Richly blessed with sandy white beaches, beautiful landscape and other natural wonders, Sangana town is the kind of place in other climes, that usually draws hordes of tourists and holidaymakers to savour its beauty and engage in water sports like surfing, scuba diving, jet skiing and more.
Underneath this ldyllic, attractive image however, is a community fighting for its very existence from forces that seem bent on destroying it.
Buffeted on all fronts by disasters, both natural and man made, including polluted rivers and creeks, sea encroachment and erosion, this coastal town by the Atlantic Ocean in Brass Local Government Area of Bayelsa State is like an environmental time bomb waiting to go off.
In fact, an explosion really did happen late last year in the community. Its residents woke up on the morning of November 1, 2021 to discover that a gas explosion had occurred on the Adriatic 1 oil rig operating in Otuo Field, a short distance away offshore from the town. On that fateful morning, the rig owned by Conoil, an indigenous oil producing firm, exploded, spewing gas and other noxious substances into the sea and atmosphere and throwing Sangana town and neighbouring communities into panic and disarray.
In shock, many ran to the sea shore to find out what was happening. The sight that met their eyes was like a scene from a horror film: thick smoke covered the rig and gas was spewing out everywhere.
Recalling the incident of that day, a nurse at the town’s Primary Health Centre, Mrs Amaye Amos said: “I was in my office when I heard people shouting; people were running towards old Sangana by the sea shore. I went with the doctor with me then and that was when we saw the smoke; the whole rig was covered with smoke. And we started inhaling gas- it entered my mouth, nose, eyes. I couldn’t open my eyes. I had to use a hankerchief to cover my eyes.”
Her experience mirrors that of others in the community. Unknown to them, it was the beginning of their woes and many debilitating challenges they are still battling with till the time of filing this report.
Following that explosion, a myriad of problems not of their making, have beset this peaceful community of over seventy thousand residents. They include serious health challenges, polluted sea, rivers and creeks, depleted fishstock in the water, loss of livelihoods and many others.
Many in the community suffered (and still suffer) from respiratory problems such as shortness of breath, cough, catarrh and others. “The gas caused many diseases and infections in the community,” said Amos. “Many children died due to difficulty in breathing and other ailments linked to the gas explosion.”
Madam Adogiye Ibiawor, a sixty-something-year-old resident of the town and fisherwoman, who had gone fishing with her husband on the day of the incident, is still suffering from the effect of the explosion. She disclosed that after the explosion, when she used water to wash her face, it stung her and affected her eyes.
“It ‘peppered’ my eyes and affected my sight; now, I can’t see far anymore.”
Said Ayibatonye Tariah, another resident: “Many of us are still suffering from catarrh, cough and shortness of breath. We’ve suffered a lot because of this incident.”
Besides those problems, the gas also caused stomach upsets such as purging and diarrhoa, skin infections like rashes, blackened skin among others. Intimate areas of the women in the community were not spared either. According to Nurse Amos, the tradition of the town (like in many Ijaw communities in the country), stipulates that women douche themselves at the waterside early in the morning before performing their domestic chores. But even that ancient traditional practice was affected by the explosion. “On waking up in the morning, our women usually go to the waterside to douche and clean up themselves. Without doing that, they can’t prepare food for their husbands or children. The women who went to the waterside to douche after the explosion came to us to complain of severe pains in their body; tests proved they had pelvic inflammation disease (PID) which was caused by the polluted water,” she averred.
A slowly dying community
It is often said that the face is a mirror of a person’s inner mind and spirit. Madam Bethel Wanatoi personifies that saying. Wearing a dour look on her face, which was brightened up a bit by sparks of anger in her eyes, the businesswoman and Women Leader of Sangana Town, is one very embittered soul. And it’s all thanks to the events of last year that changed her life and that of her hometown forever.
“The community is in bitterness because of what happened to us,” she said sharply, her words rushing out fast as if she is anxious to spit out all that had been burdening her mind. “We want the authorities and the oil company responsible for the gas explosion to come see us, to help us because our current situation is bad – our health is bad. Do you know up till now no medical team has been sent to examine us since the incident of last year? We want to know why!” she said firmly.
“Many of us are sick and dying and our health system here in the community is not good. When our people fall sick here, they can’t get treatment at the health centre due to lack of drugs. In the process of transferring them to Yenagoa, which is about two hours away by boat, some die on the way. We are gradually dying here. We need help.”
A visit to the Primary Health Centre, located within the premises of Sangana Secondary School, confirmed her words about the state of healthcare delivery in the community.
With the serious health challenges facing the town’s residents resulting from the gas explosion, one would expect to see a standard, well equipped health centre to take care of the pressing health needs of the people. This centre, the only one in the community and environs is sadly lacking in nearly every aspect of what a good health facility should be.
Unlike most hospitals which often bustle with medical personnel, patients, visitors and others, the centre bore a forlorn look like an orphan bereft of family. An old, abandoned ‘boat clinic’ purposely designed to operate in riverine areas like Sangana welcomed one to the centre. Inside were empty wards with a few unmade beds, consulting rooms with no doctors, nurses or patients and the place totally devoid of that pervasive antiseptic smell most hospitals are famous for.
A ‘ghost’ hospital would be an apt description of the place, the nurse was teasingly told, to which she smiled wryly and concurred: “I’m the only one here. There’s a doctor attached to the centre but he doesn’t come all the time. Medical staff don’t like working here because of the remoteness of this place. Anyone they transfer here leaves within a short time.”
Due to the situation, she stated patients avoid visiting the centre because as she put it: “What’s the point coming here when there are no drugs or staff to attend to them?”
Many who fall sick in the community, she revealed, resort to self medication or go the traditional way through the use of herbs, roots and other local concoctions.
‘No fish in the water again’
A mostly fishing and agrarian community, Sangana and its adjoining villages and hamlets are famous for their plenty seafood which drew buyers from different parts of the state, neighbouring states and beyond. Its vantage position surrounded on almost all sides by water including the mighty Atlantic Ocean, made fish and other marine life plentiful and not hard to catch.
With their fishing and trading endeavours, the people were able to send their children to school, build homes and live a fairly decent life.
“We can no longer catch good fish from the rivers and creeks,” Wanatoi lamented, adding that the gas explosion killed all the fish. “We saw plenty of dead fish floating on the water. We are a fishing community but we now have to get iced (frozen) fish from Yenagoa and Port- Harcourt. You see our situation? From a big producer of fish to importer,” she said, shaking her head sadly.
Besides killing the fish, the gas also affected farmlands and crops according to the Women Leader. “Our plants don’t grow well. When we harvest our crops like cassava, what we see is watery cassava. But because of hunger, we were forced to eat the bad crops which affected our health, causing stomach upsets and other ailments.”
It was the same hunger that drove the people to consume the dead polluted fish too as Ibiawor explained. “We were hungry because the gas killed the fishes in the water which affected our livelihoods. So, we had no choice but eat the dead fish which made us sick,” she said. They however stopped eating the polluted fish when some officials who came from Yenagoa told them to stop.
While calling for help from the authorities, Ibiawor said, many of the people had been rendered jobless because the gas did not just deplete fish stock in the water, but destroyed fishing gear.
“All our fishing nets and boats have been destroyed by the gas. Please, tell government to help us with money to replace our equipment because we don’t have money as we can no longer fish. We need help,” she cried.
On a stroll round the community, despondency could be seen on the faces of most residents. The once vibrant town wore a dull mien, with many residents including able bodied youths simply lounging, chatting and watching the world go by.
Emmanuel Hezekaiah, a young graduate of Geography and Environmental Management from the Niger Delta University, Yenagoa, is one of such idle youths in the community. We met him at noon, chilling under a tree with a couple of friends, a few metres away from Sangana beach where the incessant roar of the waves from the ocean acted as a noisy backdrop to their desultory conversation.
He had a lot to say about the goings on in the community particularly the pollution as well as the erosion that is also affecting the town badly.
‘I’m a graduate and at my age, I don’t have a job,” he said. When he could not get a job relating to his field of study, he took to fishing but with the pollution, even that is no longer possible. “I was doing fishing work and now pollution has killed all the fish. So, what do they want us to do now? As a man I’ve to take care of my family and parents too, but how can I do that with no job or means of livelihood?” he queried.
‘They don’t see us as human beings’
In his years practising as an environmentalist, Ayibatonye Koki, an indigene of Sangana has seen and dealt with a lot of environmental issues. But the gas incident still leaves him baffled. He is particularly puzzled at the response of the oil company whose rig exploded and caused all the environmental damage to Sangana and environs.
Said he: “Immediately the explosion happened last year, Conoil evacuated all their staff, first to Sangana then later to Yenagoa. But they failed to evacuate the people of this community, thereby exposing us to the danger they were running away from. They left us here to face the danger alone. So, why were we not evacuated? Are we not human beings too?”
To Koki, since the company accepted responsibility for the gas explosion and the fallout, it was left to them to do the needful by the community.
As he stated: “Conoil is the parent company operating the rig. Normally, when incidents like these occur, the company responsible will visit the affected community. But as we speak, no one from the company has visited Sangana to even say – ‘we are sorry, it’s one of the operational hazards; it has happened, but we will take responsibility, ‘we will do something.’ But nobody from Conoil or Adriatic has visited Sangana. We don’t know why, we expected them to visit us but no one has come. We are friendly, hospitable people; we took them as one of our own, we expected them to reciprocate this gesture but it wasn’t done and we don’t know why.”
Another grouse of the community is the absence of a medical team sent down to check the health of the people. “When we met some representatives of the company in Yenagoa, it was agreed that a health team will be sent to Sangana community to check the health status of the people due to the gas explosion, to ascertain the damage to the system of the residents of the town after inhaling all that gas and eating the fish full of gas. Till now, no one has come to check us.”
Besides all that, was the issue of a clean up of the community. Koki said seven months after the explosion, no cleanup of their polluted rivers and creeks had been done. “The last time the company came, they claimed they had done cleanup on the rig,” said Koki, adding, “And we asked them, what about the community? Because their workers stay on the rig, they cleaned it up for them and neglected Sangana town. This is our ancestral home, we don’t have any other place to go, if this place is destroyed, then where do we go?”
Another issue that has drawn the ire of the people of Sangana was the thorny matter of compensation. Months after the explosion, no single compensation has been paid despite the promises made after the incident happened.
Reuben Preboye is the Chairman of the CDC, a community development outfit. In a tone filled with frustration, he narrated the cat and mouse game the company had been playing with the community since November last year when the gas explosion occurred. “We were told by the oil company a week after the incident that they were going to get back to us. Months later, we have not heard anything from them. As at today, we are helpless. No reply from them, no scheduling of meetings. Nothing” he said. He noted that due to the shoddy way the company had treated the community, the relationship with the oil company was deteriorating, a fact exacerbated by the failure of Conoil to keep to previous agreements they had made with the community.
“When the oil rig came in 2019, negotiations and agreements were reached; unfortunately, the company failed to keep their own side of the agreement. We’ve reached out to them to keep to the agreement but to no avail. That anger against the company was already there before the gas explosion ocurred,” he stated.
Speaking on the compensation issue, Koki noted: “It’s something that shouldn’t be swept under the carpet. It’s clear by all environmental laws that compensation needs to be paid so we don’t know why Conoil hasn’t come to Sangana to negotiate for compensation. The last time the Oil and Gas committee met with them, they said we will talk about compensation later.
We are still waiting up til now (May). I don’t know if they want us all to die so that our children who didn’t know what happened will come negotiate with them.”
From all indications, the residents of the town are unanimous in their condemnation of the terrible way the aftermath of the gas explosion incident was handled by the oil company They believe that as a major oil and gas producing community, they deserved better treatment from both the oil companies operating in their community as well as the government whose coffers are being filled daily from proceeds from resources siphoned from their ancestral lands.
As Koki pointed out: “Sangana is host to six major oil producing companies; we haven’t seen any benefit of this. We don’t have light, we buy diesel ourselves to power the generator for some hours and it’s not daily because diesel is expensive.
It’s a shame that with all that we are contributing to the nation’s economy we are suffering like this. It’s unacceptable.”
We don’t even have a road to our community. It takes hours by boat from Yenagoa to get to Sangana. We need development and government presence in Sangana. We need more support in terms of infrastructure from the government and the oil companies operating in our community.”
After many months of waiting for some sort of succour from the oil company that destroyed their environment as well as the government at different levels, it seems the patience of the people is wearing thin. Findings show there are already grumblings and restiveness in the community about their shoddy treatment by the oil company. Nelson Gotonor, a resident threw more light on this: “It’s so annoying that the company has done nothing about it, neither compensated us or cleaned up our polluted environment. We thank God our youths have been calm or something else would have happened. Our elders and Chiefs intervened or it would have been a different story. We are not happy at all. We’ve waited enough. Let them do something before things get out of hand,” he stated emphatically.
Desperate cry for help
That the current situation of the people of Sangana is dire is putting it mildly. They need serious assistance in so many areas including good healthcare delivery, financial support, provision of infrastucture like roads, good, potable water, electricity and so on.
“We are not asking for too much. All we want is fair treatment and justice,” Wanatoi maintained. Noting that the explosion has destroyed their main sources of livelihoods, she said the people have become pauperised and therefore need financial support to survive. “They (the government and oil company) should assist us financially to empower us as we can’t fish or farm again because of pollution. The suffering is too much,” she lamented.
Adding his voice to the plea for help, Koki said: “For now, we don’t make good catches because of the damage to the environment by oil pollution and spillage. Government should look into it and find out what is causing low fish catch in our water. Because of this, our people have been exposed to poverty, we are very poor now, we can’t afford our daily needs. We can’t even afford our fishing gears; we now buy our fishing gears on credit and before we can finish payment, the gears are worn out. Poverty is ravaging us.”
Serina Awari, a business woman and fisherwoman is of the view that government should come to the aid of the community as quickly as possible because as she said: “Our suffering is too much. We need help o!” She pointed out that though Sangana was surrounded by water, the residents had none to drink. “We drink well water which is often polluted by oil spillage. We need good potable water so we don’t have to drink polluted water which affects our health. Some of us are forced to buy ‘pure’ (sachet) water that they bring from Yenagoa which is expensive. Not many of us can even afford it,” she stated.
Efforts to get the side of Conoil on the matter proved abortive as their spokesperson, a Richard Edegbai who was called severally refused to take the calls. He did not respond to text messages sent to the phone.
