THE deliberations of a recent visit to the governor of Edo State, Senator Monday Okpebholo, by the Onitsha Zone Shareholders Association, has given credence to the persistent accusations and relentless protests, all-along made by this writer, conservation groups and public-spirited persons; that the forest reserve domains of the state, had been massively grabbed and destroyed, thereby dispossessing its aboriginal rural communities (the owners), aside biodiversity and mainstay annihilations.
Bishop Goodluck Akpore, chairman of the group, was seconded by Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu, in his voiced-out concern to the governor that; “Edo State had given Presco 36,388 hectares of land. Obaseki was enjoying those two companies, milking in billions, not N2 or N20. I have the records”.
Pastor Ize-Iyamu, a notable politician in the state, also added; “The last time they were forced to pay tax was when Comrade Adams Oshiomhole shut them down. Our state has been plundered by these multi-billion companies. What they cannot do in other places is what they have been doing here. And it has been worse in the past eight years”.
More reported news on the protest visit intensifies, where Bishop Akpore and others accused Mr. Obaseki of using his Afrinvest Company to plan a N100 billion bond transaction involving Presco PLC and the Okomu Oil Palm Company PLC, the two leading multinational plantation companies, in the state.
A major report by the Midwest Herald issued on November 19, 2023, titled ‘Governor Obaseki’s Scorecard: How Agriculture Policy Impacted on Environment and Livelihoods of Small Farmers’, amongst other things, had chronicled the proliferation of forestland-grab, countless biodiversity and rural lifestyle losses in the state. It also informed that the total forests of the state, are most plundered, of Nigeria’s 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Yet, notable global environmental monitors, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Forestry Global Watch (FGW) and some others had classified Edo as one of the world’s highest in forest grabbing and deforestation. And amongst the Nigeria’s top five forests regions of Edo, Ondo, Cross River, Taraba and Ogun states, that are accountable for 54% of the loss of tree covers, between 2001 and 2022, Edo had the most infamy, losing 309km per hectare (kha) of tree-cover, as compared to an average of 33.7 kha.
Indeed, Edo was gifted forest assortments that was dominated by the Guinea lowland rainforest of its south senatorial zone and the fringes, which had constituted 962 kha leftover of natural forests, covering over 50% of the state’s total land area. Regretfully, finding by the global forest bodies, indicated an alarming loss of 22.0 kha, 17.1 Metric tons (Mts) of Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from its (Edo) natural forests estate.
Interestingly, there is hardly a culture in the world, that disvalue the ‘Trees’ as insignificant and not related to humans, more so that they are ordinarily attributable totems.
For instance, ‘Ogbe obhi igedu’, is Edo’s worldview and an innuendo of the English paraphrase of a ‘man’s deflowering of underage girl child’. Its surface meaning being that ‘a young tree has been cut down’. It also foretells Edo’s admiration for sustainable forest conservation practices. Conclusively, the Edo traditional law practically categorises ‘violators’ of underage girls children as ‘fellers of immature trees’, hence strict and harmonised penalties are usually accorded to both offenders.
About the twilight of 1993, the former Okomu Wildlife Sanctuary (now Okomu National Park), then under the full protection of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) and the state government, was ‘violated’ by the multinational Mitchelin Plantation Group, that wrestled 2,000 vast hectares of its designate land and buffers. This was in the calamitous governorship era of Chief John Odigie Oyegun, when the French company, turned the high forest of diverse fauna and flora to a monocrop rubber plantation. Mitchelin had taken after the horrendous conservation examples of the Okomu PLC, with its long existing oil palm plantation, adjacent to the disputed land of Mitchellin and the present-day national park.
About the same period, Presco had taken to the slipshod operations of Mitchelin and the Okomu PLC, thus decimating the ‘protected’ Sakponba Rainforest Reserve, with its priceless natural rainforest and exotic arboretums, upon which the state expended huge resources to establish. The poor inhabitants and rustic village of Obaretin and its neighbours, the hosts, had been dispossessed and downed by Presco’s oil palm trees.
As earlier indicated by Bishop Akpore, Presco unduly got high forest reserved lands, as supported by its parent companies, Siat N.V. and Fimave N.V. respectively, of Brussels, Belgium. It is with emphasis that Presco and Okomu company, the plantation giants, had a masked origin and nexus with Socfin of Luxembourg/Belgium, Europe, were moved by a deliberate mercantile tyranny on Edo and Nigerian soils, like the despotic command of King Leopold II of Belgium, a cruelty that was once melted out to luckless peasants of the Congo nation.
Also, with Graham Heifer coming to head the Okomu PLC, around year 2000, Apartheid, the banned anti-people policy of his South Africa’s past, had ingloriously crept into Edo’s life. Since his escapades in the state, the usual news streaming from Okomu forest zone and its forcibly acquired plantation land in Uhunmwode and Ovia North East LGAs, had been misery, inhuman treatments of its commuty hosts, incessant industrial disputes, unresolved killings, arsons and Corporate Social Responsibility breaches against the hapless villagers.
But for the heinous sin of Mr. Obaseki and his government by selling Edo poor – farmers, loggers and other forest users, the people wouldn’t be at the mercy of Okomu PLC, Presco and other emergent nocturnal plantation companies, that were bloated with hundreds of billions of Naira funding from the Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and others, as shepherded by the Edo State Oil Palm Programme (ESOPP) and its so-called Investment Group.
Whilst in power, the accusation stuck to Mr. Obaseki as having exhibited a double standard and pecuniary intents, as he soon gave back, immediately after becoming governor, to Okomu PLC the 13, 750 hectares of lands from the forest reserves of Okomu, Ehor and Owan BC 12, respectively, which the Adams Oshiomhole’s government had revoked and returned to the local communities, whereas Obaseki then as Economic Adviser, had influenced the very decision.
As if this impunity was not enough, he (Mr. Obaseki) had tightened the yoke on the same local communities, wresting more of the remnant lands to his other business fronts. And the forest reserves of Ekiadolor, Ehor, Ebue, Uhunmwode, Okada, Okomu, Owan BC-12, Iuleha/Ora /Ozalla, Urhonigbe, Evboesi, Sakponba and others, were not spared, neither the aboriginal communities who stood against the bulldozing of their forests, farmlands and crops on lands which were ceded without their prior information and consent. When the communities stood their grounds, Mr. Obaseki had deployed state powers to draft in heavily armed security men, who harassed, threatened and intimidated them into compulsion. In similar fashion, there had been numerous community protesters over their privately-owned lands which he grabbed.
Now, there is a renewed hope of the aboriginal rural communities and concerned Edo public, as Governor Okpebholo, in his response to the Bishop Akpore’s group, had assured all. His abiding pledge was that he and his deputy, Hon Dennis Idahosa, are poised to investigate the matter and would retrieve the lands that were grabbed. But the concluding parts of this treatise would x-ray the reals specifics – surfaces and undercurrents of the debilitating forest-related issues, that are only herein simplified.
So therefore, there is the urgent need for the Senator Okpebholo’s government to set up a multi-stakeholder committee of capable and meticulous persons and vested institutions, to painstakingly investigate the raging accusations and carry out eco-auditing of the leftovers of the state’s forest reserves and biodiversity, viz-a-vis the negative impactions of the grabbing on the poor folks and forested communities. This is with the view to mitigate the severity of destructions and serve a deterrence.
Tony Erha, a journalist, nature conservationist and forest certifier, lives in Abuja. He could be reached at tonyerha@gmail.com
