Nigeria's fast disappearing trees

Nigerians are presently using more firewood as fuel than at any other time in the nation’s entire history, a recently concluded study conducted by Abdulmalik Nura, a scientific officer with the Raw Materials Research and Development Council has shown.

The study, conducted in the North-eastern part of Nigeria, revealed that more people are earning their livelihood from firewood trading; while local fabricators are making brisk business designing cold-pot and other types of stoves that uses firewood and charcoal for fuel.

The study, which collected data from 360 firewood collectors, sellers, buyers and users, said that the estimated demand for firewood in each household in Bauchi State alone is 5,521 metric tonnes per month.

“This,” Mr. Nura said, “is akin to burning 27,607 metric tonnes of carbon per month.”
Perhaps things would not have been so bad had Nigeria been committed to its tree planting obligations.

During the 2006 conference of parties to the Kyoto protocol in Nairobi, Nigeria joined the rest of the world to announce an ambitious initiative of planting one billion trees as one of the strategies of mitigating the impacts of climate change.

The initiative, headed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Wangari Maathai, was supported by United Nations Environment Programme, Prince of Monaco and a host of other international organizations. It seeks to commit governments, organizations and individuals to plant trees in their various locations.

The target has since been reviewed; and a higher ambition of seven billion trees set after studies showed that the initial target of one billion was surpassed. All this was done without any help from Nigeria.

Though Nigeria instituted a tree planting campaign in the 1990s, the project has been turned into an annual ritual where government officials corruptly enrich themselves in the name of planting trees.

The ceremony has also become a political gathering where local government chairmen, governors, and their wives plant trees amidst much pageantry, without reflecting on what became of the trees planted the previous years.

For instance, at Ogbadigbo Local Government Area of Benue State, north central Nigeria, a specific park within the local government secretariat is used yearly for the exercise. But no one appeared concerned that trees planted the previous year were no longer blooming.

Nigeria is among the laggards in a global survey of numbers of trees planted by countries.

Yet, the current usage level of firewood in Nigeria suggests that rather than plant them, Nigerians are felling more trees.

Inaccessible energy sources

An expert said the demand for wood fuel is on the increase due to the inability of a majority of Nigerians to afford other means of energy for their daily cooking.

Salisu Suleiman of the Ahamdu Bello University said that government needed to articulate a comprehensive plan for tree planting campaign and stop paying lip service to the exercise.

“If wood fuel is used in urban areas like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan, then one can only imagine the situation in rural areas,” Suleiman said. “Wood fuel is cheaper than kerosene and as long as that remained the case, trees will continue to be chopped down for firewood.”

Mr. Suleiman said that a major reason for the depletion of the Nigerian forest was the fact the firewood and charcoal still constituted the major cooking fuel in many homes.

In Jos, North Central Nigeria, firewood business, according to Jane Pam, is a money-spinning business that had served as a source of livelihood for thousands of women in the city.

Mrs. Pam said those who patronize the traders include bakers, households, and restaurants; including women involved in the frying of bean and flour cakes.

Another trader in the firewood business, Adamu Mohammed, said most of their supplies come from the hinterland.

The Hose and Zaramaganda suburbs of Jos are famous centres for firewood traders. Heaps of firewood litter the area, with women making brisk business. Trucks daily bring in new supplies; while others fan out to distribute firewood to customers within the metropolis.

Madam Jumai, a firewood dealer in Hose, claimed to have used proceeds from her trade to train all her four children up to university level.

Blame the states

The Director of Forestry at the Federal Ministry of Environment, Lawrence Ogundare, said government was working on ways to checkmate the illegal felling of tree. He also said much of the blame goes to state governments.

Mr. Ogundare said although the federal government makes policies and regulations governing the operations of forestry across the country, state governments who own the forests were not helping to protect it.

“It is unfortunate that state governments now give financial targets to forestry departments to meet each year, and that means felling more trees,” he said.

Teni Odujinrin, an environmental lawyer and Chief Executive Officer of EnSol, said proper management of its forestry presented Nigeria with a good opportunity of benefiting from the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol.

“Nigeria stands the advantage of earning Clean Development Mechanism carbon credits if proper actions are taking to invest in forestry, as it has the potentials of sequestering carbon oxide from the atmosphere,” she said.

For Joanne Olori, Chief Operating Officer of Eco-Afrique, a company propagating the planting of Jhatropha plants as a means of containing the impact of climate change, the country is not utilizing the advantages inherent in tree plants to cushion the impact of climate change.

“Government, therefore, has the opportunity to fine-tune the tree planting campaign to ensure that impacts of climate change on Nigerians are not only reduced but people empowered to start eking a living from the planting of economic trees,” she said.