Extorting dwellers in Ogun forest

THE Ogun State Ministry of Forestry should ordinarily be a revenue spinner for the state government. But only trickles flow into the government coffers, as complained recently by a government official. The state has nine forest reserves among which is the largest, Omo Forest Reserve in Ijebu East Local Government Area, about 80 km East of Ijebu Ode. This nature reserve covers an area of about 130,500 hactares made up of both dense forest and savannah vegetation. Considering the fact that the reserve harbours hundreds of dwellers including farmers, hunters and loggers, most of them illegal occupants, the state government expects much more revenue in terms of levies and ground rents. Almost on a yearly basis, it threatens to expel illegal dwellers and those who exploit resources in the reserve but pay peanuts into goverment’s coffers. The most annoying of this group are loggers who fell trees that they do not plant, destroy farmlands and haul the logs through Ondo State, a neighbouring state which charges them thousands of Naira in levies and other charges. Ogun state where the resources are pilfered only gets peanuts to the bargain.

Apparently unwilling to play the fool in this regard, the state in 2009 allegedly concessioned the reserve to a Chinese company which reportedly pays about #250m as annual ground rent to the government. But moves to eject illegal dwellers in the forest have proved futile as the dwellers, particularly farmers who are unwilling to lose their economic crops, notably cocoa, palm trees and kolanuts put pressure on politicians and civil servants as well to help abort the plan. The pressure is in several forms. Knowing goverment officials as being covertly and overtly corrupt, dwellers begin to tax themselves and oftentimes raise substantial amounts of money with which they lobby government officials. In this regard, forest guards are often the first port of call. The guards make so much money through frequent arrests of farmers and loggers in particular.  The allegations are mostly that the farmers are cultivating government lands illegally. The guards dictate the limits of government reserved land and the farmers, mostly illiterate, upon arrest and unwilling to lose their farms and farm tools, plead for mercy and open negotiations with the guards. If the price is right, money exchanges hands and the “captives” and their “captors” move on looking for other preys. Only very few cases get to the “ogas” in the ministry and when they do, the prices are most high.

The loggers are similarly exposed to this corrupt tendency. In addition they also pay substantial sums to the government through their association, one of which is the Ijebu Sawmillers and Timber Contractors’ Association, STCA. In a three-page petition to the ministry of forestry last August, they claimed they were paying about N800 million every year to the state government and wondered why goverment should concession the forest reserve to a foreign company which has been threatening to dislodge their members. Government, the association complained recently, raised the logging fee per member from N22,000 per annum to N60,000 per annum allegedly without “prior notice.” It is an irony that in spite of these legal and illegal payments, government is still playing the Oliver Twist. It has tasted the pudding and is unwilling to let go, in a forest which flora and fauna should be preserved. This is probably because the government purse is still leaking in the sense that officials are grabbing more than what they should. What to do?

The state government hatched a plan to reduce the leakages by asking the concessionaire to take full control of the forest through a thorough delimitation exercise and adjustment of boundaries between long-established enclaves, villages and reserved forests. Government is also asking the company to eject illegal dwellers among whom are farmers that have encroached on reserved land, loggers and criminal elements who hide in the forest to perpetrate criminal acts such as illegal mining of mineral resourses, poaching and killing of wild animals, kidnapping and armed robbery. Expectedly this threat of ejection is not going down well, particularly with economic users of the forest. They argue that this will lead to loss of their means of livelihood and increase in the number of the unemployed in the state. The fear and tension being generated by the quit notice may cause some unrest in the local government area if care is not taken. Many farmers and dwellers in about 60 enclaves in the forest are alleging, rather bitterly, that the concessionaire is surreptitiously extending the forest reserve boundaries and  trespassing into farms and communities that were not initially part of the reserve. In larger enclaves such as Ajebandele, J4, J5 and J6 for examples, many traditional farm lands that have existed for over a century are allegedly being encroached upon by the Chinese company.

For many dwellers in the area, since this push is becoming a shove, they are mobilising in their hundreds to cause a policy shift. Afraid that the issue might lead to an unrest, the forest ministry met last month with some traditional rulers including baales, community leaders and selected farmers and loggers in the area to explain matters, douse tension and find a way out of the potential crisis. Discussions were frank but the agreements reached seem to push more burden on the rural communities and their poverty-ridden population. At the meeting, ministry officials bemoaned losses in revenue as the main reason for concessioning the forest.

They even admitted the corrupt tendencies of some of their colleagues, especially forest guards; and blamed farmers and loggers for allowing themselves to be victims of this exploitation. Rather than devising ways to catch the corrupt, the officials asked the community leaders to carry out a proper survey of their enclaves and register the survey plans with the state government to save their investments.

Of these suggestions, the survey option looms large. It is the newest of the engagement package. During the colonial period, the colonial governments surveyed the forests stating clearly the number of miles available to the enclaves for expansion purposes. The military governments continued with this tradition as the hunger for farmlands grew larger with more people migrating southwards for economic sustenance. But successive governments later abandoned this more pragmatic approach and thus gave room to land grabbing by powerful elements backed by political party stalwarts. The snag in this area is astronomical survey costs that may leave the communities prone to exploitation by surveyors in government ministries and other land speculators.

The payment of ground rent to government every year by farmers is not new to the stakeholders. What is new is the directive that loggers should keep their logs in centres designated by forest guards and refrain from freighting them through illegal routes to Ondo State. Also new is the plan to allocate land to loggers on which they must plant trees. Although these arrangements appear to help douse tension, they hardly remove the penchant for extortion by the rampaging locusts in the guise of forest guards, dubious community leaders, surveyors in the ministry of forestry and hordes of touts along the criminal chain. At the Ogbere meeting, an official joked in Yoruba, “a jo maa d’awo ku ni,” meaning “we will all pay levies till we die!” This is a statement that coarsely and brazenly explains the ruthlessness of revenue collection business in the area. It is also not new to all the stakeholders at the meeting. To many of them, it underlines rather brutally the reality of the game at hand.

The game throws up rent collectors in and outside government, many of them political jobbers, thugs masquerading for politicians and civil servants angling for substantial shares in the forest pie. What the state government has been encouraging in that sector therefore is a rentier economy dominated by extortionists who by their modus operandi have become locusts who eat up much of the disposable income of many of the rural dwellers in the area and offering almost nothing in return. Apart from public schools and health centres, government’s presence in that area is almost nil. Hardly any of the rural roads are motorable. Before he became the chairman of the Ijebu East LG, Wale Adedayo alias “Babalawo” lamented that the area lacked infrastructure such as “roads, potable water, electricity, drainage/deflooding, etc”. He said he would give special attention to Ajebandele, Imobi I and II and Ogbere wards because “ these are the places generating revenue for the federal government (and state government)…but are seriously underdeveloped.” Almost half time into his tenure, not much has been done to fulfil his promises in this regard.

Perhaps this is why he is interested in driving more revenue into the state government’s coffers through the forest reserve in his domain. The concessionaire, forest guards, surveyors in government ministries, transactional leaders at community levels and political jobbers, etc, are now on the prowl in the forest reserve and the enclaves therein, chasing farmers, loggers and other stakeholders for more revenue. How much will eventually go into the state government official coffers and how much will be remitted to the host LGA may still remain a matter for conjecture as the locusts gain more ground.

• Onabanjo, a journalist, writes in from Lagos via: [email protected]

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