THE NEW FIGHT AGAINST DESERTIFICATION IN NIGERIA

THE NEW FIGHT AGAINST DESERTIFICATION IN NIGERIA: SOME COMMENTS

The Olive de L’Afrique Consult, Abuja

Having lived all my life in the northern town of Kaduna, where the threat of desertification was not really visible, my first visit to the northern fringes of Katsina and Sokoto states in the eighties made a profound impression on me. Initially as a curious student and later a corper serving in a Daura village, what I saw in the nine months of my brief sojourn – the sand dunes, the wind storm, the rains that showered only three times throughout that raining season, the poverty and the overwhelming degradation of the soil and environment in general – was really scaring even though fascinating. Even as an innocent and casual observer, I was convinced that something drastic and urgent has to be done to stop the menacing advance of this monstrous process. For almost thirteen solid years nothing seems to have been done. It was like we all went to sleep over the issue.

The recent media report on the latest initiative to combat desert encroachment by the Ministry of Environment has rekindled our hope. The Minister, Alhaji Sani Zangon Daura, went on air to disclose the effort made so far by Nigeria in collaboration with Niger Republic to seek funds from the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to combat the menace of desertification at their borders.

Although the Minister refused to disclose the amount sought, he dropped the hint that the funds will be used to undertake an integrated management of natural resources on the borders of the two countries. According to the report, the major components of the Ministry’s strategy to combat desertification include the establishment of shelterbelt for controlling land degradation; development of environmentally sustainable model villages in Kano, Zamfara, Adamawa, Borno, Kaduna and Niger States and the reactivation of existing model village Sabon Nangere in Yobe State; reintroduction of house-to-house inspection by Environmental Health Officers (EHOS) in the country; incorporation of the N500 million to be spent yearly on poverty alleviation into the proposed National Rolling Plan and the Year 2001 budget; and lastly the formulation of a national Action Programme (NAP) in which the United Nations (UN) convention to combat desertification using a bottom-up, interactive and decentralized approaches.

Until the details of this strategy are made public and the requisite infrastructure put in place, one is constrained to make a fairly comprehensive appraisal of underlying philosophy and the implementation of the strategy. However, the Minister’s disclosure raises questions over certain vital environmental issues especially bordering on the political economy and causes of desertification, which are crucial premises upon which any genuine strategies should be formulated.

First is the level of environmental awareness. In Nigeria, the mere mentioning of the ‘environment’ (even among ‘educated’ Nigerians immediately brings to mind that whole area of human activity that is preoccupied with designing and erection of physical structures, and for ‘environmental protection’, it suddenly, conjures the picture of weekly or monthly sanitation exercise; if not, then the activities of those government agencies whose duty is to keep the physical cleanliness and maintain the prowling aesthetic beauty of Nigeria’s mega-cities; and at a slightly higher wavelength, the imperative to clean oil spillage or treat the ‘patient-for-long-but-now-agitating’ fishing and farming communities of the Niger Delta like human beings.

Even among the officials of the so-called Ministry of Environment one cannot help but to notice this seeming ignorance. The other day, I engaged an official of the Ministry in a discussion in respect of the recent NASA report on the increased depletion of the ozone. To my chagrin, the ‘learned gentleman’ just could not comprehend either the consequences of the ozone depletion on marine live, terrestrial organisms, human health or its evapo-transpiration effect on dry land and desertification.

Such is the high level of ignorance that one can safely state, and rightly too, that even the phenomenon, desertification and soil degradation is little understood in Nigeria. The picture that desertification or desert encroachment creates is one of sand dunes advancing over agricultural land around the edges of desert. This is however misleading as it implies a single process instead of a constellation of processes. The desert edge does not advance intact. It is rather the combined effect of accelerated wind and waste erosion, woodland destruction, water logging and salinization of irrigated land. In other words, desertification is an embodiment of well-defined processes, which operate singly, or in combination on dry land region to cause environmental degradation; natural processes exacerbated under adverse climatic conditions by population pressure.

Generally speaking, over cultivation, woodland destruction, poor irrigation practices, overgrazing, unsustainable development/public policy, alienated land ownership structure and legislations and wasteful energy policy all add to accelerate of processes already common in dry land, such as the physical and biological degradation of soils, wind and water erosion, and soil salinization even though the intensity and combination of causes and processes differs under different land uses.

Though studies are still going on, available statistics shows that the Sahel Savannah has now extended down close to places slightly above 10 degree of latitude (at latitudes between 20 and 32 degrees) towards the equator. Soils are extremely dry at these latitudes because the potential for evaporation and transpiration is generally greater than the average rainfall. The areas that are mostly affected by desert encroachment include most part of Katsina, Kano, Borno, Sokoto, Kebbi, Jigawa, Zamfara, Yobe and Bauchi states.

Secondly, it is important that the new programme on the environment should base its policy prescription and implementation on a sound understanding of the specific local causes of desertification in those areas. It should as a matter of fact be noted that the major factors precipitating environmental degradation in this area are of natural and anthropogenic origin.

Natural precipitators include changes in climate, drought and other natural disasters. Increase in temperature levels resulting from the general global warming combined with the occurrence of drought in the years before 1900, the 1920’s, 1940’s, 1960’s, 1970’s and the 1980’s to accentuate an increase in the level of evapo-transpiration in the area under consideration. It has already been predicted that if global temperatures were to rise by 4^oC the potential evapo-transpiration would increase by 10-15 percent and as a result the desert area with a deficiency of precipitation would expand.

Of human activity, the initial precipitators are to be located in political history of the area. The political history of this area like the whole of the Sudan belt is one of the rise and fall of successive empires, the first of which was the empire of Tekrur, followed in sequence by the stable dynasties: empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Other civilizations that flourished in this area included the Kanuri Empire, the Hausa city-states before 1800, the Sokoto Caliphate and lesser kingdoms like Borgu and Jukun. The establishment and destruction of these centers of ancient civilization were made possible through the instrumentation of war which entailed destruction of man and his environment; his settlements, agriculture, vegetation, commerce and local industry.

The destruction of the environment must have went on unabated until the coming of the European imperialists. The imperialist exploitation then introduced a new dimension into the process that has already started. What was uppermost in the minds of the imperialists was to how to source raw materials and create markets for their burgeoning industries and civilization and to do that they incorporated the flourishing African nascent economies into the global capitalist mode of production. The colonial political economy was patterned to coerce Africans to massively grow cash crops first for tax in order to keep the colonial state machinery going and create western taste and a market for European goods, and secondly to provide for exports. To accomplish this twin goal, large expanse of vegetation has to be destroyed to make way for peasant farms and colonial plantations for growing cash crops such as cotton, spice and groundnut. Similarly, natural vegetation had to be destroyed to make way for rail tracts and feeder road into the hinterland to make evacuation of raw material and transportation of imported good to and from the coast possible. This process continued well into the 1970’s, almost two decades after the colonial masters had gone. One would have expected this area to have been given the attention it reserve by successive administrations years after so as to mitigate the social and environmental dislocation, but instead the abandoned settlements, cash crop farms and plantations, rail tracts and roads that used to be commerce beehives became desolate, pockets or concentric ‘deserts’, a precursor to desert encroachment.

Worthy of mention is the problem overgrazing. It should be noted that the people of this area enjoy the most favourable grazing conditions to be found in West Africa. The tall grasses of the undulating plains provided pasture for the large humped cattle and for domesticated animals such as goats, sheep, camels, horses, donkeys, rabbits, fowls, etc. The area was also fantastically teemed with game both large and small. Over time, the expansion in livestock population occasioned by the creation of stable political systems, urbanization and the accelerated migration of the nomadic Fulanis from the Futa Jallon, trade in animals and their products with both the coastal as well as Saharan peoples, must have added to the pressure on their environment. This can easily be seen from the fact that grazing animals is selective of the plants they eat, with palatable young foliage being preferred. As grazing pressure increased, more foliage is consumed, impairing its reproductive potential. This often results in the lost of vegetation and increases the extent of bare soil. Gregarious animals, such as sheep, graze in concentrated groups, thus increasing the potential to severely degrade small areas. Domestic animals can cause severe degradation problems when they become feral.

The traditional methods of rotational pasture use based on the seasonality and productivity of individual pastures such as nomadism and transhumance, have been curtailed by settlements in this area. Under this situation, grazing is often restricted, leading to year round use of some pastures and soil compaction by the concentrations of livestock at water holes. This seems to make vegetation recolonization difficult and increases the risk of water and erosion. Thus heavily grazed lands around villages and along grazing routes were thus affected.

Closely associated to overgrazing is the twin problem of bush burning and woodland destruction. The management of rangeland vegetation by fire has over the years led to the accentuation of erosion. In this area, late-season high temperature fires are used to kill off shrub and tree seedlings, without damaging dormant grass species, which then thrive and provide good pasture. Such fires tend to leave the ground bare prior to the start of the rain leading to high levels of erosion in the early wet season. Also, woodland destruction continues to occur in this area to meet timber, fuel wood and charcoal needs as well as to provide agricultural land, even though wood biomass resources are scarce. Fuel wood collected in this area is destined for either the local rural communities or, more recently, the urban areas (due to scarcity and rising cost of kerosene, petrol and other fossil fuels, and biotechnology products). Sometimes fuel wood and charcoal are transported over 600 kilometres to these major cities. The effect of this urban demand has been to create ‘pockets of deforestation’ around major cities like Kano, Katsina, Bauchi, Jigawa, Damaturu and Sokoto.

Another factor that might have facilitated the process is the development paradigms that guided the formulation and implementation of public policy in and for this area since Independence. Successive governments have adopted development paradigms which focused exclusively on trade and related economic policies that dismally failed to embrace the issues of environmental protection and sustainability, particularly how it can be linked more closely with the everyday lives of those most affected by environmental degradation. Closely linked to this is the unfriendly energy policy of successive governments. Issues of nature conservation, renewable natural resources were evidently omitted altogether from gigantic development projects, such as agricultural development projects (ADP’s), irrigation schemes and construction of artificial dams, human settlement schemes, national agricultural and land development scheme (NALDA). Little wonder, these projects contributed significantly to the displacement of thousands of peasant families and the destruction of natural resources rather than resuscitating a beneficial rural-based yield. The Bakalori project is a classic example.

Added to the above is the complications introduced by the overthrow of traditional/customary land ownership through the implementation of the unpopular Land Use Decree of 1976 (amended in 1979). This enactment, sort of, alienated the people from their land, thereby severing the umbilical cord which tie man with land and by extension, nature. The customary ownership structure forced the peasant farmer or the pastoralists to treat the land he inherited from his ancestors as with care and sometimes as sacred, ensuring that its use or the exploitation of its wild riches takes into account the fact that its natural reproductive capacity is preserved. The Land Use Decree seems to have stripped off that obligation. Nigerians, now treats land and its resources as an entity alien to them, ‘after all, no be government property, so make we use am well well before dem collect am.’

Also, there is enough evidence showing that large bilateral and multilateral endeavors undertaken by the state governments in this area were merely intended to promote a vision of economic and social progress that had no visible comprehension of ecology or conservation, the debilitating consequences of which had been left to their rural folks to contend with.

Perhaps, the biggest source of worry for the authorities concerned (among all the anthropogenic causes of desertification and environmental degradation in general) is the other twin evil of poverty and the unchecked population growth in the area under consideration. Here, rapid (even encouraged) population growth conspires with deepening poverty, chronic illiteracy, endemic ignorance, outmoded cultural belief that emphasizes on ‘Bakin da Allah ya tsaga baya hana masa abinci’ (God will not allow the additional mouth He has created to starve), and worsening environmental degradation to reinforce each other in a downward spiral, the manifestation of which is visible: armies of marauding kids in their school-going ages and destitute roaming the streets of the major state capitals, apparently living in sub-human condition.

In any case, the new environmental programme will be judged first by whether it has incorporated concerns raised above; whether it has made any effort to reconcile all conflicting interests and the major contradictions inhibiting a sound environmental attitude and practice; and above all whether it will reverse environmental degradation and eradicate the dehumanizing poverty that has engulfed more and more of the people of that area, and Nigeria as a whole. Both the Federal government, the state governments as well as local authorities in this area have a huge responsibility in this regard. They all know what they have to do. And, indeed, they know how to do it! If they fail to turn the self-destruct economy (which is already reeling with pains from the doses of the Obasanjo’s ‘kalokalo’ economic medication) into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be consumed by environmental degradation, social disintegration, or at best, by destitution.

And the only way to accomplished that, is by putting in place a bottom-up, inward-looking economic programme whose philosophy is based on nationalism (Nigeria for Nigerians); its conceptual foundation, sustainable development; and the policy instrument, long-term comprehensive human and material planning! And in our views, nothing less!!

The Honourable Minister, we await your National Action Programme on the environment (NAP).

Abuja