{"id":4967,"date":"2023-09-28T09:04:40","date_gmt":"2023-09-28T09:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/?p=4967"},"modified":"2023-09-28T09:05:01","modified_gmt":"2023-09-28T09:05:01","slug":"4967","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/?p=4967","title":{"rendered":"IOCs Divestment Campaigns in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"As part of the actions in line with the African People\u2019s Counter COP 2023 (APCC), Environmental Rights Action\/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA\/FoEN) organized a Webinar on IOCs Divestment Campaigns in Africa to uncover some of the issues surrounding the sale of assets by the International Oil Companies.<\/p>\n

The discussions which were held on Tuesday the 28th of September 2023 featured over 45 environmental activists and climate justice groups from Nigeria, Togo, and South Africa who faulted International Oil Companies (IOCs) over the misinterpretation of divestments in Africa.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the webinar, the Executive Director of ERA\/FoEN, Barrister Chima Williams, said the virtual meeting was targeted at building synergy among groups in Africa with a view to challenging the divestment processes by engaging communities, CSOs, and media practitioners to stop the divestment processes. While elaborating on the divestment processes in Nigeria, Williams pointed out that the IOCs were divesting from onshore to shallow waters and deep offshore where their activities cannot be easily monitored by environmental groups, insisting that they were doing so to evade responsibility for the oil spills, flares, and other negative environment impacts on the host communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way the IOCs are implementing the divestment is very wrong and very bad. Divestments must follow laid-down global principles and procedures. The IOCs are not at liberty to divest until they restore the environment and clean up the mess they created before divesting. This is our simple campaign.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Williams also pointed out that the Nigeria campaign on Deepening Conversations for Review of International IOCs Divestment Processes and the Nigeria Energy Transition Plan under the Energy Transition Fund (ETF) seeks to escalate growing agitations for policy-level intervention to address the anomalies in the Niger Delta, particularly IOCs failure to take responsibility for the cost of oil in impacted communities.<\/p>\n

He further explained that the campaign on divestment, which started in 2021, has strengthened civil society and there is now a growing advocacy for policy-level laws to halt new oil exploration activities and new oil fields. According to him, a major legal precedent was achieved by stopping Shell and Exxon Mobil from divesting onshore holdings pending a suit instituted by impacted
\ncommunities in Bayelsa State in the heart of the Niger Delta region.<\/p>\n

Giving a presentation on the global view of IOC Divestments, the Programme Manager Administration of ERA\/FoEN and Project Coordinator, Climate Justice, and Energy, Friends of the Earth Africa (FoEA), Ubrei-Joe Mariere, explained that there are about 20 processes that companies must fulfill for a divestment process can be deemed complete, including transition planning, due diligence and legal consultations, among others.<\/p>\n

He however stressed that the processes are not followed by Shell, TotalEnergies, and Eni in their divestment plans in the Niger Delta, maintaining that the IOCs were deceiving the government and members of the public by claiming that they were divesting to curtail global warming and climate change. Ubrei-Joe revealed that the Leave Oil in the Soil Campaign championed by ERA\/FoEN and the global climate justice federation was a strategy to put pressure on governments to pull resources away from dirty energy and invest instead in clean energy or renewable energy projects.<\/p>\n

Senior Manager of Climate Energy and Justice Campaign, Groundwork South Africa, \u00a0 Yegeshi Moodley, who spoke on IOC divestments in South Africa said the country has had its fair share of misrepresentation of divestment even though Section 24 of the country\u2019s constitution affirms the right to the environment. She noted that companies like TotalEnergies, Renergen, and Rhino Oil and Gas were at the forefront of fossil fuel projects that local communities are now resisting.
\nMoodley stressed the fact that most of the mineral resources belt in South Africa including the offshore have been partitioned and carved up by IOCs encouraged and protected by the South African governments, adding however that farmers and community people had been strategically challenged.<\/p>\n

\"\"Similarly, the Executive Director, of the Centre for Environmental Justice in Togo, Kwami Kpondzo, pointed out that the divestment engagements in Togo have a particular uniqueness because the country\u2019s government believes that the energy mix must include fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

He added that fishermen and communities around where extractive activities take place are now at the forefront of demands that the government remain committed only to transiting to clean and affordable renewable energy sources.<\/p>\n

The Webinar was attended by climate activists, grassroots communities, and media representatives across the African continent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of the actions in line with the African People\u2019s Counter COP 2023 (APCC), Environmental Rights Action\/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA\/FoEN) organized a Webinar on IOCs Divestment Campaigns in Africa to uncover some of the issues surrounding the sale of assets by the International Oil Companies. The discussions which were held on Tuesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,32,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-era-in-the-news","category-event","category-press-releases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4967"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4972,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4967\/revisions\/4972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erafoen.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}