Shocking Photos: How crude oil and 'dirty' petrol is polluting the land, water and air in Nigeria especlly in Lagos, Port-Harcourt and Kaduna

 

• More than 114,000 people died from air pollution in Nigeria in 2017, the top in Africa – HEI & IHME updated estimates

• Onitsha, a port city in southern Nigeria, had the world’s worst air (PM10 pollutants) in 2016 - WHO

• Kano had Africa's worse air pollution in 2018 - IQAir Visual & Greenpeace

• Nigeria's air quality monitoring agency does not issue air quality alerts to the public even when air quality levels are expected to adversely impact health

• Nigeria has a mortality rate for air pollution of 307.4 for every 100,000 people - WHO

• Nigeria has annual mean concentrations of 46.3 μg/m3 of PM2.5 pollutants, 4.5 times above the WHO guidelines for outdoor air quality.

According to atcmask.com while many low-and-middle-income countries are tightening pollution controls to reduce public exposure to the toxic air hanging over their cities, the air pollution levels in Nigeria remains dangerously high with no relief in sight.

The air pollution levels in cities such as Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kano, and in particular Onitsha, a port city on the bank of the Niger River in southern Nigeria, is still at health-damaging level.

Onitsha recorded the world’s worst levels of PM10 (particles of less than 10 micrometers) air pollutants in 2016 with an annual mean concentration of 594 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3 ). This was 30 times above the World Health Organization (WHO) annual guideline of 20 μg/m3 for PM10.