Nigerian environmental journalism pioneer Tunde Akingade about the historical origins of eco-reporting in Nigeria.

For Akingbade, environmental journalism didn’t come into its own in Nigeria until the mid-1980s, when the dumping of toxic waste in Koko alerted public attention to the weakness of environmental legislation and the need for specialized coverage of environmental issues. Prior to this incident, individual reporters covered droughts, desertification, or flooding, but ‘there was no coherent, consistent, systematic reporting of environmental issues’ as environmental themes were occasionally covered by reporters from other beats, Akingbade recounts.

The Guardian newspaper, created in the mid-1980s by Alexander Uruemu Ibru, was a new type of cosmopolitan publication in Nigeria, trying to reach civil society and academia alike through first-class journalism - and it it was the first newspaper to include the environment as one of its official specialized beats. Yet what prepared Nigerian readers for this new type of environmental reporting was the dumping waste incident that occurred in Koko.

At that time, Nigeria was chairing the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) and stressed that Nigeria would not accept ‘toxic waste terrorism’. Yet unbeknownst to them, Italian businessmen Gianfranco Raffaeli and Renato Pent of the waste broker firms Ecomar and Jelly Wax had signed an illegal agreement with Nigerian businessman Sunday Nana to store 18,000 drums of hazardous waste in Koko. Together with another colleague from The Guardian, the paper’s science editor went to Koko for a secret investigation, following initial coverage of the issue by the Vanguard, and ended up including images in the newspaper’s Sunday edition of thousands of drums of toxic waste dumped in Nigeria. Following a public outcry, the Nigerian government had both the waste and the contaminated soil shipped back to Italy. The Koko incident directly lead to the creation of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA).