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Edo State governor, Senator Monday Okpebholo and the Chairman of the state’s Forestry Commission, Hon. Valentine Owamagbe Asuen, have been called upon to take urgent steps to give adequate protection to the Benin Ogba Zoo and Nature Park (BENZOPA).

They have also been urged to retain the remaining forest reserves of the state, and evolve the capacity to protect and sustain the livelihoods of poor local communities and others, who rely on BENZOPA and the remains of its over-exploited forest reserves.

The renewed call was made by the Okpamakhin Community Initiative (OCI), a frontline Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) on nature conservation, through a statement signed by Chief Reuben I. Aizenabor and Comrade Nath Osamede, its directors for Community Relations and Public Affairs, respectively.

OCI’s repeated call, followed the initial one recently made through a letter written to the state governor, with copies addressed to the Environment Minister, Abuja, Hon Balarabe Abbas Lawal, the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), Abuja and Managing Director of its subsidiary Nigeria Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), with headquarters in Benin City, Edo State.

The organisation prompted the state government to come to the urgent rescue of BENZOPA, by stopping all the threats against it, including encroachment on its land area, violations by the nearby headquarters of the NPDC, recovery of its biodiversity and other priceless features.

The group also pushed on the state government to speed up actions on the Arbitration Agreement, reached between it and Everal Services Limited, BENZOPA’s management firm, in November, 2000, with the intent to ascertain it land area, and solve other problems that hinder effective management of the foremost conservation resource and ecotourism enclave.

OCI also advised Hon Asuen, Chairman of the Forestry Commission, not to succumb to the current moves by the IDH National Initiatives for Sustainable and Climate Oil-Palm Smallholders (NISCOPS) and other anti-people land-grabbing moves, to establish oil palm trees and other single-crops on the scanty forest land, now left for the surging population of farmers, loggers and other land users, hinting further that it is an invitation to more livelihood losses, acute scarcity of land, food insecurity and intense community crisis.

Okpamakhin Community Initiative stated that the said NISCOPS project, which Mr. Augustine Ninyio, its manager, was said to have introduced to Hon Asuen, has no place in the little land areas left in Edo forest reserves, but that the organisations could go through the state’s Ministry of Agriculture, not the Forestry Commission, to seek for privately owned lands, which the smallholding oil palm project is tailored for.

The organisation, which had carried out protracted global advocacy campaigns against the immediate-past government, with a suit instituted by it at the Regional Court of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Abuja, and two others pending in European courts, against the state government, stated that the group did not desire to continue open-confrontation with the Governor Okpebho’s administration, which the teeming and aggrieved farmers and other land users, had supported with their block votes, excepting they were pushed into it.