By Tony Erha
The misfiring governor of Edo State, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, had downplayed
the revocation order of about 13,750 hectares of ancestral high forest
lands, belonging to unfortunate Edo rural communities and folks, who
voted him into power. Instead, he has forever handed the land on a
platter to Okomu Oil Palm Company Plc., a foreign-based plantation firm,
masterminded by a delinquent Dr. Graham Hefer, its Managing Director and
South African immigrant.
Obaseki, by so doing, aptly lives up to his nickname of ‘Wake and See
Governor’ and a manipulator of the very poor; as he unilaterally
traded off the vast lands from the Owan Forest Reserve of Owan forest
zone and the Okomu Forest Reserve, respectively. This is notwithstanding
that it is from the same multinational Okomu Plc the lands were
originally revoked, by the decision-making Executive Council of the
immediate past administration of ex-Governor Adams Oshiomhole, of which
Obaseki himself, was an integral officer.
In response to public outcries, government then explained the reason the
said revocation order was needed. It was stated in “The Edo State
Government of Nigeria Gazette, No.16 Vol.19 (page 48 – 50, published
on 05th November, 2015- that the Forestry (as amended) Law of 2002 had
revoked the “…Illegal sale and transfer of land approved for Iyayi
Groups of Companies, for regeneration in Government Forest Reserves, to
second and third parties; and “Commercialization of the Areas
de-reserved….”.
Affirming the revocation order, Edo State Government also wrote a
letter, dated April 18, 2016 (Ref: GH/COS.58/156) to the headstrong
Okomu Plc.’s boss, warning the firm to vacate the land and stop
planting on the land it has bulldozed. Hefer and Okomu Plc. also
ignored the directives for it to conduct a mandatory Environmental
Impact Assessment (EIA) study on the entire lands, following a letter to
its Managing Director by the Environment Minister, dated 22nd
September, 2015 (Ref: No. FMEnv/EA/123:271?Vol. 1/28). It had started
bulldozing about two years earlier than on January, 2014, when the
letter was written.
Flouting the revocation order and mandatory directive from the Minister
for Environment, Hefer goaded his company to grab the over 36,000 ha
from the rarest two lowland rainforest reserves, from which a mere
13,750 ha of the diverse and rich biodiversity was bulldozed down to
replace a mono-crop oil palm plantation.
Imperatively, the critical stakeholders and the mass of concerned
citizens of the state needed to ‘gird their loins’ and rebuff the
arrogance and impunity with which Governor Obaseki, continues to grab
from poor Edo villagers their God-given inheritances and give to the few
rich land grabbers, particularly through his exploitative Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU), without the due process of involving the local
communities, the original owners of the lands, upon which the projects
are premised.
If not checked, the abnormality could degenerate into avoidable and
calamitous crisis like unmitigated food shortages, environmental
destabilization, acute livelihood losses, crimes escalation and
protracted inter-communal battles. More so, where the lands have
commonly been used by the various local communities, the depletion by
Obaseki, is beginning to result in scarcity of farmlands and attendant
crises, in the face of increasing population growth of the locals and
external land users.
The over 30 affected forest communities of the Owan forest zone,
encompassing the three-in-one forest reserves of Owan, Ehor and
Iueleha/Ora/Ozalla, respectively, were shocked to their bone marrow,
when in January, 2014, Hefer brought the bulldozers, clearing down
standing forest and crops belonging to the locals at the Oke-Irhue,
Odighi, and Odiguete villages’ fringes of the forest zone.
The bulldozers had decimated the locals, with acute poverty, hunger,
desperation and failure to carry on with their usual lifestyles. The
loss of the forest covers also exposes them to tougher environmental
conditions, with the extermination of their traditional places of
worship and sources of water. The impacted communities spread across
three local government areas of Ovia North East, Owan West and Uhunmwode
include: Odighi, Odeguetue, Uhiere, Owan, Agbanikaka, Oke-Irhue,
Orhua, Ekpan, Umokpe, Agudezi, Ozalla and Igbira Camp. Others include:
Uhonmora, Eme-Ora, Atoruru, Ogbetuo, Ugubezi, Sabogida-Ora, Oke-Ora,
Avbiosi, Uzebba, Agoshodin and Sobe, etc.
The Owan forest zone has about 400,000 inhabitants and over 75,000 able
bodied users and over 10,000 other able bodied external users, who
depend on it for farming, logging, woodwork, hunting, medicine,
collection of non-timber products and sources of water, etc. The land is
rare and of high biodiversity concentration, part of which had long been
earmarked as an extension of the globally-acclaimed Okomu National Park.
From Okomu forest zone, Okomu Plc. had also grabbed most of the park’s
buffers, thus endangering an already fragile ecosystem. The company
refuses to relinquish the revoked land and thousands of more ha it has
forcibly acquired, without authentic EIA study. The Okomu villagers are
also at the mercy of the almighty Okomu Plc. and receive their share of
the bulldozer treatment, as they face ejection from the land.
Hefer’s intent is to introduce on Edo-Nigerian soil the oppression,
thought to have been outlawed in his Apartheid country. A Hefer
gone-gaga had severally mocked the aggrieved villagers to go to hell and
that there was nothing they could do to get their land back, because he
has the governor and government in his pocket. This is, indeed, a
disdain for Nigerians as they dare not try that in Hefer’s South
Africa, where Xenophobic attacks against defenceless Nigerians and other
Africans have become a common expression in the Nelson Madela’s
country.
An environment and people-friendly government under Oshiomhole, made it
public knowledge that it was an aberration for the vast land areas to be
sold to A & Hatman Company Ltd (a firm belonging to notable politician,
Chief Anthony Anenih), who as a middleman, bought it from the Iyayi
Group of Companies, belonging to Mr. Iyayi Efionayi, an Edo-based
magnate. Chief Anenih and Mr. Iyayi, the men at the centre of the
dubious land deal, died at the same period, not too long ago.
Whereas, the vast lands were given, free of charge, by the Edo State
government, under former Chief Lucky Igbinedion, to Iyayi, solely for
regeneration, dubious Certificates of Occupancies (C of O) were procured
through the backdoor, under Igbinedion, which aided the illegal sales
between the three organizations, with several billions of Naira changing
hands. That was after over 40 years of excessive and gainful logging of
the same forest lands by Iyayi.
Hefer and his company were cunning enough to wait till the expiration of
the tenure of ‘an uncompromising Oshiomhole’s government’ to get a
compromising Governor Obaseki to undermine the revocation order and give
the rampaging Okomu Plc. and its South African boss the elasticity to
carry out grave impunity and heinous crime, unknown in the history of
the heartbeat state.
This, Obaseki worsened by going to carry out official opening ceremony
of the Okomu Plc. Extension II Oil Palm Plantation, premised on the
community’s land, which he had helped to revoke few years back. A
tactless and exploitative Obaseki, on the occasion, had promised to cede
more land areas to the land-grabbing company, to the detriment of the
locals, the original owners of the lands, who he holds the land for, as
a trustee.
This was before he had avoided all the petitions written to him to
prevail on Okomu Plc., on the matters, directly by the aggrieved
communities, particularly by the civil society’s Coalition Against
Landgrabbing and Deforestation (CALD). While Obaseki refused to honour
his promises to invite the impacted communities and CALD for a meeting,
as the Oshiomhole’s government had honourably done, Obaseki had had
frequent meetings in his office, with Okomu Plc. and its South African
boss. During a huge street protest taken to Governor Obaseki, in his
office, by CALD, supported by the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of
the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), Obaseki refused to address the protesters.
For about two decades, when Dr. Hefer became the company’s boss, he
has let hell loose upon the host communities and locals of the Okomu
forest enclave, in Ovia South Local Government Area of the state. Here,
in the bowel of the once largest but now most depleted rainforest
reserves in Nigeria, with Okomu Plc. as the greatest plunderer, the
company has its, headquarters, a giant processing industry and vast oil
palm and rubber plantations.
Hefer is a tempestuous slave-driver who has notoriety for being
nicknamed “Hell Fire” by his workers. The bulling South African, in
2010, once ordered Nigerian soldiers, who beat up and detained top Edo
government officers, for ‘daring’ to carry out simple official
duties in his company’s headquarters. With his slipshod and
dehumanizing operations in Edo State, he unduly militarizes the host
communities of Okomu and Owan forest enclaves, with a platoon of men in
soldier and mobile police uniforms, who are at his beck and call. While
he uses them to enforce his seizure of the land, they also carry out
deadly duties, like forcing the Okomu indigenes to carry body passes and
restrictions of movement, by a 6:00 pm to 6:00 curfew.
Whereas, there are numerous ‘Obasekis’ who mean well for the
people, the Edo people must be wary by another premonition to a
‘second slavery’, where an Agho Obaseki has apparently
‘reincarnated’ a ‘Godwin Obaseki’, who is making to forfeit the
Edos to some South African, as it was done for the British
adventurists. A people re-sold into slavery may be lost, forever!
· TONY ERHA, A JOURNALIST AND ENVIRONMENTALIST, WRITES FROM BENIN
CITY, EDO STATE