How many endangered species can Nigeria preserve?

The World Environment Day (WED) is observed every June 5  globally. Among the purposes of the day is to raise global awareness on the need to take positive action to protect nature and the environment.
This year’s theme, ‘Join the Race, Better the World: Go Wild for Life’, focused on the wellbeing of humanity, the environment and responsible management of natural resources. In this reason, the United Nations (UN) has called for a worldwide campaign to take a strong action to curb the illegal trade in wildlife products that are threatening the planet’s biodiversity.
The call was made in regards to how animals like elephants, rhinos, turtles, whales, lions amongst others are hunted, killed and smuggled for their meat, fur, skin, and tusks. This action, prevalent in Africa, has endangered many animals while several others have been hunted into extinct.
Such illegal activities and killing of animals round the globe have been noted to be disturbing the ecosystem and robbing humans of their natural heritage.
The UN said individuals and governments should take stern action to protect wildlife resources and to ensure sustainability of the planet and species that are under threat for future generation.
The federal government at an event to mark the WED pledged to address the cases of illegal hunting and trafficking of wide life to avoid their extinction.
The Minister of Environment, Amina Mohammed, said, “The status of wildlife in the country leaves much to be desired, as the rate of depletion of the population of animals like the elephants, leopards, giraffes and crocodiles amongst others is frightening.”
This unfortunate state of the affairs, she said, showed that Nigeria’s wildlife is fast disappearing.
However, the minister said there was no statistics for wildlife in Nigeria and that she could not provide accurate and current statistics on the status of wildlife in the country.
“Today I know that if somebody says, what is really the status, or figures for wildlife in Nigeria? I am not sure I can tell you as the minister of environment. And if I am going to say something, it is probably 10 years old in terms of its information and data,” she said.
This raises the question of what Nigeria is set to preserve and its seriousness in ensuring that the country’s wildlife is preserved.
She said government would develop the capacity to know what the baseline was, what animal was where, which was endangered, what needed to be done to protect those animals and to increase their population in Nigeria for the sake of the wildlife.
The minister, however, maintained that the ugly trend in the environment could be reversed by enhancing the regulatory frameworks, laws and capacity to address the crisis.
According to a report by Usman B. A. of the Geography Department and Adefalu L. of the Agriculture Extension Department, University of Ilorin, many species of Nigerian plants and animals were either threatened or endangered and at the same time, soil degradation, erosion and desert encroachment continued in various parts of the country.
The report titled ‘Nigeria Forestry, Wildlife and Protected Areas: Status Report’, stated that problems such as inadequate data on the status of biodiversity, uncoordinated land use policy, absence of well-defined programmes, inadequate funding and high poverty levels in the country remained the major constraints against the success of the policy.
The experts posited that wildlife protection did not enjoy the early attention given to forest conservation. They attributed this to the wrong notion that, wild animals were plentiful and were therefore not under any threat of extinction.
The report noted that another obstacle to wildlife conservation in the country was that several communities saw their surrounding areas as traditional hunting grounds.
The IUCN red list of globally threatened species, according to them, contained 148 animal and 146 plant species found in Nigeria. Included in the list are three animal species and 15 plant species classified to be critically endangered.
The National President, Environmental Management Association of Nigeria (EMAN), Arc. Emmanuel Ating in a phone conversation said lack of information and data on wildlife in Nigeria was due to failure of putting plans in place.
He said wildlife preservation boiled down to protection of the environment and it was not just about animals or fishes but a whole lot that included water and plants.
Ating said for anyone to protect wildlife, there was need for a good environmental system that entrenched in proper rules and regulations. “But the important thing as we speak today is that the Ministry of Environment functions more as federal ministry of sanitation because the core professionals that could have made it an environmental management institution were not recruited,”he said.