The United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) has donated wildlife monitoring and enforcement equipment to the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA) to boost its effort to bring an end to wildlife trafficking in Nigeria.
The equipment include GPS trackers, digital binoculars, digital video cameras, laptops and desktops, weighing scales, walkie-talkies, foot wears, magnifying lenses, digital camera binoculars and calipers.
The Director General of NESREA, Prof Aliyu Jauro, while receiving the equipment, noted that traffickers had adopted sophisticated methods to operate, hence the provision of real time equipment would greatly enhance wildlife monitoring, investigation, intelligence gathering, enforcement, evidence collection, data generation and data management and transmission.
Prof Jauro assured that the country was taking all the necessary steps to rid the country of wildlife crimes, saying the recent destruction of seized wildlife stockpiles was intended to discourage perpetrators of the crime and also send out a signal that the country would not tolerate any form of wildlife crime on its soil.
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The NESREA boss expressed appreciation to UNODC, adding that the gadgets would be deployed to the zonal and state field offices of the agency, particularly those that had been identified as hotspots.
The Programme Officer of UNODC in Nigeria, Folusho Adeleke, commended the efforts of the Nigerian government in reducing the rate of wildlife crimes.
