Challenges of Enforcing the Polluter Pays Principle as an Environmental Protection Tool in the Nigerian Oil-Producing Community

Abstract

Nigeria’s oil-producing community has been ravaged perpetually by the continued deleterious
activities of oil exploration and production. The people live daily with the resource curse, lack in
the midst of plenty, the mixed feelings of squalor and squander as poverty leaves permanent scowls
on the angry and frustrated faces of their inhabitants. One prominent legal mechanism for
achieving the environmental restoration of their polluted community is the ‘Polluter Pays
Principle’ that seeks to ensure that the company that occasions the pollution of the environment
be made by law to pay for such pollution to the pollution victims and clean-up of the polluted area
as a way of compensation and reparation of the polluted environment. This paper takes a cursory
look at the internal workings of the consequential principle and the challenges of enforcing it. It
concludes that the principle has not been particularly effective as an environmental protection
instrument in Nigeria and makes a set of recommendations capable of achieving the environmental
protection of Nigeria’s oil-producing community.