Years of coal mining in some communities in Enugu State and attendant negligence of those mining sites are now leading to dangerous environmental degradation that threatens those communities. In this report, Ben Aroh, who visited Enugu North, Udi and Ezeagu local government areas of Enugu State where the mines are located, captures the fears of the residents and threats posed by the abandoned coal mines.
Mercy, Anthony Onoh’s wife, says they see every day as the last for their house because the approaching erosion occasioned by the abandoned coal mines recently pulled down the perimetre fence of the house. Several privatization attempts−to salvage the coal mining sector−including the one by former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 up until 2004, did not bring back the fortunes of the once-flourishing industry. All these, including the selling-off of its assets by the NCC to settle debts owed its staff members, meant that the mines were forever abandoned.
Their farmlands have equally been taken over by the environmental degradation that the abandoned coal mines have brought. This hitherto agrarian community has become a ghost of itself as the landslides spread meteorically. The natives adopt various erosion-control measures to curtail it, but it keeps spreading. “We are worried that the underground tunnels that have been there for many years may cave in one day,” Sheddy Ozoene, a native of the village, said.
Agu Gab Agu, a professor of law and secretary of the group, says the mines were shut hurriedly without due processes. Agu blamed the Nigerian government for failing to do the right thing in reclaiming the affected areas at the time the coals were shut down. “Nobody can discountenance that the problem of Ugwu Onyeama may be part of this development. If it passed through 9th Mile, with the ongoing development there, it means that one day, it will just go down. Most of those lands may not be useful to the owners again. They ought to be restituted.”
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