By Musa Yaro, Calabar.
A coalition of stakeholders in Cross River state has faulted the immediate past governor of the state, Prof Ben Ayade for failing to control the forests or sustain the status quo that his predecessors had instituted.
The stakeholders stated this when they converged in Calabar, the Cross River capital for a multi-stakeholder conference on deforestation.
Speaking at the event, a one-time chairman of the anti-deforestation task force in Cross River, Mr. Peter Jenkins, said that although communities have roles to play, the key role of safeguarding the forests lies in the hands of the government.
In his words, “We need to understand before going to the governor who is running the business now in the state because there are several different cartels from large to small, operating in the state.
“The largest cartel was the Ayade family, his sisters, his brother, and himself and his cronies where every single kobo in the state was going into someone’s pocket.
“We have to call people to account and I am not assured we are willing to do that.
“It requires a lot of self-sacrifice and a lot of these things can turn out to be dangerous as you can get death threats because when you are stepping on somebody’s money and that money is billions of naira, they are going to come out for you,”
For the Village Head of Buanchor in the Boki local government area, Otu Douglas Owan, the ‘Green Police,’ constituted by Ayade’s administration yielded no results
“That thing Ayade brought, he said Green police, we never saw if such thing existed, apart from the uniform, everything went like that, you cannot be deceiving people and we see the forest going.
“I know he (Ayade) is a timber dealer, so he was rather encouraging it. Let the present administration stop ‘crossers’ where people join hands together to be harassing people in the bush to enable them to carry wood out.
“It was constituted by government and it was a way to settle all those area boys who were following them during campaigns, these crossers should be scrapped,” the royal father said.
Paramount Ruler of Boki, Attah Otu Fredaline Enka Akandu, advocated for the continuation of the Governor’s Duke and Imoke styles of truly banning logging in the state.
“Let us do what Duke and Imoke did. During Imoke, timber business, extraction, and logging were banned.
“Recently that we had this immediate past governor who never mind what was going on about timber, People complained, he never minded, though concentrating on his major projects in the state, timber was minor to him and he never listened,”
On the activities of the task force set up on deforestation, the paramount ruler said, “If I am an ordinary person, I would have applied to be a member of the task force.
“All task force members do is to stop a trailer, pick their share of the cash and allow the trucks go with our woods, and at the end of two years they build upstairs and drive cars,”
Others who spoke including Dr Ekeng Bassey of ‘Mangrove, Calabar South’ and Prof Raphael Offiong of the University of Calabar, blamed the loss of mangroves on poverty among youths, women, and elders, even as they called for alternative livelihood sources to check the trend of illegal logging.
