causing agents and the people exposed to it were likely to develop cancer and other deadly diseases.
He appealed to the oil companies to reduce the quality of the oil they spill on the environment to ensure good health for the populace.
He said: “We also hope that the NOSDRA law will be amended very soon and that will give us power to crimalise the issue of oil spills so that violators can face criminal justice of this country.”
Idabor, however, solicited the cooperation of other environmental agencies to address the challenge of environmental degradation, saying that the issue of overlapping functions should be a thing of the past.
“We should all come together because the oil companies are capitalising on the differences between us and our sister regulators to continue to pollute and degrade our environment,” he said.
NAN reports that NOSDRA was established by Act No. 15 of 2006 by the Federal Government to address environmental degradation and devastation of the coastal ecosystem, especially in the oil-producing areas of the Niger-Delta region.
NOSDRA is statutorily empowered to co-ordinate oil spill management and ensure the implementation of the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan for Nigeria in accordance with the International Convention on Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Co-operation 1990, which Nigeria has ratified.
The NOSCP is a blueprint for checking oil spills through, containment, recovery and remediation/restoration.
It was drafted in 1981 and first reviewed in 1997 and further reviewed in 2000 and 2006, respectively.
Trending
- If the Foundations be destroyed: A Catalogue of the unresolved, by Michael Olatunbosun
- WAEC introduces CBT as option in November 2024 WASSCE
- How to report misconduct of our Officers — Police
- Tinubu subsidised cost of 2024 hajj with N90b – Shettima
- Nigerian jailed in US for $1.1m fraud
- Veteran actress Liz Benson returns to Nollywood
- Tax is now Nigeria’s highest source of income – FG
- Tinubu to APC Governors: Make your states viable