|
Special Feature
Newsdiaryonline Fri Oct 21,2011
Dutse:
Nigeria’s
Greenest
Capital
City
“In the next one year, the Four most urgent and life saving
services that government must deliver in line with the
Irreducible Minimum declared by the PDP will be handled by the
scheme. These services would include:
…….Massive re-forestation and tree planting campaign aimed at
restoration of nature throughout Jigawa State.
This particular programme would enable us use our youths to
restore our natural green environment. It will also enable our
children grow with green such that the environment forms part of
their being again.
In this connection, the state government intends to invite the
Nobel laureate, Professor Wangari Mathaai, with a view to
benefiting from her expertise, thereby giving our own programme
here a comparative African breath”
- Governor Sule Lamido in his Inaugural address to the people of
Jigawa on May 29th, 2007
Greening the whole state has been on the agenda from day One.
That is what the quote opening this essay tells us. It might
have sounded remote if not esoteric then but today, it is the
reality. Dutse and those who know say the entire state is
enveloped in Green. The Kenyan environmentalist who just passed
away did not visit Jigawa before her demise but even then, she
would smile in her grave that some people in one small corner of
Nigeria are living out her ideal to the fullest, ‘growing with
green’.
There is some paradox in all this. Jigawa is supposed to be part
of the ‘desert’ waste land in Nigeria and it is not there that
national leadership in an elaborate programme of greening is
expected. But, again, that is the reality.
It must be one of the very positive realities today in
Nigeria
given the strategic issues involved. One is the connection
between the environment and poverty eradication and peace, with
particular reference to women and, generally, the poor. Two is
the connection between the environment and continuity of life in
terms of our use and misuse of livestock, trees, forest
reserves, water and the land itself.
The extract below from a paper submitted to the European Peace University
October 2010 is self explanatory on this point. The evidence of
the environmental challenge gleaned from the paper is why
Lamido’s greening programme in Jigawa must interest the world.
Titled, “The Global Environmental Challenge: Evidence From
Nigeria’s Jigawa State”, the ‘Reflection Paper’ on Resources and
Environmental Conflict noted that the the case of Jigawa fitted
into the environmental challenge as the state is at the core of
the regional division of labour that plays the balancer in
Nigeria’s survival-food from the North and oil from the South,
to put it crudely. Jigawa’s contribution to the quantum of food
from the North, (grains, fish and livestock) is, therefore,
crucial to Nigeria’s
stability.
Jigawa is also favoured as a case study in that it has already
commissioned an expert study of its environmental profile and it
is on that study that this Reflection Paper relies exclusively
for the tentative conclusion that it is this state in Nigeria which proves the assumption
of global environmental/climate change thesis, whichever
indicator is taken.
In the
study commissioned in October 2007 and submitted in January
2008, a number of environmental crisis points were identified:
One, the country (Nigeria) is estimated to be losing
about 350,000 hectares of its land to desertification annually.
The most affected states called desertified frontline states
include; Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto,
Zamfara, Yobe, Borno, Bauchi, Gombe, Kebbi and Adamawa. These
States have a total population of about 42 million people
occupying about 43% of the country’s total land mass area.
Furthermore, desertification process is gradually pushing its
limits southwards at an estimated rate of 0.6 kilometer per
annum. This implies that states like Kaduna,
Plateau, Niger,
Nassarawa, Benue, Taraba, Kogi,
Kwara and the Federal capital Territory are being threatened by
this phenomenon.
Two, desertification in Jigawa State
has adversely affected the socio-economic environment of the
areas in question, from agricultural production, rising
incidence of food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition,
increasing level of poverty and migration of people to urban
centers. Desertification further triggers and aggravates
conflicts over land resources, especially in areas of high
productivity like the Hadejia/Nguru wetlands that provide means
of livelihood to various rural land users, notably farmers,
herders, fishermen and hunters”
The message of the environmental report card on Jigawa to the
rest of
Nigeria
is, as observed somewhere else, that the earth is not a static
object which exists on the basis of our justification of it. It
is, more than anything else, a product of massive migrations,
the wars we fought, the bombs we tested, the technological
excesses of modern industry, what radar have done to (bird)
species, the threat of ocean liners to sea animals, what mining
has done to lands as well as oil exploration and a whole lot of
that. Today, the consequences are starring us in the face- the
over two million people lost to drought and related
environmental problems between 1973 and 2003; the noticeable
heat waves and dehydration around Alexandria
in Egypt, Bangladesh,
Thailand, etc as well as the water scarcity
and, by implication, food scarcity/malnutrition that hangs over South Africa. These are beside
temperature rise and the associated crisis of higher evaporation
and the way they affect productivity, migration and living
standard.
It is in this context that the green revolution in the same
Jigawa derives its significance. Pictures of all major
buildings, settlements and other locations blooming in greens
should be instructive. Some have been there, some are new but
they all add up to the other green revolution:
Dutse welcomes you into its unity Roundabout
Green lined cross cutting road network
Page 2 Next
|
