By: Hadram Hydara
An oil spill into the tributary and riverbank of the Gambia from the country’s main oil reserve in Mandinaring, Kombo East, has reached the Pirang riverbank, on the coast of Kombo East. The threat has been fast approaching the River Gambia.
Reliable sources within Gambia Environmental Alliance (GEA), an umbrella body for civil society and community-based organisations on environmental safety, told The Fatu Network that the spillage has been going on since Saturday and has since been covering a lot of sea area.
“The spillage started when a ship was delivering oil to the Gam Petroleum depot in Mandinaring. So far, the spill has expanded and covered an area of 40 to 50 km of the river coast, which shows you how severe this case is. It is one of the worst cases ever in the Gambia marine environment.”
The sources further went on to emphasise that the oil pollution could be hazardous, especially to the biodiversity along the riverbank, if imminent action is not taken.
“The oil pollution can be very detrimental because it could lead to significant loss of biodiversity along the riverbank. It could also contaminate the freshwater and brackishwater stream flow into the River Gambia, thereby affecting the distribution by causing a massive dieback of mangrove species.”
Asked if he has any knowledge of the Gambia government putting measures into place to curb the situation or as an Environmental body, if his organisation is doing their bit to help, the GEA sources said the government does not seem to be serious about the disaster and that they are just trying to cover it up.
“The government is fully aware and they are the ones trying to cover it up because it involved a foreign vessel. Even the Petroleum Minister visited the site but nothing has been said about mitigation plans to prevent such disasters from happening in the future. The government does not seem to be serious about the disaster as they failed to implement the training they did on oil spillage disaster around 2010 to 2012 when Jammeh was still around.”
Speaking on the impacts of oil spillage on the environment and marine life, Omar Malmo Jr, an Environmental activist and an accredited Multidisciplinary Researcher said oil spillages on cause devastating impacts on the society.
“Spillages are basically pollutions, therefore environmental pollution in one way or the other affects or compromises the environmental quality of every society. So when toxic oil spilled in water like it did in Mandinaring, it would have a significant impact on the marine biodiversity because most of the fish species come into the mangrove crakes to lay their eggs and to spoon so if there is significant oil quantity in this ecologies it would eventually come in contact with the fish species and thereby leading to the death of some these fish, which would reduce their abundance in that ecology. Besides, even if it did not kill the fish but then the fish consumes part of this toxic oil and it finds its way into the food chain and if humans also consume the fish, there are possibilities of causing serious health conditions to humans or even death to people depending on the toxicity level. If people swim in these areas, all of that has to stop simply because it could cause skin problems or even find its way to our respiratory system.”
On the possible damages this could cause the environment, the young environmental activist went on to explain the serious consequences of the spillage happening on land.
“If the spillage happened on land it would actually seep down and it could kill all the micro-organisms in the ground and therefore this land cannot be used for any productive agricultural activity. Also if it seeps down it could get into the ground water thereby polluting the ground water and this is where Gambians get drinking water, which means that if this spillage gets into the ground water it will affect the consumption of water in the Gambia and also agricultural productivity will be highly compromised due to high presence of oil spillages on land. This can have a devastating impact on life and livelihood,” he said.
Speaking on how the government can curb the spillages, Omar urges the government to asked the public to stay away from this site as there is a risk of getting heath issues.
“First, in terms of response, because like I said this is a public health emergency and what needs to be done now is to communicate the public to stay away from this site because if there are other socio-economic activities happening around these areas, it could definitely affect the health of the people that are involved, therefore, people need to avoid the site immediately and the government needs to put up a remedial plan immediately to see how best the spillage could stop. Having all those water depots around our water bodies and all of these things should not, in the first place, been the case. There should be regular monitoring of some these depots or some the activities that are being done along our water ecologies, otherwise, such things would continue to reoccur, but what government needs to do first is to need communicate the masses and of course give information to the people and of course put up signs within these affected areas for people to avoid while the try how best to remedy the situation depending on what is available on the ground.”
Speaking on environmental governance and laws, Omar said the country’s environmental laws in the Gambia are not serving the people and the environmental institutions are not doing as expected.
“When environmental governance is dependent on the bargaining powers of politicians and business people, poor people are left with options to either fight injustice, corruption, violations of rights, and environmental pollution and things like this or live to bear the consequences as per what may. I think the Gambia requires more concentration on environmental governance than any other sector. Our environment is highly volatile to a lot of things and our government is not really concentrating on anything around that, instead the government is really compromising our environmental laws and regulations. But what I could say is, I think the National Assembly needs to look into and ensuring that there is an independent environmental agency that is independent of even the state government to ensure that even government is kept on check and balances. So the National Environmental Agency (NEA) should be given full autonomy to corporate on their own to ensure that there is that environmental consciousness, including government to be punish if they do thing wrongly, otherwise, if you want to leave everything to government they just keep doing what they want to do. All these we are seeing in the Gambia are mastermind not by ordinary citizens but by the government of the Gambia so therefore the government is the biggest violator of our existing environmental laws in the Gambia,” he concluded.
The government is understood to have set up a task force with stakeholders, including NDMA, Environment, PURA, Maritime Agency, Ministry of Petroleum, and GamPetroleum. They will have a meeting today at PURA and then do a joint press release this afternoon.
