Adegoroye blames governance failure for environmental challenges

Adegoroye

Environmental expert and retired Federal Permanent Secretary, Dr Goke Adegoroye has attributed the recurrent environmental challenges in communities and cities across the country to retrogression in the nation’s civil service, bureaucracy and governance system.

Adegoroye, affirmed this at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) School of Environmental Technology’s 2017 annual lecture, which is the 9th in the series, titled: “From Research To Policy And Vision To Action, The Challenge of Environmental Management in Nigeria.

He said it is pertinent to discuss the challenge of retrogression that seems to have taken over governance at all levels and across every sector of national development, lamenting that indeed, this is having adverse effects on every aspect of human endeavours in the country.

The topic, according him, was borne out of his personal introspection and to underscore the unique position and potent power of research as the cornerstone of environmental policy and programmes, so as to enable the academic communities assess the effectiveness of their research within the context of the effectiveness of other key actors.

Alongside the aforementioned, he noted that they would also assess other interventions in the environmental management chain, and to identify the challenges and chart the way forward.

The one-time Director General of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA), said the lecture was the result of his three-month study of the current state of our nation’s environmental management, what is amiss and what needs to be done to move it forward.

He said; “after carrying out a critical analysis of what has happened in our environmental management over the past 25-30 years, including the notable increase in institutional establishment from one agency in 1989 to a full-fledged ministry, four agencies in 2017 and the plethora of regulations that have been churned out by those agencies; he concluded that the environment sector has been grossly short-changed.”