ouse of Representatives member and Chairman, House Committee on Environment, Mrs. Uche Ekwunife, has challenged?? the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency(NESREA) to come up with creative strategies to make both private and corporate environmental polluters pay for the country’s clean up.
Ekwunife? gave the charge in Abuja? at the 5th National Stakeholders’ Forum on the New Institutional Mechanism for environmental protection and sustainable development in Nigeria.
The forum which was organised by NESREA to mark its 5th year anniversary had as its theme: “Environmental Governance: Transformation in Compliance, Monitoring and Enforcement.”
While challenging the agency to step up its activities, she urged it to go beyond advocacy to proffering solutions to the myriad of environmental challenges confronting the country.
“Beyond the celebrations, it is important for NESREA to understand that the time has come for it to move from posing the environmental question to providing the much needed environmental answers.
“NESREA is programmed by enabling laws to regulate and enforce environmental laws. The agency is positioned by law to generate enough revenue into the federal government coffers which is presently not the case. The time has come for NESREA to come up with creative and imaginative strategies to make both private and corporate environmental polluters pay for our environmental clean-up and protection,” she said.
The House member said that even though the agency was still faced with series of challenges such as lack of baseline information and data, inadequate human and educational capacity, inadequate budgetary provision among others, it could still do more in its mandate of protecting the environment against dispoilation.
Also speaking at the event, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Environment, Dr. Bukola Saraki, said that the time had come for the country to mainstream the issue of environment in its developmental plans.
He said the recent flooding in some parts of the country clearly showed in an unmistakable term that the country must evolve sustainable environmental development initiatives.
Saraki explained that the present National Assembly and the Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology were ready to collaborate with the Ministry of Environment to address some of these environmental challenges.
He said,” The present National Assembly and the Senate Committee on Environment and Ecological is poised than ever before to work with the Ministry of Environment and agencies like NESREA to show leadership and direction towards dealing with these problems.”
According to him, one of such areas of focus was to? embark on a comprehensive review of the environmental laws to strengthen the regulatory intitutions.
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