ECO-PANDEMICS, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION AND PROTEST IN NIGER DELTA

Abstract

Protest is unavoidable in any environment that is rife with injustice and human rights violation irrespective of space, race and status. The agitation in the Niger Delta is a reaction of the people to human rights violation wrought in the region by oil exploitation. Environmental degradation that is caused by oil spills and gas flares has resulted in the spread of economic and socio-political challenges across the Niger Delta just as the COVID 19 pandemic spreads across the world. While the later received urgent attention and intervention, the former has not despite having been in existence over many decades in the region. This study, therefore, metaphorically conceives the effects of environmental degradation in the Niger Delta as eco-pandemics and aims at investigating the reason why the fictional Niger Delta in Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist has not received the required attention like many parts of the world that were affected by COVID 19 pandemic had, and also to find out why the intervention-seeking strategies of the characters in the text fail to yield desired results. This investigation was carried out through a literary examination of The Activist from an eco-Marxist perspective. This study concludes that, just as the spread of COVID 19 pandemic was urgently checked, the factors responsible for the spread of eco-pandemics in the Niger Delta require to be addressed with a sense of urgency for meaningful progress to be recorded in the region.