Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/252

Port Harcourt 21.13 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES

The inhabitants of Port Harcourt suffer psychological stress because of social dislocation, poverty, the poor urban environment, and a sense of failure. Such stress reduces physiological efficiency, induces depression which lowers intellectual energy and efficiency, causes irrational and violent behaviour (sometimes in terms of the "mob"), and encourages some people to withdraw from society altogether. All this not only has an economic cost to society as a whole, but also conspires to destroy the Joy of Living, defeat hope and to cripple human happiness. And of what value is any society and system that results in so much human misery and degradation?

21.14 PARTICIPATION IN URBAN MANAGEMENT

From the foundation of Port Harcourt in 1913 there has been very little participation by local people in its planning and management: it has known repression, indifference and occasionally, even misguided benevolence, from colonial, military and civilian rulers alike. No organic democratic institutions have been allowed to develop so that the city has been inefficiently planned on a European model unsuited to African social institutions and for the benefit of the economic elite. As a result the needs of the majority have been ignored.

21.15 THE IMPACT OF PORT HARCOURT ON ITS REGION

A city is a living thing: it consumes resources to live, digests them and produces wastes that it has to evacuate. It is the impact of this consumption and evacuation on the surrounding country that defines the city's region.

Port Harcourt consumes land for housing, education, industrial, military, commercial and administrative purposes; for roads, and airports; and for rubbish dumps. Also it consumes people from rural areas depriving them of labour and of their best brains. And it consumes resources for its essential survival, and for its industries.

Port Harcourt evacuates wastes as refuse, gases and liquids, particularly in the form of water pollution.

The ecological footprint of Port Harcourt (the impact that its consumption and evacuation has on the regional ecology) is large and especially on the fragile Freshwater, Brackish-water, Estuarine and Offshore water ecozones of the Niger Delta. The Brackish-water ecozone is especially fragile and threatened by Port Harcourt.

However, although there is no doubt that Port Harcourt has a strong and negative impact on the Niger Delta in terms of its evacuation, in terms of consumption, the influence of the city is not so easily measured. This is because the area's valuable resources (oil, timber, fish) are demanded throughout the region and the world, with Port Harcourt acting only as an export point.

21.16 CONCLUSIONS

Port Harcourt is a fast growing city and will be the centre of a large industrial conurbation early in the next century. For the majority of citizens living conditions are overcrowded and unsanitary, and their access to basic services is poor with no prospect of things getting any better and a strong likelihood of them getting worse.

The main reason for the bad living conditions is poverty which is the result of economic injustice which diverts wealth away from the majority citizens to a minority elite 250