Save These Forests For Our Future -By Saliu Momodu

There is a United Nations’ policy that seeks for each member country to retain 25% of it’s land mass for permanent vegetative cover.

This policy is to ensure sustainable national and global ecosystems for healthy and enriching environment while forestalling climate change/global warming.

Sadly though, our country Nigeria is reported to maintain a mere less than 7% vegetative cover which is grossly inadequate and terribly risky.

Even worse is that while desert encroachment continues to devastate swats of lands in the North of the country, massive and tragic deforestation is rapidly and mercilessly been inflicted on the otherwise rich rainforest vegetation of Southern Nigeria.

To be specific, there is as we speak, an utterly despicable onslaught upon the forests and bushes around many parts of Edo State. Etsako Central Local Government Area of the state that hosts interior communities like Agenebode, Ekperi, Ubiane, Anegbete amongst many others is a case in point.

Trucks and trailers from different parts of the country particularly from the biomass-deficient North and most probably from even beyond it’s borders arrive and depart in droves taking with them the cover, the flora, the funa, the herbs, the habitat and the rejuvenation of the environment and the planet that these forests were meant to represent.

Someone, everyone must prevail upon and rein in on this sordid development that is eating away at our collective future at lightning speed. A future that we now sell for a paltry sum and that we now allow to go up quickly in smoke and in flames.

It is hoped that the federal government’s recent announcement on the establishment of ten additional national parks across the country would precipitate the awareness, consciousness and action to stem the ugly tide of threatening desertification and rapacious deforestation in Nigeria.

We should be planting and nurturing more trees not felling the few that can barely cover our nakedness.
Let the states, local government as well as the traditional authorities within these concerned communities come awake to their responsibilities.

Saliu Momodu
saliumomoh123@gmail.com