Dr Erepamo Osaisai, the Director-General and Chief executive officer of the Nigerian Energy Commission, (NAEC) has found the way to ensure energy security in the country. And that magic wand, he says, is exploiting the nation’s potentials of generating nuclear energy. But before he and other nuclear energy enthusiasts in the country goes any much further they would do well to remember Chernobyl power station.

Known as The V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, it was located in Ukraine. Near it was Pripyat a town solely built to house the power station employees and their families. The location of the station was in a wooded, marshy area near the Ukraine-Belarus border. This is about 18 kilometers northwest of the city of Chernobyl and 100 km north of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
Construction of the Chernobyl power station began in the 1970s. The first of the four reactors was commissioned in 1977, and Reactor No. 4 began producing power in 1983. When the accident occurred in 1986, two other nuclear reactors were under construction.
The power station had four reactors and each was capable of producing one gigawatt of electric power the four of them altogether were producing about 10 percent of the electricity used in Ukraine.
And then on Saturday, April 26, 1986 at about 1:23:58 .am local time, the music changed. The worst nuclear accident the world has ever known till date occurred.
Verified accounts have it that on that very fateful day, the operating crew planned to test whether one of the reactor turbines 4 turbines (no 4) could produce enough energy to keep the coolant pumps running until the emergency diesel generator was activated in case of an external power loss. Before starting the test, the automatic safety systems were deliberately switched off. This was done in order to prevent interruptions while the test run of the reactor was going on. Furthermore, the reactor had to be powered down to 25 per cent of its capacity for the procedure.
Really it was a well-intended experiment but unfortunately it didn’t end well. First, the reactor power fell to less than 1 per cent and so the power had to be slowly increased.  However, half a minute into the test, there was an unexpected power surge, causing an explosion and driving temperatures in the reactor to more than 2,000 degrees Celsius. This of course melted the fuel rods, ignited the reactor’s graphite covering, and released a cloud of radiation into the atmosphere.
Though the ensued fire was put out six hours later by very brave fire fighter (some of them still under 30s), its devastating effects are still felt up to this very day. The next day, people known as liquidators who supervised the processed evacuated Pripyat. Furthermore about 80 towns and villages in the Ukraine and 12 further ones in neighboring Belarus were also evacuated. Altogether about 200, 000 people were evacuated.
But there were immediate and direct causalities. And the firemen were the first to go. While some o them died in the inferno, all the others died within a few weeks. According to experts, “ they had been exposed to massive levels of nuclear radiation up to a million times above the acceptable level.”
Till this very day, those men who literally were sent to their deaths are praised as the ‘heroes of Chernobyl who have rescued the world’ In the theater world, the movie usually ends with the death of the hero or villain but in this case was totally different; their deaths were just the beginning of the nightmare.
A 2005 report by the Chernobyl Forum, which was made up of eight United Nations organizations, estimated that the accident eventually would cause about 4,000 deaths. Greenpeace places the figure at 93,000 deaths, based on information from the Belarus National Academy of Sciences.
The nightmare went on further as the Belarus National Academy of Sciences estimated that 270,000 people in the region around the accident site would develop cancer (skin cancer, leukemia, lung cancer bowel cancer, and thyroid cancer) as a result of Chernobyl radiation and that 93,000 of those cases are likely to be fatal. There have even been cases of psychological illnesses and suicides, especially among the liquidators.
Yet another report by the Center for Independent Environmental Assessment of the Russian Academy of Sciences found a dramatic increase in mortality since 1990—60,000 deaths in Russia and an estimated 140,000 deaths in Ukraine and Belarus—probably due to Chernobyl radiation.
Experts of course said it would have been so bad if the concerned and relevant authorities had reacted appropriately and quickly.
According to them “up to 90 per cent of future suffering, especially thyroid cancer amongst children could have been prevent.”
But they weren’t because first of all the Soviet Union government inform the people of what actually happened as the big explosion and fire were explained away as minor accidents. And then they didn’t start evacuation the inhabitants of Prybyat till after 36 hours later making. And to think that the town had about 50,000 inhabitants (10,000 of them employees at the power station), when this accident occurred.
Today Prybyat still remains ghost town (only a fraction of the population made up of the elderly, who couldn’t adjust to life in the high rise blocks in Kiev and other big where they relocated to returned) and there is even a law, which prohibits persons under the age of 18 from visiting the town. And even others could only visit this rarely since they would need special permits in order to do so.
All these due to an accident said to be caused by “ a fateful combination of human error and imperfect technology”.
Many people will argue that technology has moved on since 1986. That may be true but humans still make errors.
The Nigerian people need to be sure this technology is safe before they rush the same fate as Pripyat and its brave fire fighters.

Everyone likes to be treated with respect. That also includes the Nigerian cow.
For ages it has been regarded as a mere source of beef, milk and cheese. No one cared about its health and general well being. It is a different story at Brodowin, a small organic farm village 70 km North-east of Berlin. There, the only way to breed cows is to treat them well and feed them according to their nutritional needs.

The public relations officer of the village, Ms Susanne Poinke said that in as much the company needed to make profit, the important thing, remained the health and well being of the animals. They have a whole 500 hectares for only about 500 cows.
Those ideals have obviously paid off. “Here, the quality of the milk they produce is better than the ones produced at conventional, “ she declared proudly.
Experts describe organic farming as an agricultural system that seeks to provide the consumer, with fresh, tasty and authentic food while respecting natural life-cycle systems.
In organic farms, farmers take advantage of on-site resources, such as livestock manure for fertiliser or feed produced on the farm. They also raise livestock in free-range, open-air systems and providing them with organic feeds.
That’s exactly what obtains at Brodowin where at least 20 per cent of the cereals produced on the farm are used to feed the cows and 80 per cent are sold to human consumers.
But the resultant ‘fresh, tasty and authentic foods’ from organic farming usually don’t come cheap.
At Brodowin producing and selling milk consumers regard as possessing premium quality invariably translates to higher price and also profit. While a litre of milk from conventional farms goes for 16-euro cents, from Brodowin it will fetch at least 40-euro cents. Little wonder then, Poinke insisted that the global economic recession that saw many high profile companies crashing has left the firm completely unscathed.
But Nigerians farmers don’t have such happy tales, Problems such as energy cost, erratic power supply, lack of credit, non-existence roadwork have made it impossible for them to break even. And what is the use of doing any business if you can’t make profit?
Organic farming isn’t new to Nigerians. Many subsistent farmers practised it before the advent of chemical fertilizers. That was the only kind of farming they knew.
Over the years, with dwindling fortunes, many people including the so-called villagers won’t even be associated with it. They would rather migrate to the cities to do menial jobs than work on their farms.
But organic farming can be profitable.
That is the message of Brodowin, which not only practices a closed farming system but also relies on natural agricultural products to keep their cows healthy. Essentially the cows are brought up to be healthy cows for a long as possible and not high performance cows for only a short while.
The story of this farm on itself makes for an interesting reading. Poinke who spoke to African and Asian environmental journalists, who were on study tour at the village, revealed what you might likely term an accident of history.  The farm she said was state owned by the former East Germany government but after the unification, the original owners of the land reclaimed it and decided to turn into an ecological farm. Today the 1,200 hectares belong presently to 80 people and the farmers pay 200 euros per year for every hectare.
That means that some Nigerian farmers who are usually members of a cooperative society could actually teem up and acquire land for large-scale farming.
But the company’s financial growth and stability goes beyond feeding cows with cereals and having an in-house vet.
They found ways of maximizing profit and minimizing loss. For many farmers in Nigeria having access roads have been a big problem. They usually end up throwing away farm produce, which couldn’t reach the consumers timely due to bad road. Of course Brodowin can’t be said to have such problems. Nevertheless its decision to own milk and cheese factories within the farm, ensures they lost nothing middlemen and time.
With about 70 employees, it has helped keep the region’s unemployment to two per cent, while the neigbouring villages have rates as high as 20 per cent.
The farm has successfully transformed into modern day company with branded products and many people are quite happy to associate with the brand. It doesn’t matter they have to pay more. Apart from those who walk into their shop they have about 1,200 clients in Berlin.
Nigerian organic farmers therefore needn’t live in penury. Not anymore. With lessons from Brodowin their cows wouldn’t only lead better lives they would fetch bigger money. And farming like any other business is all about profit.

Imagine waking up on a certain day and your job won’t be there anymore. That means no food and of course no more the comforts of life you have over the years taken for granted.

Tough life, you might say, but already that is the fate of millions of Africans, including children. These are people who have lost the capacity to feed themselves because the land on which they have depended for centuries have become barren.Sometimes in order to escape starvation, many of these people abandon their lands to migrate to other regions or urban slums, creating what is now known as environmental refugees.

Desertification, which is the term for what had gone wrong, is defined as land degradation in arid, semi-arid and sub-humid lands. And according to United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) 1991 assessment, about 73 per cent of the total agricultural-used dryland in Africa is affected to some degree by various forms of land degradation.

Experts insist that if nothing is done to halt the process, its spread is imminent and therefore presently ranks amongst the greatest environmental challenges globally.

Unfortunately there seems to be no way to tackle this monster even as governments and non-governmental organizations in the affected regions have tried to combat it. Even with the provided guidelines (Plan of Action to Combat Desertification, known as PACD) from the United Nations, so far many of the affected countries have recorded minimal success.

While lack of funds and inequitable international order have been fingered as being responsible for this, experts say some other factors must also be considered and tackled if the war against desertification is to be won.

A professor of Geography at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, Michael Bernard Kwesi Darkoh says there is a lack of political will and serious commitment to combat desertification at national and international levels. He also believes that there is a need to integrate anti-desertification programmes into the integral framework of a nation’s socio-economic development.
For instance, he says that in some countries the measures adopted to combat desertification “are hardly even seen as integral parts of established national plans for the economic and social development of the affected communities.”

Furthermore he also condemns what he believes to be minimal or no coordination of the solution process, which prevents an integrated approach to dealing with the situation.

In his paper titled; Desertification: the scourge of Africa, he also decries the fact that the solution packages hardly ever take cognizance of the needs, skills, experience, wisdom and aspirations of the affected people.  Even the introduction of technology, he says, has become problematic because this is done without concern for all factors in the environment.

There is definitely the need for a change in government and people’s attitude to improved incentives. Here, experts believe the young people have (a) role(s) to play.

And in a world that has gradually turned global, it might be even more difficult to tackle desertification properly because in this case globalization has definitely become a double-edged sword.

A new report revealed that the globalization process is amplifying the driving forces of desertification by removing regional barriers, breaking local connections and increasing the interdependence among peoples and nations.

So while globalization and trade liberalization are highly desirable for economics gains even to the developing countries, no one is paying attention to the negative effects on desertification, which may lead millions to their early graves.