SALE OF POOR EDO VILLAGES TO LAND GRABBERS, PLUNDERING OF OKOMU NATIONAL PARK AND OGBA ZOO/PARK
Your Excellency,
Under your guard, the diverse forest reserve estate of Edo State, are continually depleted. Also, Okomu National Park, a globally recognized conservation enclave and foremost ecotourism destination in Nigeria, based in the state, had been heavily plundered. Also violated is Ogba Zoo and Natural Park, Benin City, unarguably a foremost vestige of the lowland rainforest habitat, privileged to be located in the urban centre, on the vast Africa continent. After you once lividly threatened to prosecute some powerful individuals, who grabbed its lands, they went free with their loots.
Evidently, your fickle and uninspiring policy of negligence and grandstanding are mainly responsible for all the setbacks.
Consequently, the Edo poor of the poor, the innocent villagers and the aboriginal owners of the lands, are the most sufferers of the dispossession, acute environmental degradation, social disconnection, poverty entrenchment and livelihood losses etc. Clearly, this means “seizing the water-pot of the poor to overflow the barrels of the rich!”
The acute degradation of the once vast and flourishing forest estates of Edo villages, underscores the very disturbing finding by environmental experts that your government is the highest propeller of deforestation and local community-livelihood losses, amongst the 36 states of Nigeria.
Disturbed by the prevailing violation of Okomu Park, Dennis Idahosa, a member of the House of Representatives from the state, dragged the matter for hearing by this junior chamber of the National Assembly. Sadly, it calls for re-examination when a foreigner from South Africa, Dr. Graham Heifer, the Managing Director of the erring Okomu Oil Palm Company PLC (OkomuOil), had to tutor your government about inadequate laws and nonchalance, as the main causes of the excessive destructions to the park and Edo forest reserves etc.
It is your fault that you are now being addressed via this open letter. “When a king spurned a genuine dialogue whilst on the throne, he would concede to unusual settlement of the same matter as he sits on the bare floor”. In the similitude, this letter is a recourse decision after your refusal, since about five years, to address the same pertinent issues, severally reported to you.
For a personality that is advertised to be urbane and development-minded, you would be conversant with the prevailing dislocation of the world by Climate Change, a disorder about which mankind fumbles for effective solutions. Unfortunately, your government is behind time, promoting the agents that cause Climate Change, despite its noxious damage to the very Edo public, you profess to lead.
Your Excellency, your government had extensively ceded (and still gifting) vast hectares of the state’s high forest reserves, to mostly multinational (alien) companies, without prior information and consents of the local communities, the original owners of the ancestral lands. Painfully, you had successively signed Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs), with the companies, behind the poor communities, rather derisively, without tangible rewards for them.
Instead, investors of Edo indigenes should have been given the lands if they were to manage the projects, independently. Perhaps, they wouldn’t manipulate and enslave their own people, in the same manners as OkomuOil, Presco PLC, Mitchelin and others who operate in the state. Interestingly, your family members have lands conceded to them in the same forest reserves that once boosted their logging business. Surely, this assisted your education and upbringing. Why do you now give out the forest reserves in their vastness to aliens for bulldozing, where others would no more benefit? If those before you had destroyed the forest reserves, would you have benefited and still have them to cede out?
Contrary to the wrong notion, which propels the audacious land ceding practice, a state governor has no sweeping authority over aboriginal community’s lands, which local communities first gave to the former colonial masters for safe-keeping, thereupon switched to indigenous governments. So therefore, a governor can’t do whatever he likes with aboriginal lands, over which he is a mere trustee, and accountable to the local communities. Everywhere in the world, governments don’t own lands. It is “Land for the People and by the People”.
Your government assisted OkomuOil to re-grab the 13,750 hectares lands, revoked by the immediate past state government and returned to local communities of the threesome Ehor, Owan, Ora/Iuleha/Ozalla (Owan Forest Zone), including the designate and buffers of Okomu National Park, within Okomu rainforest reserves, respectively. This was a government in which you served as the all-important and brainbox-Chairman of the Economic Committee and member of the state Executive Council, the decision making body that revoked the lands.
Is it not illogical and self-serving that you later spearheaded the official commissioning of the Okomu Oil Palm Extension II, a scheme premised on the same lands you helped to revoke from the same company your government indicted as having grabbed them?
Retrospectively, the entire 13,750 hectares of the lands (revoked in 2015) were different parts of the over 35,000 hectares of the two forest reserve zones, which were ceded to Iyayi Group of Companies, for regeneration and later sold (by Iyayi) to A & Hatman Ltd, who resold them to OkomuOil. Over 35 local communities of the Owan forest zone, cutting across the three LGAs of Uhunmwode, Ovia North East and Owan West added to 20 other villages of Okomu forest zone had been shortchanged by OkomuOil.
You deliberately evaded all the street protests taken to you by the negatively impacted local communities, with the intercession of civil society coalitions. You also declined replies to their numerous letters, to you. Yet, the findings of the two different committees you reluctantly set up to investigate the complaints have been buried. Earlier in 2014, ex-Governor Adams Oshiomhole, investigated similar protests by some of the forest communities, which led to the 13,750 ha revocation.
Painfully, your committees, despite earlier promises, refused to invite the aggrieved local communities to a cross-examination with OkomuOil, the accused. Meanwhile, you later held meetings with the same foreign company, thereby ignoring the complaints and mitigation of the collateral damages to the poor villagers. Rather, all the aggrieved villagers and the public saw where news media items, in which you keep hobnobing with the accused and more of the communal lands were/are gifted to it and others.
The repercussions are glaring where lands ‘sold’ out for the first 99 years (two generations), with renewal components, are lands seized forever. This is as the average lifespan of a Nigerian is only 45 years!
Unrelenting, your government surrendered additional 18,000 hectares in the Ekiadolor high-forest reserve, belonging to over 20 local communities to Dubril Prima Foods PLC multinational alone, with more to its like. The companies followed the same land grab method of OkomuOil, in the aforementioned Owan and Okomu forest zones, bulldozing crops and high forest land and completely jettison or before manipulating the due process of the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) certification, from the Federal Ministry of Environment.
It is barefaced falsehood that the spate of de-reservation you accord foreign plantation companies, is to boost foreign investment inflows. Rather, it is the acts of a “Penny wise, a Pound foolish”, engendered to further enrich some corporate organizations and private individuals, and bring the Edo poor to unending slavery.
Contradictorily, Edo government gets a N692 maximum on a hectare as annual lease-tax on forest reserves from multinational companies. But, under ‘Taungya’, a community block farming scheme, where economic trees are planted alongside crops and the forest is allowed natural regeneration, the state government usually charges local farmers at least N1,300 per acre; minimum of N3,200 per hectare!
Which is preferable? That alien plantation-owners pay much less after bulldozing high forest lands and rich biodiversity or allow Taugya, where land owners retain ownership, retain the circle of biodiversity and livelihood to pay much more? By the way, when last did your government pay royalties on the forest reserves to the local owners?
Still not done with the exorbitant land concessions, you and your namesake, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), broached a N69 billion oil palm expansion scheme under Edo State Oil Palm Programme (ESOPP). Assigned for the project are more gigantic 120,000 hectares of high rainforest reserves, within your Edo South senatorial constituency, including your acclaimed origin of Uhunmwode LGA, which you had grossly neglected, without government’s presence.
Is it only when it comes to ceding their land inheritance that you remember the existence of Uhunmwode, your origin?
At the inauguration ceremony of the N69 billion ESOPP’s scheme, Edo local growers of oil palm were excluded, whereas they are the basis for the oil palm business chain. Whatever happens to the local growers’ bedrock, like in Malaysia, the world leading country, which you often alluded to? Has Malaysia also turned all its arable lands to a single oil palm crop and tend to terminate other varied crops and the local farmers, to cause staple food scarcity and punish the public, as you do in Edo?
Pathetically, Edo local growers are further deceived by the ‘Anchor Borrower’s’ scheme, a contractual bullying where local oil palm growers cultivate, harvest and sell to the almighty multinational firms as off-takers, through scarce loans provided by government. What a monopoly! Why confiscate rare government’s funds to multinational companies, instead of the local growers that it is primarily meant for, whereas the multinational firms have their financial overflows?
Crusoe Osagie, your spokesman, told the public that those expected at the inauguration, and others to benefit from the N69 billion fund were Dufil Prima Foods PLC that originated from Indonesia and Singapore, FDGB of Malaysia, OkomuOil of Luxembourg, Presco PLC of Belgium and some other multinationals, including the ubiquitous Dangote Dansah Farms PLC and other local firms, as the aforementioned and indicted A & Hatman Ltd.
And it is disturbing that most of the indigenous companies and their principals mentioned by Crusoe Osagie as beneficiaries of the CBN funds, are those who once benefitted from the logging of the forest reserves, dependents on its woods and furniture, who now move to obliterate their former source of wealth by bulldozing the forest reserve. Where is the continuous feeders for the over 2,500 sawmills littering the state and the flourishing wood and furniture works, for which Edo leads amidst Nigeria’s 36 states?
Furthermost, many of the local businesses and individuals are conniving with the multinationals to form a nocturnal association, as they surrender their land allocations to the multinationals.
Your 600,000 jobs creation by the N69 billion ESSOP project is not unachievable and so misleading. This is an empty sloganeering like the 200,000 jobs’ promise you made, but far from attainment in your first four years in office. For your information, Edo indigenes do not go for labourer’s (unskilled) jobs, which form over 95% of employment opportunities in oil palm plantations. Edolites rather cultivate their inherited lands and not as labourers on foreign plantations.
The negligible skilled job in mono crop plantations, in which you predicated the 600,000 job’s opportunities are mostly reserved for non-Edos and children of the local colonialists. For the asking, why does a Ghanaian in the name of Billy Ghansah, be made Coordinator of the so-called Okomu PLC Extension II project, when there are more qualified Edo people?
Pointedly, most Edo people only see as lethal threat the disputable ceding of the lands for RUGA or settlement etc., without knowing that land grabs by foreigner plantation owners largely are worst and contributes to rural-urban drifts and abandonment of Edo villages, for their settlers (labourers) to takeover.
Your Excellency, whereas most states of the country solicit for national parks, your government gambles with the only one Edo is lucky to have had. It is without gainsaying that in your government, there is a concealed intention by some companies and highly-placed persons, who currently mastermind the destruction to the park, as a ploy to take over the land and finally sell to the highest-buying multinationals.
The first step by your government at destroying Okomu Park, is your refusal to chase away OkomuOil from re-grabbing the over 8,000 hectares amidst the 13,750 ha revoked lands, including other large land proportions, that formed the park’s designate and buffer lands. These had reduced the park’s size and wandering range for some of its faunas, like the ever roving endangered African Lowland Rainforest Elephant (Loxodonta Africana cyclotis).
Whilst the park reeled in continuous plundering, your government made empty promises and dilly-dallied. In June 8, 2017 as the management of the park paid you official visit, your vow to stop the park’s violations. It was not realized until three years after, when you made same promise in November 30, 2020 to ThisDay newspapers and others, when the park had been grossly plundered, as it is presently.
You also abandoned your promise to establish a Forestry Commission for the state. The body would have summarily valuated the remnants of its forest estate, carry out regeneration exercises and discourage excessive ceding of the forest reserves, as you have wrongly done.
Comparatively, you failed to re-enact the once stimulated forestry policies by the Oshiomhole’s led government, in which you served. For instance, ex-Governor Oshiomhole, in 2010, instantly stopped the logging of Okomu Park, by seizing illegal logs and banning logging concessions around the compartments of the park. He also stopped the ferrying of illegal logs by poachers, on the Okomu/Gelegele River, with the waterway security outfit he established.
How then are you not the main cause of the unending plundering of the park, when you ceded tens of logging concessions around the park, which licensed loggers now see as an excuse to illegally log the park’s old-growths and kill its animals?
Now, we are more determined to save the Edo land, environment and livelihood of Edo people. At home and in the Diaspora and amongst humanity, our clamour is gathering the blizzards and verves. For Edo and our dear people must be saved from the fetters of pillagers and slave masters. And those who caused the pillages wouldn’t have respite.
Tony Erha, a journalist and conservationist is a Forest Certifier with the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO). He writes from BENIN City, Edo State