Expert Alerts On Environmental Degradation

An environmentalist, Mr Emenike Eme, on Thursday advised Nigerians to be wary of dangers associated with environmental degradation.
Eme told newsmen in Abuja that the eco-system had been destabilised mainly through environmental misbehaviour of people.
He said the flooding of homes, settlements, and farmlands as well as the scarcity of food, the increasing crime rate and untimely death of man, plants and animals were all the result of progressive environmental degradation.
“Nigerians have to wake up to the reality of the time and we must take our future in our hands, we must secure our environment today for posterity.
“The truth remains that if we don’t do anything about our environment and if we don’t do it fast, there may be no environment for the future that means, we are helping to extinct humanity.
“Some people may think this is a fallacy but that is the truth; we heard of the flood in the USA, so many people missing and the things come on and on.
“We advise Nigerians to be aware of their environment, be aware of the impact of your actions on the environment because such actions though they may be pleasing to you at the moment, but they are detrimental to the environment. ’’
According to him, the worsening environmental conditions do call for collective and localised response of all persons to save both humanity and planet earth.
Eme who is the Coordinator-General of the Environmental Safety Corps (ESCORP), a Non- Governmental Organisation, said that the organisation would partner with relevant stakeholders to create awareness on environmental issues.
He said that the 7,000 environmental health officers in the country were grossly inadequate for a population of 168 million Nigerians.
The officer said there was urgent need to complement the services of environmental health officers through organised environmental corps like ESCORP.
“They are so many youths out there who unfortunately have become tools for the devil, these ones sometimes if you reach out to them, they can come back and they may want to invest their lives in something meaningful like what we are doing.
“Why we want to collaborate with the NYSC (National Youth Service Corps) is because of the people we recruit, we train them and for this training to be effective, we have to camp them, during the period of training.
“We are planning to collaborate with the NYSC, if for nothing else; we can use their training camps when they don’t have corps members in the camps.
“We use the camps to run training for environmental foot soldiers; we call them environmental safety marshals, that is the essence of the collaboration we are seeking with the NYSC.’’
Eme, however, told NAN that the organisation would engage some youths in farming, to empower them for self-sufficiency, adding that some orgnisations had already indicated interest to partner with ESCORP to achieve that goal.
He said the programme tagged “ Land brigade’’ was an attempt to make agriculture attractive to youths, saying that if they find it interesting, them will embrace farming.