 My name is Nemo Basi, I'm a direct organization in Nigeria called Health of Mother Earth Foundation. One thing that I've seen in my years of struggle is that even something like environmental pollution is not neutral, it's not politically neutral. It's a political activity because if transnational corporations pollute your environment or erode or diminish your biodiversity, they're actually assorting you so that you can become dependent on them. So it's a way of grabbing your resources and taking away your ability to defend yourself and to take care of your own needs. When your life loops are destroyed, then you become dependent on jobs that would not pay you, give you the kind of life that really has meaning. Destructive behavior of oil and mining companies is the same all over the world. I've never seen a place where they behave in a way that is acceptable. And so there's nothing like sustainable mining or sustainable oil extraction, sustainable usage or extraction of gas. They all mean displacement, they mean human rights abuses, they mean they really damage the economy and the environment. In the particular context in which I work, which is in Nigeria context, in regard to oil extraction, oil has been extremely destructive. Sixty years of oil has meant extreme pollution of water bodies, creeks, river streams, lands and even the air because there are gas furnaces burning for decades, nonstop pumping very toxic air into the atmosphere. Now communities have resisted this. They've resisted by litigating, going to court against the oil companies. There are many cases in Nigerian courts that cases against companies like Shell, in the Hague, in the UK. There have been cases against Chevron in the United States. There is a case building up right now against any in Italy. And so the people have been following very peaceful resistance to these degrading activities of the oil corporations. But this has not been very easy because the entire Nigeria has been militarized. So much so that you have so many security services, agencies around. But that actually translates to insecurity. So the more you have security agents, the more you feel insecure. This is the reality of the communities in the oil sector, in the oil field communities. And if you look back to the early 90s when the Ogoni people first began to mobilize to show that this content against the degrading activities of Shell in their communities. The company working with the military dictatorship involved this. Actually, I brought about a kind of oppression where hundreds of people lost their lives, killed. And then the most widely known case was the arrest of the group that has been known as Ogoni Nine, which is Ken Salawiwa, and eight other Ogoni leaders who were held by the military and executed on 10th November 1995. Why were they arrested? The whole thing was to pacify the Ogoni people. It made them to silence them so that they would not make any demands on the system. So the system, which is the oil cooperation on government, has been totally against the interest of local communities and the interest of the environment itself. And so in 1993 when the people of Ogoni rose and said, we've got enough, they really brought about a turnaround in environmental activism in Nigeria, environmental justice advocacy in Nigeria, community mobilizing in Nigeria. But again, this ended in a very sad note in 1995 when these heroes of the people were Zeguta. Shell was expelled from Ogoni in 1993. And the Zeguta Ken Salawiwa in 1995, hoping that this would open the way for them to go back. But till date, the Ogoni people are standing strong against the reopening of those wars. So Shell is unable to go back to Ogoni line to extract good oil. Now, so this is one aspect. The other aspect has been there's been a lot of divide and rule tactics against various ethnic nationalities in the region. But again, people have become wise to this. So people have declarations and demands. Do you Ogoni have the Ogoni Bill of Rights? Do you have the Kama Declaration? Or do you Ogoni Bill of Rights? Do you Robo people in Nigeria have their own demands? And so people have actually documented their demands, which are political, cultural, economic for rights, for people to live in dignity in their own environment, to be able to carry out their livelihoods. But again, with all the mobilizing and all the struggle, it's just the highway to freedom is still long apparently. But I believe that one day we'll get to the top of the mountain, because the people are resolved and committed to stand strong against this kind of misbehavior in their territories. And the good thing again is that the resistance is spreading, and there are connections with other communities in other countries in Africa, with countries in Latin America, in parts of Asia, and even in the global north. So global resistance against oil extraction. In terms of resistance against mining itself, there's a network called Yes to Life, No to Mining. People are saying we want to live. Mining does not support life. For oil we have Oil Watch International, which has groupings in Latin America, Oil Watch Africa, Oil Watch South East Asia, and of course globally. And so all this brings about spaces for people to share ideas, share their pens, share strategies, and stand strong against this kind of thing that we witness in the oil field communities. So we've seen a situation where a chief economist of the World Bank wrote some years ago that underpopulated countries in Africa are grossly under-polluted, and that it makes impeccably economic sense to pollute, to dump toxic waste in those countries. So we have that kind of political philosophy that then allows you to become an economic outlaw anywhere in the world. And then we see the case of many countries in the global south. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and early 90s, which were designed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, actually helped to destroy the re-culture, destroy public investment and productivity, diminish the capacity of public sector to take care of the citizens, reduce the availability of good education, health services, and the safetyness for the people. All this has been done to destroy the economy fabric and weaken the webs of resistance in countries that have been recolonized more or less. So we have a clear case of neocolonialism on the platform of neoliberalism where everything that would make a country resilient is turned on its head. Don't protect your people. Don't educate your people. Don't grant basic rights to workers. Don't protect your environment. Feed the metropolis. Just keep on being the storehouse. And when you look at all this, you just get to think that sometimes the oppressors and the exploiters would like to see large territories devoid of poor human population. They would just be storehouses for resources. And this is what we're fighting against, because we have a right to live, not just to live, but to live in dignity. And Mother Earth has a right to maintain her natural cycles so we can't allow continuous brigandage to go on unchallenged.