Flooded Communities in Ogun Were Not Properly Primed For Habitation, Says Oresanya

Ogun State government has expressed commitment to address the perennial flood ravaging some parts of the state. The state Commissioner for Environment, Mr. Ola Oresanya, while speaking to selected journalists in Abeokuta recently, beamed light on efforts by the state government to also address environmental pollution caused by cement factories in the state. He also tackled issues bothering on threats to biodiversity, the challenge of waste management and advantages of the CNG initiative, which he said the state has fully embraced, among others. Sunday Okobi brings excerpts

Recently, some parts of the state witnessed an unprecedented flooding. In Isheri, residents resorted to using canoe due to the magnitude of the water in the area. Since this is a perennial issue, must there be flood? So what’s the future plan to forestall this menace or should the people just relocate?

 Well, let’s start with your question, must there be flood? I would say yes. What is flood? Flooding is the consequences of overflow, of the pathway for a river or drainage channel overflow due to several reasons, including, most times, high level of precipitation, which is rainfall, or constriction of flow.

So, now, what are the natural dimensions to flood? Rainfall. It’s so easy. Let me explain it to you. There’s something we call hydraulic structure, which is your drainage channel, dams, and the rest of it. These are things that manage flow of water. It’s likened to the sink you have in your toilets.

 If you pour a bucket of water into that sink, it will take probably five minutes before it drains off. It’s an overflow. The same sink, you now pour one drum of water inside it, will it not spill over? That’s flooding. So, if you have developed your drainage channel to take charge of this level of water, and you now have a very high precipitation, you have the overflow.

The average rainfall pattern in Ogun State, which is a replica of Nigeria, is 20mm monthly average. But between the month of June and July, for one month, it can run to almost 400mm. In fact, check this on the meteorological report that was released in February this year.

 In Ogun State, we’re going to have about 396mm, almost 400mm of rain in one month, compared to the average of 20mm, where we have about 26 days of rain. So, can anything contain that? No. But must you allow for the overflow? Yes, you must allow for the overflow.

And in Ogun State, we have two patterns of seasonal flood, due to this kind of a rainfall pattern, the flash flood, which comes with the early rains, it is inland, it is upland. The heavy flow of rainwater, this rainfall will come within a very short time, and it will run downstream. That is a flash flood.  It can be abrasive, erosive, and destructive, on a high-speed flow. And when you look at the topography of Ogun State, we have a hilly part in the northern part, and almost a flat terrain in the southern part.

So, there’s a heavy runoff, which is a flash flood, and that is the first season of flood we always have in Ogun State. The second season of flood is the river flooding and the coastal flooding, which is always due to release of detained excess water of the early part of the year. And usually, that detained water that is released is necessary, so that we don’t have dams being broken, things like that, coincides with the time of the tidal increase, height.

In October this year, it was reported globally that Lagos Lagoon was going to rise by 1.14 meters. As the normal tidal height day, I mean night height, usually maybe 0.2, 0.3 meters, but on October 18, it went up to 1.14, and from October 25, it’s coming down. So, with that kind of lock, when you have water being released and you have a tidal lock, what do you expect in the flood plain? You’re going to have water that will stay for a while before it regresses into the Atlantic Ocean.

All these areas you talk about are flood plains, they are natural plains that God created to reticulate these natural events. You’re not supposed to build on them. There’s a rule of engagement that guides if you must build there. Like the Bible says: ‘My people perish for lack of knowledge’ – knowledge gap within the government

A flood plain has its own rules. The rule is that if you look at 100 years height of flood in that area, what is the highest or the prevailing height? For the Isheri area and the rest of it, water can go up to about 1.5 meters.

So, if I must build there, I must operate at a higher elevation. My road must be like almost like a few meters, my building must be at that level, if I must stay there. Go to Lekki. Lekki was dredged at about five to six meters by Westminster dredgers in the 1980s. That’s why you can’t build in Lekki. It was swamped. The whole of Victoria Island was swamped, but you have to prepare the land for habitation.

Most of these areas you’re talking about have land speculators that just moved in there, even the government had an estate there, the government was guilty too, moved in there without preparing the land for habitation, allowing people build those houses there.

What do we do next? It’s just to manage the headache. So you ask that question, must there be flood? There will always be flood, it is part of human natural events, but you must decide to manage the flood, so that it does not disturb what you will do. Give water its own way, and while you make sure you elevate yourself to habit in area where water must be.

When you look at the Isheri North, it was not prepared for habitation properly. It’s unfortunate that a lot of people built houses there – beautiful, lovely estates in that area, but without proper understanding of the terrain.

The issue of air pollution, especially from cement factories in the state, has become a recurring issue in the state. At a time, host communities of the Lafarge WAPCO factory, Ewekoro, complained bitterly on how activities of the company have impacted their farming activities. What’s the state government doing to permanently end this menace?

 Cement industry happens to be one of the industries with the highest level of footage when it comes to carbon emission. In Ogun State, we have the highest number of cement industries in Nigeria. Aside the cement industries, we have the highest non-oil extractive industries in Nigeria, talking about mining, limestone, and other minerals.

Three-quarter of the state is underlain by limestone, that’s the appetite you have for mining. Lafarge WAPCO has two factories – Sagamu and Ewekoro. We have other industries – BUA and Dangote cements. Dangote has the biggest factory here at Ibese, and BUA is along the way. We have international cements also in the state – large industries are all here.

Now, for the Ewekoro area, what we did was to take the stack records, we got consultants of international repute to give us what is coming up from the stack. What we got in Ewekoro was within permissible limit, where Ewekoro had a problem was on their mining site. It was the emission from their mining site. They were not able to precipitate the dust from their mining site, not from the stack.

Where they had a stack problem was at the Sagamu factory, and we shut them down. Up till today, the Sagamu factory is not working, because we shut it down two years ago. And we told them that until they complete the installation of their centrifuge precipitator, which is a pollution abatement device, both for their waste scrubbers and for dry scrubbers, they will not open that factory.

At the Ewekoro factory, they have the scrubber, they have the precipitator there, so what is coming from their stack is not what is causing any pollution there, the pollution is coming from the mining. That probably would have disrupted farming activities. But while we did the investigation further, we found out that the land those people are farming actually belongs to Lafarge. But because they were not there to mine for years, the people started using this land for farming.

When we asked the communities to bring their title hold on this farmland, they could not bring any, but Lafarge brought theirs. So we were able to come in, to resolve that community issue. I think it was more of a community disagreement and I think so far, they are doing their thing.

 What happened at Ibese was worse than what is going on at Ewekoro, but we were able to intervene there. I was there, likewise the Minister of Environment, and we told them what to do to avoid any kind of backslide. So, we are working seriously with these cement industries.

One other thing to support the cement industry in their decarbonisation programme is by using refuse in the state, because Ogun State is holding firmly on decarbonising these industries because they are adding so much to the national footage.

We turn refuse to what we call the refuse-derived fuel. They are going to use it as a main component of their energy transition programme to reduce the fossil fuel quantity they are using in their plants. And they are working with us seriously. We are working with McKenzie on this. We are working with what we call Manufacture Africa, which is a British Government –owned SPV that is working with us in Ogun State.

We are the only state in Nigeria where Manufacture Africa is a British government-owned organisation working with us. And we have McKenzie, which is a global organisation. We have the National Sovereign Fund and several conglomerates working with us on decarbonising these cement industries using the refuse, not just from Ogun State alone, but from other contiguous states.

 We are working seriously in that direction. And we are pitching on this at the Climate Change Summit (COP) coming up in Azerbaijan.

The issue of open defecation has become a norm, mostly on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, especially from Mowe, Ibafo stretch to Kara Cattle Market, including some border communities. How’s the state government nipping this environmental crisis in the bud?

 When we’re talking about open defecation, there are several things to make people indulge in that – lack of infrastructure for toilets; social values – this is because some people, even with the toilet beside them, prefer to go to do the thing out there; or lack of consequences for that kind of misbehavior. So, whatever we’re doing, we’re conscious of what warranted that.

For Kara, it’s not just lack of infrastructure; it’s about social values, because the people that indulge in that area, most of them have been displaced. Inside Kara, we have public toilets, but rather than go there, they will still want to indulge in that open-air thing where they will smoke, where they’ll get kind of relief from doing their thing openly, smoke whatever weed they want to smoke, and they tell you that’s the way they enjoy their life.

To some people, it’s a psychological issue. For most of the people that we’ve arrested there, we’ve done a lot of clacking to ask, this is a toilet, why can’t you go there? They’ll tell you that they get a kind of feeling when it’s in the open like that and it’s having a fag. So, it’s a social psychology thing. And for such thing to change, and a change of that habit, we need to have a kind of a reprimand, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

The menace has reduced seriously in that area because we now have people policing the area 24/7. So, when you’re caught doing it, you go through the experience of community service, of cleaning what the others probably would have done for you and that probably is a deterrent right now.

Then, two, for the people who go there to trade, what about infrastructures? Now, we populated the area with another six new public toilets, go over there, you’ll see the yellow roofs. I can count six from Berger end towards the Tribune office area.

 For policing, yes, to change that social value, we have to do policing. You would have seen people with green vests monitoring up and down in the area. So, it’s something we cannot condone. The next thing we are putting out is signage around the area, so that at least they will see it, and we will criminalise it with the signage. So, it’s not just a community service right now, some of them may have to serve some terms somewhere. So, we’re not going to allow it and we are doing so much to make sure we eradicate it in that area.

 And you would have seen that in areas where we have the cases of open defecation in Ogun State, it is localised, and in areas where you have people who are not indigenous.

So, we will not allow the degradation of our environment with such noxious actions. So, it’s our strategy. And one of the good news you must hear is that with our strategies of implementing what we call the WASH – Waste Sanitation and Health Programme, we have the first local council in Southwest that was certified open-defecation-free.

What we did there, following the UNICEF protocol to make sure that every household must have a functional convenience, and we achieved that, and making sure that you don’t have any reason whatsoever to go out there to defecate. And we are scaling that up in the state, making sure that we have more public toilets all over the state.

 And our public toilet in Ogun State is unique. It’s not just a conventional public toilet; it’s unique in the sense that the feces is used with what we call the bowel reactor. We use it to generate electricity in those toilets. So it’s unique in a sense, and that’s our goal.\

Now, on supporting facilities, we’re tightening up our laws to make sure that all restaurants in the state, all petrol stations, if you don’t make your toilet available for people to use, we can seal up the place.

 So we’re going to make sure that people have numbers to call to report if you are pressed and approach a petrol station to use their toilets, and they deny you. If one of the conditions for giving them the license to operate is that they must have functional toilets for public use, restaurants, not just for their customers, because they are in the public service, they must make it available for public use. So we’ll make sure we educate them more, and we’ll criminalise that. So you don’t have any reason whatsoever to do anything on the road.

The Omu and Olokomeji Forest Reserves are being encroached. The development is actually affecting the biodiversity. You might say it’s a cultural issue, but it all falls under biodiversity. Don’t you see this as a threat to biodiversity in the state?

Well, biodiversity issues have got to do with what your values are, and those values will be well-entrenched in your conservation policy. It’s a conservation issue. And you can conserve for tourist purpose.

You can conserve for human development purpose. You can conserve for historical reasons or for agricultural reasons because this biodiversity has their own input in agricultural development and the forestry.

Now, for these two main forest reserves, the Olokemeji and the Omu, if you look at the peculiarities, in Olokomeji, the biodiversity loss is due mainly to agricultural encroachment. You have a lot of residents- traditional people who need their land for cultivation. So they started disturbing the natural habitats, clearing the trees, so that they can do a lot of agriculture.

Now, what are we doing about it? We are working with UNICEF and UNEP to create alternative means of livelihood for the people because they have to survive. So, instead of cutting off the trees and disrupting the biodiversity, we have to create an alternative job for them. Now, for Omu, it has the UNICEF centre there. That’s the only one in Nigeria recognised.

Omu’s major problem is not just for agriculture, it’s also tree loggers. It’s one of the major problems for Omu-the loggers. And that conspiracy is huge. It’s not just Ogun State or Nigeria, it’s a global conspiracy. There are not too many of farmers, but mainly it’s about logging.

What the Ministry of Forestry is doing about that is to increase on the enforcement and to make sure that we stop the exportation of all these woods out of Nigeria, which is one.  Then, two, we make sure that we incentivize the afforestation programme, so for Omu the main thing is afforestation.

Now, restoration of the biodiversity, will it not be easy? It will take years. Those elephants have been displaced, it’s causing so much problems. They’re struggling to come back to their natural habitation. The communities are trying to push them away. And we know further that people are now taking the tusk of the elephants. So it’s a security issue.

We’re working with a lot of other conservation agencies to make sure that these sites are well protected and we don’t lose this key component of the biodiversity, which is the ecosystem, and the eco-diversity in Ogun State is very rich. There’s hardly many states you see in Nigeria that have such high industries, high agro-based issues, and even rich conservation sites. Ogun State is so blessed.

And we have two main sources of inland natural freshwaters, the Osun River and the Ogun River, traversing the state. It’s almost like the Garden of Eden of Nigeria.

Can you tell us what the state is losing to this encroachment?

 I’m not very good at that. Maybe the Ministry of Forestry can give us the naira and kobo of it. I don’t know how much they sell, but I’m only concerned with the environmental impact and the actual entomology component of it, because entomology will tell you that we’re losing so much of the insects that are clearly helping in pollination and growing those trees. Because those insects are the ones actually assisting these trees.

So what’s the state government’s approach to waste management? What we have taking place now everywhere is waste disposal, not waste management. How is the state approaching this?

There’s difference between waste disposal and waste management. Waste management is about closing the loop in the value chain. Waste generation, that’s the source –collection, transportation, and we’ll come to waste processing, and from disposal to processing, and then back to source. So we are talking about circular economy in Nigeria, Ogun State happens to be the headquarters of circular economy in Nigeria. We have the highest number of industries and recycling companies in Nigeria.

We recycle about 1,250 metric tons of plastics daily in the state, among four factories.

We have over 1,500 metric tons of ferrous and non-ferrous metals daily, and over 1,000 tons of papers recycled daily. We have nine companies in Nigeria doing recycling of batteries, eight of them are here, and the ninth one is not even functioning.  Let me just say that virtually all battery companies are in Ogun State. With those facts, I can tell you that Ogun State is the headquarters of circular economy in Nigeria.  We generate about 3,500 metric tons of waste on daily basis; it is not enough for us to even service the demand for the recyclables we have in the state. That’s the downstream activities, because it is only what you’ve collected efficiently that you can recycle effectively.

Now, upstream what do we do from source to those recycling centres? Our model is to bring in the private sector, waste management is a bankable process, we are focused on the market, the market source is the source of generation, we are people who are able to pay adequately and in areas where they cannot pay, the government bridges the gap.

We made it in such a way that the private sector is collecting for profit and that’s the motivation, that’s the incentive. You don’t want to lose a job you are making profit from, so we breach the gap to make sure that collection of wastes is profitable and that’s the area we are bridging, that the state government has been supporting very well.

We have a lot of investors investing their own money, so there is a social component of it and there is a business component of it. We certify it into industrial-commercial waste, hazardous and chemical waste, residential waste and all of that, these are certified for different cadres of collectors.  And we have an institution that is focused on that – the Ogun Waste Management Authority (OGWAMA)-headed by a special adviser to the governor; which was created by this administration of Governor Dapo Abiodun.  

There are challenges with waste disposal in some local government areas like Ado-Odo/Ota, Ifo and others, where refuses are disposed indiscriminately on the road medians. Can you tell us the synergy between the state and the council areas authorities on this?

 You would have seen that there is a kind of synergy between infrastructure and waste management. In all these mentioned areas, there are infrastructure gap and that has affected the waste management strategy in those area, even the private sector players would not want their vehicles to break into two, many of them avoided those areas and that is why we have not been efficient in that area, but recently, the government is deploying so much on infrastructure development there. There is nowhere in the world where waste management can be efficient without infrastructure development, so they comes hand in hand, and very soon you’ll see  the changes in these areas because once the roads are made, the next thing is to see them in action.

On transportation, going with the Presidential CNG initiative, which Ogun State has keyed into, vehicles have been imported and this administration has a lifespan, how sustainable is this initiative?

Whatever programme you do in the public sector, to make it sustainable you start with an enduring policy, so that you can develop your legal instrument from there. It is all about entrenching your intentions and your policies with the legal instruments. Two, your framework should consider three major things – the social benefit of whatever you are doing, people, must key into it, people must have ownership, if people cannot relate with the benefit of your programme, forget it, you can only force it within the lifespan of your regime, but if the people have ownership of your programme, it goes beyond just your tenure, it will be part of the things people will demand from any government coming in, so there is the social component, which must be well entrenched  and that means you must engage with the people, they must have a shared vision and you must hold the vision.

 Two, it must add value to the environment visibly, if it’s not adding value, why will anybody want to embrace it. So, if it’s adding value to the environment, nobody can stop it because the environment is your natural habitat.

And lastly, which is the most important, it must be economically viable, you must have a business model that will make sure that there is a reward system that must come from doing well. Somebody must be picking up the bill and there must be a reward. If there is no reward system that will take the private sector to invest in it then forget it. If you are able to subject your policies and guidelines or your programmes into those two components of sustainability, it is going to be enduring. So, you must check your checklist and your programme. Is it saving me cost? Yes, instead of buying N100, 000 fuel to travel a hundred kilometre, I am using N20, 000 for a hundred kilometre, that’s economics, it is just there.

Now, is the social value making life more meaningful for me? Yes, because they are now bringing food from farm to the table with the CNG-powered trucks, reducing food costs, and it adding value to my life. So socially, I will key into it.

Lastly, whether it’s reducing carbon emission in our state? Yes. The presidential initiative on CNG vehicles is superb, if only we can implement it within that framework of sustainability.  

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Must there be flood? There will always be flood. It is part of human natural events, but you must decide to manage the flood, so that it does not disturb what you will do. Give water its own way while you make sure you elevate yourself to habit in area where water must be…The average rainfall pattern in Ogun State is 20mm monthly average and we’re going to have about 396mm, almost 400mm of rain in one month, compared to the average of 20mm, where we have about 26 days of rain. So, can anything contain that? No. But must you allow for the overflow? Yes, you must allow for the overflow