TAKING WILDLIFE CRIME SERIOUSLY

Wildlife trafficking poses a threat to Nigeria’s biodiversity and security

Tomorrow in Kano, three high-profile wildlife traffickers will be arraigned in court on a case that should be taken seriously. The three men were arrested last month and remanded in custody, after being intercepted on the Kano-Daura Road. They were caught transporting a large illegal cargo of 48 live endangered wild animals—including baby gorillas, chimpanzees, caracal wild cats, and albino alligators. While wildlife crime is often underestimated by law enforcement officers who may see it as harmless, several reports have linked it to other serious crimes, including insurgency and banditry.

Indeed, wildlife trafficking is one of the most serious environmental and transnational crime challenges in Nigeria. And it poses a huge threat to Nigeria’s biodiversity and security. This unchecked thriving trade in wildlife in Nigeria led to the suspension of the country from CITES in March 2008. Five years earlier in 2003, after two gorillas that were being illegally trafficked were intercepted in Kano, international and local conservationists labelled Nigeria a hub in the illegal trade in endangered wildlife. The two captured female western lowland nine-year-old gorillas were subsequently sent back to their homeland in Cameroon that year to the shame of our country. But our authorities can do more by ensuring that when wildlife traffickers are caught, they would be brought to justice. That has not always been the case.

After spending five years running from the law, a notorious wildlife trafficker, Shamsideen Abubakar, was earlier in the year apprehended in a joint enforcement operation by the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC). Previously declared wanted by the Federal High Court in Lagos, Abubakar had been on the run since September 2021 following a coordinated operation by the WJC and NCS that led to the arrest of his associates, Sunday Ebenyi and Salif Sandwidi. That operation also resulted in the seizure of 1,009.50 kilograms of pangolin scales in the Ikeja area of Lagos, according to NESREA.

Incidentally, Nigeria was once said to have the most diverse population of monkeys and apes in the world, but as its forests dwindled, many animals have been hunted to extinction. Nigeria’s remaining gorillas are from a particularly endangered sub-species of the lowland gorilla: the Cross River gorilla that lives in the rugged mountainous jungle on the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

Nigeria is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as ‘CITES’. The treaty provides different levels of protection for a large list of plant and animal species, working to protect their numbers in the wild. It does this by imposing a specialised permitting system on the transport and trade of specific listed species. By those extra hurdles, CITES has created an environment that has had a significant impact on the rampant over-exploitation of the species it monitors. Nigeria has a number of animal and plant species that are listed by The World Conservation Union (IUCN) in the 2004 IUCN “Red List of Threatened Animals” as ‘vulnerable’ to extinction.

Unfortunately, the federal government has not been able to adequately equip forest guards to stop poachers, who operate almost freely within the nation’s protected game reserves. From Yankari, Bauchi State to Okomu, Edo State Gashaka-Gumti National Park in Adamawa and Taraba States to Cross River National Park and Omo Forest Reserve, Ogun State, there is no protection for the animals. Worse still, poachers are usually not interested in the orphans that they leave either to die of hunger or get picked up by people who sell them to itinerant medicine men or circus operators.

To the extent that this is about security, biodiversity conservation, and Nigeria’s international obligations, authorities must take wildlife crime more seriously.