The President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki has called on stakeholders in the environment sector to shun ethnic differences in tackling erosion across the country.
Saraki made the call at a one-day public hearing on the Bill for an Act to Establish Erosion Control and Prevention Commission 2017 in Abuja on Tuesday.
He said the need for concerted effort to tackle the menace, followed its overwhelming negative impact on the entire nation.
According to him, erosion is a wide spread phenomenon that cuts across all parts of the country and must be viewed holistically rather than along ethnic lines.
“The properties and lives that have been lost to erosion in the past five years alone are unfathomable.
“We must therefore not continue to be reactionary in our dealings with our environment.
“We must have in place policies and strategies to protect our environment from environmental menaces,’’ he said.
The Senate president, who was represented by the Leader of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan commended the Committee on Environment for organising the public hearing.
He also commended the sponsor of the bill, Sen. Hope Uzodinma (PDP-Imo) for coming up with the bill at a time when erosion posed a big challenge in the country.
“It is a bill that is dear to me and I have keen interest in seeing it passed and signed into law.
“Having served as the Chairman of the Committee on Environment in the last Senate, I was privileged to extensively negotiate and deliberate on a similar bill.
“In that capacity, I had extensive negotiation with the World Bank which exposed the severity of the environmental degradation caused by erosion.
“This deepened my knowledge and realisation of the threat we face.’’
The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment, Oluremi Tinubu, said the importance of the hearing could not be undermined.
She said there was an urgent need to prevent and control damages caused by erosion to the environment.
Tinubu decried the havoc caused by erosion in almost every sphere of life, adding that millions of Naira and valuable properties had been lost to the devastating effect of erosion.
“It is a known fact that erosion is one of the natural environmental problems facing us in Nigeria as a country and Africa as a whole.
“The menace is one of the major causes of degradation of the environment which is currently destroying our grassland and farmlands.
“Erosion affects food production and humanity, damages socio economic structures and demolishes the eco system and micro economic framework.
“It also damages water supply sources both in rural and urban areas which will consequently affect the larger population.
“Each one of the 36 states of the federation including FCT suffers from one form of erosion problem or the other,’’ she said.
The chairperson urged participants at the hearing to make constructive inputs that would ensure the passage and signing into law of the bill.
The bill she said when passed, would positively impact on the environment, while determining the desirability of creating an erosion commission.
She further called on the Federal Government and major stakeholders to encourage the planting of more trees as well as manage drainage systems to ensure that the problem was brought to an end.
The bill seeks to establish a commission that would take up the responsibility of prevention, control and management of erosion in the country. (NAN)
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