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Days ago, it emerged that 163 persons, most of them children, had died in Zamfara since March, from suspected lead poisoning. The victims were said to be mostly illegal gold miners, working in an area with high concentrations of lead. Apart from the dead, hundreds have also fallen ill.

Only days before that news emerged, hundreds of persons were hospitalized in Kaduna State after being exposed to poisonous fumes from a mysterious gas cylinder. According to news reports, the toxic gas was released when a welder attempted to open a cylinder. The gas rendered many of its victims unconscious, and affected even rescue personnel as well.

In a country with an age-old disdain for collecting statistics and monitoring trends, these incidents, tragically, are only a tip of the iceberg. The effects of most will not be sudden as in the above instances, but drawn out; slow deaths that no one will ever get to the bottom of.

Incidents like this are to be expected in a society like ours; it goes beyond ascribing the term lawless to the ease with which governance is conducted without any awareness of its basic requirements. The questions on the mind of any right-thinking Nigerian are these: where was the Zamfara State Government all the while a multitude of its citizens carried out illegal mining activities on its territory; and how did it escape the attention of the authorities that the land was contaminated with lead?

Viewers of the (in)famous BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos will recall that some of its major characters eked a living from setting fire to copper wires in a bid to retrieve pure copper which is then sold for profit. At least one of them in fact acknowledged that the venture posed serious health risks.

It is already well known that Nigeria is a major dumping ground for electronic waste (e-waste) from the West and from Asia – obsolete and often unsalvageable computers, mobile phones, TV sets, refrigerators, etc.
Lagos’ Alaba Market, reputed to be the biggest electronics market in West Africa, is an infinite storehouse of disused electronics from within and outside Nigeria. Much of this junk is pulled apart and smelted by a teeming army of otherwise jobless Nigerians, with the aim of extracting – in crude ways – valuable but highly toxic metals. This crude recycling is in all cases a death sentence, poisoning the soil, the air and the bodies of victims; increasing the likelihood of heart and respiratory diseases, cancer and genetic mutations.

On May 29 the Nigerian Customs Service seized a vessel carrying eight containers of e-waste, which arrived at the Tincan Island Port. Only in April yet another ship was detained at Tincan Island Port. Among its contents were containers of lead batteries. The fact that these ships keep showing up in our ports should be sufficient cause for alarm in government circles. It appears that potential dumpers of hazardous waste have identified Nigeria as an easy prey. They must have strong reasons for coming to that alarming conclusion.
We call on the National Environmental Standards Regulation and Enforcement Agency (NESREA) and other relevant government agencies and law enforcement bodies to step up their surveillance. Proactive steps need to be taken regarding these scandals. We cannot afford to wait for these ships to show up on our shores before we take action.

Few Nigerians will forget the Koko tragedy, in which thousands of tonnes of toxic waste originating from Italy were dumped in Koko, present-day Delta State, polluting the air and soil and causing widespread sickness and death. But not many Nigerians will know that Probo Koala, the ship which dumped tonnes of toxic waste in Abidjan in 2006, killing several persons and making tens of thousands of others sick, stopped in Lagos shortly before going on to Abidjan.

Nigeria, it appears, lives perpetually on the edge of disaster. The seeming nonchalance of our authorities gives immense cause for concern. Despite the Zamfara tragedy, we are sure that the illegal mining which led to the death of hundreds (and which also causes the country to lose billions of dollars annually), will continue unhindered, once the dead are buried and the hue and cry has died down. Tragically, Sani Ahmed Yerima, Zamfara State Senator, and one of those who should be spearheading efforts to tackle this disaster, is at the moment caught up in trying to defend his choice of an under-aged wife. Talk of fiddling while the land lies poisoned.

We sympathize with the victims of these disasters, and call on our governments to wake up to their responsibilities. These clearly avoidable tragedies will continue to be inevitable as long as no lessons are learnt from the ones that have already happened.