It is a sunny Thursday afternoon in Akure. I am at my favourite spot in the office, right next to the window and I notice a huge truck heaped to the brim with felled trees, zip past on the main road right across my office building. I have been keeping count and this is the third wood-laden truck this week. The average person would not give such a sight a second thought, but the environmentalist in me gets restless whenever I am assaulted by these sights and I cannot help but engage myself mentally; asking questions, seeking answers and wondering if measures are being put in place to replace the countless trees that are felled each day in Nigeria.
There is a plethora of environmental issues currently bedevilling Nigeria and while we have sung, chanted and advocated to raise awareness for the oil spillages in the Niger Delta- which at some point (and even currently) assumed the front burner of environmental issues facing the country, we have relegated deforestation to the back seat. With astonishing mindlessness, we chop down trees and decimate our forests daily; and it appears no one is talking about this problem – it is a problem, and quite honestly, the silence is deafening!
The world annual deforestation rate is estimated at 13.7 million hectares a year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) latest State of the World’s Forests report, and only half of this area is compensated for by new forests. The rate of deforestation in West Africa (Nigeria in particular) is disturbing, because, unlike the reasons that account for deforestation in places like Europe and the Americas, for example, the reasons for deforestation in Nigeria and her neighbours are peculiar and stem from factors that are endemic to our social and economic climate. Poverty and corruption are the top two. Deforestation, according to Cambridge Dictionary is the cutting down of trees in a large area or the destruction of forests by people.
Deforestation is a global problem and unfortunately, it is yet another negative Nigeria has secured a position in. Nigeria currently has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. A 2004 report by FAO pegged Nigeria as the country with the highest deforestation rate between 2000 and 2005, as more than 50 percent of Nigeria’s primary forests had been decimated due to indiscriminate logging, agriculture, industrialisation, population explosion, urban expansion and fuel wood collection. Underlying these factors, we have poverty and corruption as earlier mentioned. We cannot rule out the place of natural factors in deforestation (forest fires, biotic agents, microbes extreme weather conditions like hurricanes, floods, drought etc.) but unlike these natural factors, the human activities that cause deforestation can be controlled.
POVERTY – Although India has overtaken Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world, Nigeria is still home to millions of people living in grinding poverty; many
of whom live in rural areas with proximity to forests, and these forests account for the livelihood of these rural people. You have a situation where trees are cut down for wood fuel- either for sale, personal use or both and once people cut down and remove these trees, it takes years to replace them, which puts people deeper into poverty. It so happens that much of the allowance for deforestation in Nigeria comes from the demand for fuel wood. In 2003 it was reported that 90% of the Nigerian population stated that they relied on kerosene as the main energy source for cooking but because it is expensive and often unavailable, 60% said they used fuel wood instead.
Today, cooking gas has become more popular, even in some rural communities, but still, the chopping of trees for wood fuel goes unabated, because, unlike cooking gas, firewood is nature’s gift. If poverty was not such a big issue in this part of the world, not many people would be interested cutting down trees for firewood or selling the same to put food on their table, as there would not be persons interested in buying. Deforestation and poverty connect because of what the forest can provide for people living in poverty.
Another indirect cause of deforestation is corruption. Corruption in Nigeria is a countless-headed hydra that has infiltrated every sector in Nigeria. It is a serious issue in this nation and it contributes immensely to illegal
logging by companies and forest officials. Illegal logging has led to deforestation in epic proportions, which in turn has led to illegal trading in timber and
its by-products, which in turn has also led to huge economic losses and environmental degradation. According to Transparency International, the rise in demand for wood products has made our forests very lucrative.
This has become a self-reinforcing mechanism of illegality that has chronically defeated efforts to safeguard our forests. Today, many of those in high places, charged with the responsibility of checking illegal logging have turned a blind eye and deafened their ears, while the illegal harvesting of forest riches happens right under their noses, all because of the pecuniary gains that come their way now and then. Nigeria has become one of the largest exporters of rosewood logs in the world and one of the largest overall wood exporters in Africa. Yet almost all of the exported rose-woods coming from and through Nigeria are illegally harvested. The rosewood exported from Nigeria is covered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which requires that all exports of rosewood be accompanied by an official document issued by the national CITES authorities.
This document verifies that the wood was lawfully harvested and shipments without this document must be seized by the importing nation’s customs officials. Unfortunately, a 2017-2018 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) reveals that illegal loggers have resorted to large-scale corruption to evade this restriction, amongst others. Millions of dollars in bribes have been paid to Nigerian senior officials for the improper issuance of CITES documents.
The large-scale corruption scheme in the Nigerian timber sector has led to the rapid degradation of fragile forests, which in turn has amplified the numerous risks that naturally accompany forest decimation.
As a result of all these destructive activities, it was recently reported by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) that Nigeria has lost 96% of its natural forest cover and that its deforestation rate is at an alarming 11.1% per annum. The NCF Director-General, Muhtari Aminu-Kano, disclosed in Lagos on Thursday, June 10, 2021, at a seminar to commemorate the World Environment Day, that Nigeria loses between 350,000 to 400,000 hectares of forest every single year. Originally, Nigeria’s biodiversity is one of the richest in the world. But these statistics paint a rather grim picture of the future of Nigeria’s biodiversity, as according to the Director General of the NCF, “Nigeria is no longer green, but brown.”
In simple terms, biodiversity is the mix of plant and animal species that can be found in a given location. Our vast biodiversity of 864 species of birds, 285 mammals, 203 reptiles, 117 amphibians, 775 fishes and 4,715 species of higher plants face a serious threat in the face of deforestation (figures by Mongabay). But as it stands, our biodiversity is a crying shame; a far cry from what it was during the colonial period, a time when forest conservation was actually in the consciousness of the government. The numbers of the rare Cross River gorillas, for instance, have decreased to around 300 individuals because of poaching by locals and mass habitat destruction.
The implications of deforestation, especially for a nation like Nigeria will be severe if nothing is done. Let us look at Climate change for starters. The relationship between deforestation and climate change is not as tenuous as many make themselves believe.
The connection is real and serious! When all our trees are gone, the atmospheric impurities that ordinarily get absorbed by trees will have no place to go to but the atmosphere and this is because the cutting down of trees causes billions of tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) to be released into the air, and although global warming is already a grave issue, our dying forests will only feed global warming and make it worse. On another hand, we have Environmental catastrophes such as acidic oceans, floods and soil erosion. What about the impact on man and other animals? Forests harbour a vast amount of the earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. In our forests, we find multitudinous species of plants and animals, some of which are rare.
Deforestation not only forces some of these species to relocate, it also leads to the extinction of some rare and endangered plant and animal species. Today over
30% of the World’s pharmaceutical products are derived from tropical plants. And so, by contributing to the extinction of multiple species of plants through deforestation, we might be destroying the cure for many human diseases plaguing our world today. And then there’s food insecurity, yet another tragedy that will affect man and other animals. According to the FAO, trees and forests influence both their immediate surroundings and the stability of the larger environment, and as a result, have several important links to food security. Both at the micro and the macro level, they help provide the stable environmental conditions on which sustainable food production depends.
Well, the most direct and practical strategy is to plant more trees. Yep. It is that simple! In addition to this, we can create more awareness. Writing this article is an awareness creation on my part. We need to enlighten the public on the devastating consequences of deforestation.
Another thing we can do is use less paper. According to the Environment Paper Network, the amount of paper that is thrown away each year accounts for approximately 640 million trees! This wastage is something that I see every day. A good example is the practice of printing information tracts every Sunday in some churches (mine inclusive). I am pained by the fact that information that can be easily displayed on a screen for everyone to see during service is printed on paper and unsparingly distributed and at the end of the day, very few people even read them.
Many universities in Nigeria mandate final-year students to write a thesis to graduate and after months of research and writing, each student is expected to submit a copy to their department. Come back in a couple of years and what will greet you is the gory sight of project papers stacked to the ceiling in an abandoned room. They remain there for years and eventually, these project papers end up in flames. I believe it would be better for projects to be submitted in soft copy, while the “excellent” works could be printed and kept for posterity. As youth corpers, we are all given these “nysc newspapers” at the end of every month (in my state of service) and the last thing any corper I know would do is to devote their time to reading it. Every month, thousands of papers are wasted because no one reads them. Publishing the same news as a PDF file and making it available on an online platform will do more good for the environment and save money.
Other things can be done to combat deforestation in Nigeria, but the system of things in Nigeria will invariably render those solutions inoperable and unrealistic, given the current situation of things.
But we can start with these highlighted above. On the part of the government, it is my plea that the laws and policies that govern environmental conservation in Nigeria be updated and made to be in keeping with present day realities and in addition, backed by solid implementation. With regards to policies, the National Forest Policies in 1988 and 2006 for instance, have done very little to mitigate this environmental menace. Today, all we have are our dying forests, thanks to aggressive deforestation, outdated conservation policies that are bereft of the concrete structures that ought to make them work, and very little implementation. It is not as though we lack the human resources required to tackle this problem, I mean, our nation is replete with universities that boast of forestry departments and still there are no hands on deck. On the international scene, Nigeria is a signatory to several environmental Conventions one of which is the Nature COP26. During the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, UK, President Muhammad Buhari unequivocally pledged that Nigeria will cut its carbon emission to net zero by 2060. While this pledge is commendable, I cannot help but wonder how this will be achieved because Buhari had just a couple of years in office at the time he made this oral commitment.
The 1999 Constitution is also another issue for consideration. The Constitution creates no clear-cut structure for environmental conservation.
Rather, it grants both Local governments and State governments joint jurisdiction over natural resource development, while the forestry sector is controlled at the Federal, State and Local Government levels. Therefore, the duties, power, and resources are divided among the three levels. This lack of clarity gives rise to a lack of coordinated effort. My humble submission is that the Constitution be amended to explicitly cover the issue of environmental conservation (deforestation inclusive). It should be given a place of priority in the Supreme law of the land. I believe this should be the first step in the journey towards saving our forests.
It has been a rather long voyage of words, but I hope that the salient point has been addressed, if not sufficiently, but close enough.
There are many issues currently plaguing our nation today and I can assume that the concept of deforestation is the least problem of the average Nigerian. I mean, just trying to picture the face a rural farmer would make as I labour to explain to him the phenomenon called climate change and how his farming and tree-cutting activities affect the climate, actually cracks me up, but still, there is a need to spread this awareness. Hopefully, someday, when it is not too late, we all can become the environmentalists the planet wishes we all could be.
1.Wikipedia.com- deforestation in Nigeria.
2.”Nigeria: Environmental profile” Rainforests mongobay.com-2010-09-10
3.15 strategies how to reduce and prevent deforestation. Sara Popescu Slavikova-2018-03-06
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