The National Assembly and the Federal Ministry of Environment are presently putting finishing touches to a bill meant to ban the production of plastics in the country.
Tolulope Odebiyi, a member of the Senate Committee on Marine Transport, disclosed this in Lagos at the launch of the Maritime Action Plan for Marine Litter and Plastics Management in Nigeria by the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA).
Odebiyi, the brain behind the proposed bill, who represented the chairman of the committee, Danjuma Goje, said the bill would be harmonised with input from the Federal Ministry of Environment, to make a holistic law that would impose tough sanctions on the production of organic polymers.
According to him, the National Assembly was solidly behind NIMASA in the implementation of the action plan, which foresees the elimination of land-based sources of marine litter within five years.
“NIMASA has taken the lead in ensuring that our waterways and bodies are clean, safe, and a vital source of economic activity for us. The issue is getting to an alarming state such that Nigeria is spending billions of naira tiding up the environment while many have been making billions of naira contributing to the plastic pollution menace,” he said.
He said that people cannot continue to generate pollution, clog the waterways, cause erosion, flooding and cause all kinds of problems.
Dakuku Peterside, director-general of NIMASA, decried that Nigeria was among the 20 countries generating more than 80 percent of the land-based plastic wastes that ends up in the oceans.
He said the event was organised to raise public awareness about the deleterious effects of marine pollution and chart a national roadmap on solution to the menace.
“The solution to this global challenge are multiple and require consideration of a systematic approach to the various sources generating the pollution, both land- and sea-based contributors, and a combination of intervention in different sectors and at different levels,” Peterside said.
He said that NIMASA has engaged Marine Litter Marshals across coastal communities and littoral areas as a pilot scheme to clean up identified marine litter hotspots, adding that marine litter sensitisation has also been carried out in several littoral communities.
