Nnimmo Bassey


Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian architect, environmental activist, author and poet, who chaired Friends of the Earth International from 2008 through 2012 and was Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. He was one of Time magazine's Heroes of the Environment in 2009. In 2010, Nnimmo Bassey was named a Laureate of the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2012 he was awarded the Rafto Prize. He serves on the Advisory Board and is Director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, an environmental think tank and advocacy organization.

Work

Bassey was born June 11, 1958. He studied architecture, practiced in the public sector and thereafter continued in private practice. He was active on human rights issues in the 1980s when he served on the Board of Directors of Nigeria's Civil Liberties Organization. In 1993, he co-founded a Nigerian NGO known as Environmental Rights Action in order to advocate, educate and organize around environmental human rights issues in Nigeria. Since 1996, Bassey and Environmental Rights Action led Oilwatch Africa and, beginning in 2006, also led the Global South Network, Oilwatch International, striving to mobilize communities against the expansion of fossil fuels extraction. Bassey has served in the committees of both Oilwatch International and the regional arm, Oilwatch Africa since inception. Oilwatch Africa has membership in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Congo Democratic Republic, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Togo, Kenya, Swaziland, Mozambique, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and others. Membership of Oilwatch International spreads across South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. The Network works to resist destructive oil, gas and coal extraction activities. It demands an urgent shift from the dominant petroleum-fueled civilization. In 2011, Bassey founded the Ecological think tank, the Health of Mother Earth Foundation promoting environmental/climate justice and food sovereignty in Nigeria and Africa. At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Bassey - despite being accredited - was "physically kept out" of a meeting.

Publications

Other books by Bassey include:
  1. Patriots & Cockroaches 1992
  2. Beyond Simple Lines: the Architecture of Chief G.Y. Aduku and Archcon 1993
  3. The Management of Construction
  4. Poems on The Run 1994
  5. Oilwatching in South America
  6. Intercepted 1998
  7. We Thought It Was Oil But It Was Blood, 2002
  8. Genetically Modified Organisms: the African Challenge
  9. Living Houses, 2005
  10. Knee Deep in Crude, ERA Field Reports, ed
  11. The Nigerian Environment and the Rule of Law, ed
  12. I will Not Dance to Your Beat , Kraft Books, Ibadan. 2011
  13. We Thought It Was Oil But It Was Blood- Resistance to Military-Corporate Wedlock in Nigeria and Beyond.
  14. Oil Politics- Echoes of Ecological Wars-