This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Climate action is Nigeria’s chance to free itself from the tyranny of oil

By:   []

Date: 2021-11

“Last week, my wife was saying ‘can we go back to fuel wood?’ – even to me!”

I met Umar on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. He told me that the £13 fare would have cost him three days’ salary, if the Scottish government hadn’t issued travel cards to conference delegates. But he self-funded his long journey from northern Nigeria to COP26 in the middle of a global pandemic because he is very concerned about desertification in the Sahel.

The global gas crisis, he said, has pushed up the cost of cooking gas across the country – it has roughly doubled over the last year. Cooking with gas is a relatively new innovation in the country. According to the website, Vanguard Nigeria, the country only used 40,000-50,000 metric tonnes of natural gas in 2008. Today, the total annual requirement is about 1.3m metric tonnes: a growth of over 2,000%.

For many Nigerians, the solution to this is simple – return to what they used to cook with: fuel wood. And here lies the problem.

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Umar’s home region, in the north of Nigeria, sits within the Sahel. This semi-arid Savannah land is rapidly being swallowed up by the Sahara desert – at a rate of 0.6 kilometres a year, he estimates.

Millions of Nigerians returning to wood as their source of cooking fuel means that more trees are being cut down. And, like ash follows fire, desertification follows deforestation.

The very fact that Nigerians are subjected to these bends and bumps of the international gas market infuriates Umar: “I don’t think the government is addressing the problem sufficiently. We have more than enough natural gas. Nigeria exports crude oil, we don’t even process it here, we have to export it and re-import it.”

The fact that Nigeria – the world’s eleventh largest oil producer – spends billions of dollars a year importing petrol and gas is a painful relic of imperialism.

When the country first struck oil in 1956, it was a British colony, and rather than refining the crude where it was extracted – adding commercial value and creating good jobs in the process – British companies shipped it to the UK, building an enormous refinery in Wales.

Climate refugees

This reliance on the international market to power such an oil-rich country is not only accelerating desertification but contributing to another problem too.

“Desertification in northern Nigeria [means that] people have lost their sources of livelihood, thereby creating climate refugees across the country and beyond, which led to the rising of insurgencies in the region by Boko Haram,” Umar explained.

With former farmers desperate to survive, banditry and kidnapping rates have soared. In September, the government instructed all telecommunications companies to shut down their networks in Zamfara state in the north west of the country to try and take on the kidnappers.

According to Umar: “They kidnap people – they don’t have enough money to shift to industrial agriculture because of low rainfall and low crop yield, so people have to create a means of making a living.”

When he was due to travel to the area recently to give a lecture on climate change, Umar recalled that his friends were shocked, asking him; “How can you travel to that zone?”

While some struggling farmers turn to banditry, others are forced to migrate.

The phenomenon of nomadic farmers from across Nigeria and beyond driving their herds onto the rich, tropical soils in the south of the country goes back to ancient times. But it has increased in recent decades. As rainfall rates decline in the north, more and more people are moving, and tensions have increased – often snapping into violence and killings.

“Cattle rearers have had to migrate from north to south,” said Umar. “This has created a lot of conflict – they [southerners] feel threatened by people from north Nigeria with their cattle moving to southern Nigeria. They have resorted to killing northerners and telling them to leave.”

And the response of the state to these events has often been even more brutal. In October 2020, revelations of profiling, extra-judicial killings, kidnappings and rapes committed by officers from the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) triggered a wave of support for a youth movement to abolish the unit, known as #EndSARS, which was met with violent force, including the police killing and torturing protesters – although, officially, the squad has now been disbanded.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/climate-action-is-nigerias-chance-to-free-itself-from-the-tyranny-of-oil/
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