The Yankari Game Reserve is arguably Nigeria’s most well-known wildlife and forest reserve but stories emerging from there are at best mixed. While many people have praised the experience, others have laid some bitter complaints.
By Chimezie Chika
A Familiar Story
This story begins with me. It began in October 2021 while I was attending the Ebedi International Writers Residency, located in the town of Iseyin, Oyo State—an experience I wrote about in an essay published in The Muse Journal. Part of the residency’s program is to convey the residents in an excursion to explore the Ado Awaye Hills and the historical complex around it.
Ado Awaye is an ancient town that sprawls below a huge magnificent rock monolith, whose summit is remarkable for the suspended lake (more appropriately a pond) located on one of the crevices. The rock’s presence is intertwined with the region’s history, and remains a major tourist site, not just because of that history but also because of the recognition of the rarity and geological beauty of such natural formations.
But what did we see when I and my fellow residents arrived that hot day in October? First it was the bad road and the rusty, decrepit sight of the town lying so forlornly beneath the imposing shadow of the rock, like those abandoned Wild West outposts in Hollywood westerns.
The registration office was ramshackle—flaking rafters, peeling paint, falling blocks and all—and almost empty, with loafers loitering around. There was no infrastructure in place to aid tourists or to prove that this was a serious site of nature’s architectural benevolence from which the government could earn serious foreign exchange; such things as cable car, ladder, or working stairs, seemed entirely alien. It was clear that the place was more like an abandoned relic than anything else.
Ado Awaye is only one typical example. When our journey takes us to the South-East, the story hardly changes, only the location does. I have been to the Ogbunike Cave Complex in Anambra many times and one of the stories I have to tell about the place is one of extortion by touts in the local community. In addition to that, no tourist-friendly infrastructure has been built, even after so many years.
It is a testament to the passable importance which the Anambra state government places on tourism and natural sites. It seems to me that the best way to manage such natural sites at the present moment is through strategic privatisation.
This is what was recently done to the Obudu Mountain Resort in Cross River State, a natural site which was grossly mismanaged by the state government for many, its infrastructure falling into disrepair, until it was privatised.
Even then, the cable car, one of the location’s attractions and one way to navigate the serene mountains, is still gathering dust, according to Edna Ohabughiro, a recent tourist there whom I spoke to.
Neglect is a familiar story in Nigeria. As I conducted my research, all I saw and read about struck me as familiar. Like everything else in the country, the reserves and natural sites are witnessing the adverse results of government lip service; most of its tourism infrastructure is in grave disrepair, and poachers are having a field day bootlegging animals and rare trees for money.
The Critical Scope of Natural Reserves in Nigeria
Surprising as it may appear to the average Nigerian today whose stock images of African wildlife is usually associated with such countries such as Kenya, South Africa, Botswana, and a number of others in Eastern or Southern Africa (that no tourist has ever associated safari with West Africa, much less Nigeria, is a testament to the total neglect of the sector in the region), Nigeria actually has an extensive range of national parks.
As of 2024, there are 1,129 forest reserves in Nigeria, 29 game reserves, 4 game sanctuaries and 8 national parks. All reserved land in Nigeria amounts to over 3 million hectares of land. Some of the game reserves include the famous Yankari Game Reserve in Bauchi, Kashimbila Game Reserve, Omo Game Reserve, Erwa Nature Reserve, Afi River Forest Reserve, Idanre Forest Reserve, and others.
The creation of nature reserves began very early in Nigeria from the 1890s and continued up until the early 1990s. With so much protected areas, it’s a wonder that the country has not created a visible wildlife-forestry industry out of it.
The critical observation here is that there is no corresponding ecological effort that matches the idea behind the establishment of national parks and forest reserves in the country.
Every part of Nigeria—from the Niger Delta suffering from the effects of oil spillage to Nigeria’s sahel region in states like Bornu, Yobe, Zamfara, Kano and others, where the desert is steadily encroaching—shows the inefficiency of environmental preservation in the country.
According to a study by the Nigerian Federal Department of Forestry, only about 974,674 thousand hectares of forest is productive in Nigeria. A further 2,342,147 is classified as partially productive.
But then the gravity of the situation truly comes home when you realise that this study was conducted in 1988. While there seems to be no recent extant study in the 2020s, one can predict grim results if the current situation of Nigeria’s forest reserves is studied. It is not too far-fetched to state that from evidence of sight, word of mouth, and witnesses, Nigeria’s forest cover is depleting at an extremely fast rate and that bird sanctuaries and wildlife are critically endangered.
A research by the United Nations Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) put the rate of deforestation in Nigeria at a 3.5% to 3.7% rate, one of the highest in the world, which means that an alarming 350,000 to 400,000 hectares of forest cover is lost yearly.
The study predicts that if this is not mitigated, the country will be bereft of its forests by 2052. It is a bleak future we face with the extreme levels of environmental negligence in Nigeria.
Wildlife Preservation and Game Reserves
David Nkwa, a Nigerian travel creator on YouTube, has a documentary video on his account in which he interviewed an American couple, Liza Gadsby and Peter Jenkins, who have been in Cross River state—Nigeria’s richest biodiversity hotspot—for 36 years.
In that interval, they had managed to establish a thriving sanctuary for drills within an area that is part of the over 4000 square km Cross River National Park, where Nigeria has one of its few remaining rainforests—the largest in the country by far—close to the border with Cameroon where it forms one contiguous rainforest with Cameroon’s Korup National Park.
The story that Nkwa captured details the triumphs and, mainly, the challenges of wildlife conservation in Africa from the point of view of these Americans. According to the Americans, the drills were wrongly thought to be extinct in Nigeria before 1987, until a research group of scientists arrived to assert, by observing animal movements and interviewing locals, that that wasn’t the case; though the drills, alongside Cross River Gorillas, are still critically endangered.
One particular species of primate, the grey-cheeked mangabey, is now thought to be extinct in the region.
The one recurrent issue that keeps emerging in every talk of Nigeria’s natural reserves and its conservation efforts is the poor implementation of government regulations. Illegal logging and burning is uncontrolled, damaging the ecosystem and pushing wildlife and bird colonies further and further away.
Another issue, and one of great concern, is the almost unmitigable problem of poachers who are killing the drills and other wildlife for meat and hide. To wit, this issue appears to be more an economic problem than anything else: most people will not eat wildlife if they have enough money to purchase livestock.
In Nkwa’s documentary, Liza Gadsby put it down to lack of patriotism in Nigeria. She argues that Nigerians do not see wildlife as an important natural resource and heritage, something that must be protected and preserved for generations, as people in Western countries do, which is Nigerian wildlife are being ruthlessly killed and depleted. In a place where foreigners are the ones telling us to value our natural assets while we do the exact opposite, it is hard not to agree with her.
The Yankari Game Reserve is arguably Nigeria’s most well-known wildlife and forest reserve but stories emerging from there are at best mixed. While many people have praised the experience, others have laid some bitter complaints.
An example of such mixed reviews comes from Jindu Enugbe, a writer whom I spoke to some days ago. Enugbe was at Yankari in January 2021 and stayed for nearly a month. For Enugbe, Yankari is not just any game reserve, it is also a historical site, with cave paintings and other signs of ancient human habitation, which makes it an even more integral part of the country’s identity.
“There was some wildlife there. I saw antelopes, zebras and elephants. But there were no lions, even though they said there used to be lions. What the park rangers said about lions is that the animals have moved further into the forest to escape poachers.”
This observation is not out of place with obtainable scientific literature on Nigerian wildlife. Lions—the West African lion—are endemic to Nigeria (West Africa) and are either technically extinct or about to become so.
“The park rangers kept telling us that they had lions but we never saw one,” Enugbe said. “They said the particular guards who would take us deep into the forest to see the lion have been away for days. When the guards finally returned, they told us they were too tired to go back in. While we were there, only the museum staff proved to be exceptional, one of the best Nigerians I have met. Apart from him, there was a general air of nonchalance there.”
Even here, the major problem endangering the supposedly protected animals are poachers who cash in from the local demand for bushmeat and rare animal skins. But, for Enugbe, a related problem has to do with the management, which offered inadequate lodging facilities, especially the kitchen whose culinary diversity is restricted to just yam and noodles.
But beyond this personal experience, Enugbe reflected that what he encountered at Yankari was not out of character with the deep inefficiency in the Nigerian public system. “The mismanagement is a reflection of the mismanagement of Nigeria. The reserve is only mirroring the country it is in.”
So the same story hurtles on unceasingly, whichever location you go to. Nigeria’s largest national park, the Gashaka-Gumti—the location of, among other endangered wildlife and natural formations, elephants, mountain gorillas, biodiverse montane forests, and Nigeria’s highest mountain, the Chappal Wadi—has suffered some of the same problems.
Here, the main issues include poaching, uncontrolled grazing by Fulani herdsmen, and the rise of tea plantations on parts of the protected land.
In simple terms, it all narrows down to two major issues; one, Nigeria’s forest reserves may soon disappear, as the UN study cited above iterates, due to heavy logging and unsustainable forestry practices; two, many of the wildlife endemic to Nigeria are endangered while some are extinct due to the unchecked killing and consumption of these extremely rare animals.
The real question in the face of these realities is what can be done urgently at this time to solve these problems?
Like other critical issues in the country, I think the Nigerian government should declare a state of emergency on nature and wildlife. It is the only way for Nigerians (and the government itself) to take its acute problems seriously.
For it seems that the only time anything in Nigeria is considered with any degree of seriousness is when a sense of danger is placed upon it, otherwise such serious matters will be seen, as with most things in this country, as one elaborate joke for people to pitch in their “takes” and laugh over.
A further solution: it is not clear why the Nigerian government cannot implement policies such as cut-one-tree-and-plant-two which has been applied to great success in countries like Kenya (Generally, Nigerians do not consider greenery an important part of the environment; the country’s real estate sector proves this!).
The importance of forest cover in the critical ecology of any country or region cannot be overemphasised. It is the fundamental basis for the sustenance of life. Clear-cut environmental policies in the Nigerian government is obviously not considered a priority. There’s a lot of officialese without corresponding action.
Nigeria’s Ministry of Environment is a government organ under whose auspices the Nigerian environment is supposed to be conserved and protected. Unfortunately, from the crude-despoiled mangroves of Southern Nigeria to the desertifying far reaches of the North, and from the dense forests and mountains of the East to the rocky formations and forests of the West, that Ministry has done very little to prove its mandate.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, Channel Magazine and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on Twitter @chimeziechika1.