Awolowo, last leader to pay attention to Nigeria’s forests – Don

A professor of Forest Resources Management, Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management, Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Samuel Oluwalana, tells DAUD OLATUNJI about Nigeria’s untapped forest resources, including the cure for various ailments

From a lecture you delivered recently, you alluded to the enormous treasure in Nigeria’s forests, could you expatiate on this?

On December 21, 2022, I had my inaugural lecture titled ‘Forest, a boundless territory of wealth and health’. I reiterated that the forest contains so much, and it’s not just about timber, but also plants, animals, soil, and things underground and above the ground. Nature has endowed us with so much; I mean all that we need and all that we would need, and I discovered that there is a slight misunderstanding of this renewable natural resource called forest. Now, I’m in an area people don’t usually look into; human feces. I’m searching for the droppings of goats and pigs, which we can use to stimulate plant growth and make different products like soap, perfume, and cotton.

How will you rate Nigeria in terms of maximising its forest treasure?

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Virtually everything has been destroyed. After the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, no government has paid attention to forestry. Rather, our governments and institutions succeeded in plundering everything. Talking about maximising our forest resources is taking things too far, we have not learnt anything. When you listen to government officials, they talk about the economy, but not much about nature. Life is beyond naira and dollar, look at the way we, especially the large industries, are devastating our landscape. Estates are coming up everywhere, are we going to eat the estates? They are destroying the land and the future. We import foods, we import everything and we don’t seem to have a plan. Look at our cities. We have to look at indigenous knowledge, which we have not documented. Countries like Israel, the United States, Russia and Iran are tapping their indigenous knowledge, but we have destroyed our plants, insects, scorpions and other things that should have been useful to us.

You once spoke about using the appropriate leaf to bring someone dead back to life, which should have been one of the benefits we get from our forest. Could you expatiate on this?

It’s simple, using what the Yoruba call ‘ewe akoko’. When I got to Abeokuta in 1983 and I started attending church, many of us, young people, moved together from one place to another and we visited Oke Ilewo. I heard a story that there was a man at Oke Ilewo, who could bring dead people back to life; if the person died suddenly and people had not cried. I said one of these days, I would get the formula. We have to encourage our indigenous knowledge. Our parents were foremost scientists, but there were no written documents. I know about the indigenous knowledge of several countries, Croatia, Japan, Russia, Ukraine and others. These countries documented theirs.

How can we make money from this resource as a country?

When we talk about economic growth, money is not everything. What do we want from the government? Good roads, water, good schools, good laboratories and other basic things. I don’t need them to spoon-feed me; make the environment suitable. What we need is to use our resources to better our lives. We need to invest in education, because if we don’t train people and they rush into these things without proper information, they will crumble along the way.

You said recently that Nigeria could make money from the exportation of cockroaches and many people found it funny, could you expatiate on this?

Cockroaches are used for not less than 30 pharmaceutical preparations. The toad, for instance, the secretion, which is that poison, is used to cure cancer. We need to study what we have. These are creatures on their own and they can survive without us, but we may not be able to survive without them. All we need to do is to look at the nations that are doing these things. I was told recently that the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture has started a project on cricket farming. The consumption of insects is on the rise in the world, especially in Europe, we can take advantage of that. We have more species of insects than those nations because we are a tropical nation. So, in terms of the economy that people talk about, we can make money from these resources. We have different types of cockroaches and they are not less than eight thousand species. In China, for instance, they now use cockroaches to degrade urban refuse.

Could you explain how that is done?

In a particular place there, they heat up about 15 tonnes of refuse every day, so that instead of burning, knowing that we harm ourselves and the environment while burning things, they use cockroaches and it’s easy to use the residue as fertilizer. If you check the Internet, there are sites teaching people how to cultivate cockroaches, so if other nations are exporting their goods to us, why can’t we export to them what they use and will continue to use. I don’t think we eat cockroach here but there are people who eat it. The experience is that most of these things are used for negative purposes around here, while other nations use theirs to develop. When I spoke about Nigeria exporting human feaces, people were irritated, but in some other countries it doesn’t mean anything to them. I pray that very soon we will be keeping our urine because we can use urine to generate electricity and some other products. Urine can be used to manufacture gunpowder. God blessed us abundantly but we don’t know what to do with what we have. Right now, I’m preparing a version of India’s first liquid fertilizer from cow dung and fish waste. You can burn cow dung into ashes and use it to cure wounds or sores by just applying it on the surface, same thing as human faeces.

You also spoke about scorpions, could you tell us more on what to do with them?

The problem we have is that we destroy what we don’t understand. We can rear scorpions, which is very good. I know some people use scorpions in different ways. The venom is used for so many things in western medicine. So, scorpions can also be turned to funds. The giant black scorpion; one is sold for $50,000, but please don’t take it to the United States, else that person will go to jail from the airport. That is because they try to conserve everything, knowing they can go into extinction.

Climate change is a global issue and preservation of forests could help to minimise it, what should we be doing differently?

The situation we are in is aggravated, and what are the causes? We are destroying our forests and the soil. The mass of nuclear weapons that we have globally is also a factor. No government is looking at the burning of tyres, especially the resultant smoke, and then the volume of vehicles’ smoke that we don’t seem to care about. Government should take the responsibility of driving climate action.