Lost history · 1987–1988; 2017
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A white man said the drums held fertiliser materials, and he would pay rent for a long time. A visiting nephew saw them stacked in his uncle's compound just before New Year. Months later he read what they really were.
Koko is a fishing town on the water in Delta State, in what is now Warri North. It was founded by Nanna of Itsekiri, the great merchant chief, and it is one of the largest Itsekiri communities. It is also a place people pass through. Ilaje travellers from Ondo, Ijaw people from Egbema, and Itsekiri people living along the rivers of Edo State all move through Koko, because many of their towns can only be reached that way.
In 2018, thirty years after the event that made Koko known around the world, the Punch newspaper published an interview with a man who was there at the start. Lucky Oritsetojumi Akaruese is a professor at the University of Port Harcourt and a former national president of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. He was born and raised in Koko, and he still keeps a country house there.
His memory begins with a family visit. Late in December 1987, about two days before New Year's Day, he went to see Sunday Nanna, a cousin of his late mother whom he called Uncle Sunday. In his uncle's compound he saw heaps of drums.
He asked what they were. His uncle told him a white man had brought them from Europe through the Koko port. They held raw materials, the white man had said, for a fertiliser factory that was going to be built at Asaba. The white man had also promised that more materials would keep coming for a very long time. For Uncle Sunday that meant one thing: his compound would be rented as a store for years, and the rent would keep coming too.
At the time Akaruese was teaching at the new University of Cross River State in Uyo, now the University of Uyo. A few months later he read in the papers what those drums really held. It was toxic waste. He admits he hardly knew what the words meant then, but the news shocked him.
He remembered a few small details, too. The drums gave off a smell, though a mild one. And his uncle had told him something strange: at night, the "chemical for fertiliser" would give off heat.
According to Akaruese, it was not the officials at the port who raised the alarm. The waste had come through Koko's seaport, which belonged to the federal government, with its officials' full approval. It was some Nigerian students in Italy, he said, who exposed what was going on, and a Nigerian newspaper then carried the story. He thought it was the Sunday Guardian.
What followed was loud. The dumping drew condemnation around the world. The public anger at home pushed the government to move fast, and it succeeded in getting the Italian government and the company behind the shipment to take the waste back out of Nigeria.
But Akaruese did not remember the government kindly. He was, in his own words, not happy and mostly disappointed. The country was then under military rule, led by General Ibrahim Babangida. In Koko, he said, people only ever heard rumours that the Italian government had paid money to Nigeria, and that the military rulers and civilians close to them kept it for themselves. These were rumours, and he called them that. What he could say for certain was smaller and sadder. To his knowledge, nobody in Koko was ever compensated, and nobody was ever punished.
The only person who seemed to pay a price was the man with the drums in his yard. Security agents arrested Sunday Nanna, Akaruese said, and took him to Lagos for about a week. When the interviewer asked whether his uncle had ever felt pain or strange symptoms, Akaruese said only that his uncle was gone, that he did not want to talk about it, and that naturally it had affected him.
He was careful not to claim more than he knew. He would not guess at how many people were harmed or whether anyone died, saying those were questions for doctors, chemists and water scientists. But he pointed out two worrying things. When the drums were being lifted off the ships, some fell into the river. And Koko is in the rain belt, where you hit water if you dig barely a metre down, so rain falling on stored waste month after month could easily have reached the groundwater.
The story did not end in 1988. In February 2017, nearly thirty years later, people in Koko raised the alarm again. This time, a local company had dumped waste in the town.
Akaruese described what he had heard of it. The waste was partly buried and partly stored in tanks, and one of the tanks had exploded the year before he spoke, damaging the roof of a building. If you drive to Koko by road, he said, you have to pass the site.
The Delta State government had first said the waste was not toxic. Then the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, NOSDRA, called a meeting of stakeholders in Abuja and said that it was toxic, but that the company, which he named as Ebenco Limited, should be given time to take it away. NOSDRA did not say how much time, or where the waste should go. Nobody, he said, was talking about prosecution.
He was harsh about his own people too. He accused some community leaders, elders and youths alike, of caring more about the money that came with the dumping than about the danger. Since toxic waste does not kill you at once, he said, some reasoned that they might as well take the cash.
He also recalled a promise from 1988. While the news was still hot, people had said the government would set up a centre, with a hospital, to watch how the waste affected the land, the water and the people. As far as he knew, nothing was ever built.
Asked how Koko people feel now, he said they carry a lot of regret. They feel cheated and left without protection. They still remember the pain, he said, and they remember that some people profited from their misfortune.
