Restoring Hope for Nigeria’s National Parks: The Work of Africa Nature Investors

Tunde Morakinyo, co-founder of the Africa Nature Investors (ANI) Foundation

Nigeria is often associated with bustling cities and rapid development, but hidden within its borders are vast and fragile wilderness areas that hold some of Africa’s most endangered wildlife. Few people know this better than Tunde Morakinyo, co-founder of the Africa Nature Investors (ANI) Foundation. For decades, he has worked to safeguard Nigeria’s national parks by partnering with local communities and government agencies. In this conversation, he shares his journey, the challenges of protecting Gashaka Gumti and Okomu National Parks, and his vision for the future of conservation in Nigeria.

Perhaps, first, you could remind us briefly of your background in conservation and what exactly ANI is.

I am a community forester by training. I have worked in conservation since the early 1990s, when I started a community forestry project near Cross River National Park in Nigeria. After working on community conservation for six years in Nigeria, the Philippines, Cameroon, and other countries, I spent 16 years as a partner in an environmental consulting company in the private sector before founding the Africa Nature Investors (ANI) Foundation. We are an African not-for-profit organisation partnering with governments and communities to protect national parks in Nigeria. ANI provides hands-on protected area management through ranger-led law enforcement and economic development of the surrounding communities. In Nigeria, we work in Gashaka Gumti National Park and Okomu National Park.

Now, please tell us why Gashaka Gumti National Park is such a special place.

At over 6,000 sq km, Gashaka Gumti is Nigeria’s largest national park. When people think of Nigeria, they think about the crowded, energetic, and chaotic streets of Lagos and other cities teeming with millions of people. Most people, including Nigerians themselves, are unaware of a vast wilderness on the border with Cameroon with sweeping savanna woodlands, huge forests, deep rivers, and spectacular mountains. And then, there is the wildlife. The park has one of the largest populations of the endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, leopards, African golden cats, buffalo and a wide range of antelopes and primates. It really is an incredible place.

GGNP Black and white colobus

ANI has been working with the Nigerian authorities in Gashaka for a number of years now. What sort of progress have you been able to make?

When we first got to Gashaka in 2017, we met a park on its knees. Animal populations had crashed, and it was plagued by logging, artisanal mining, poaching for urban bushmeat markets and thousands of illegal cattle grazers setting fire to the entire park. We signed a 30-year co-management agreement with the Nigerian government and then set about rebuilding the park’s infrastructure. We recruited and trained 120 rangers who patrol the entire park to curtail all the illegal activities, and this has dramatically improved the security of the region because many of the illegal offenders were the same ones carrying out kidnapping, banditry and armed robbery. As a result, animal populations are rebounding. We also invest heavily in the local economy, supporting education, agriculture, pastoralism, beekeeping and microfinance programmes to give communities an economic stake in protecting the park. We could not protect the park without the support and partnership of the communities.

It sounds like an inspiring story. What do you think have been the most important lessons that you’ve learnt, in terms of what has worked and what hasn’t worked? 

Signing a delegated management agreement with the National Park Service of Nigeria was essential for releasing the funding needed for Gashaka Gumti. It also enabled us to work effectively alongside the government in a co-management capacity to deal with the challenges facing the park. While ranger protection has been very important, devoting serious resources and energy to community engagement and development has been critical for our success. Communities need to be incentivised to help protect the park, and for this to happen, the park MUST make a difference to their livelihoods. We still face big challenges in tackling artisanal mining and illegal cattle grazing. There are no quick, easy solutions – but we have come a long way from how we met the park in 2017.

Ranger Training in Okomu

Ok, we also know that ANI is working in another Nigerian national park, Okomu, which is a rainforest in the south with a small number of forest elephants. We imagine that is a difficult environment, but how is it going?

Okomu National Park in Edo State is a much smaller park, located on the edge of the Niger Delta. It is a very special place with an incredibly impressive rainforest, hosting one of the last populations of Nigeria’s critically endangered forest elephants – perhaps around 40. We have a similar agreement in place with the government to manage Okomu and have been very successful in curbing the rampant illegal logging that was decimating the park. Being located close to Benin City, community dynamics are quite different from Gashaka and are more challenging in some senses, but we are gradually finding ways to work in partnership with these communities, too.

Nigeria only has a few hundred elephants in total. How do you assess their current status?

Nigeria only has around 400 elephants. Their situation remains very precarious, mainly due to high human population growth and the hunger for agricultural land. Yankari Game Reserve, which has Nigeria’s largest elephant population, is hemmed in on all sides by farmland. The situation is the same for the elephants of Omo Forest Reserve, Okomu National Park and Cross River National Park. We are still fighting to stop them from being poached and losing the little habitat they have left. However, a new challenge is that of human-wildlife conflict with elephants living in such proximity to farmers.

Okomu African Forest Elephants

Finally, please tell us your hopes and dreams for Nigeria, ANI, and Tunde Morakinyo.

Most Africans and their governments care little for wildlife. They are too busy struggling to put food on the table. National Parks and their wildlife will only survive if they are economically relevant in the Africa of tomorrow. This is the challenge for ANI and for me personally. I dream of a time when we will welcome thousands of Nigerians from our cities to both Gashaka and Okomu, earning revenue for the government and changing the hearts and minds of people towards our national parks and their wildlife.

I also dream of the parks making the local communities prosperous. This way, the people will actively work with us to fend off the challenges all the parks in Nigeria face from population pressures on all sides. We are also working hard to make sure that the parks can become more financially self-sustaining (from ecotourism and carbon credits), so hopefully, one day, I will no longer have to write an endless stream of funding proposals, year in, year out! Last but not least, I look forward to the day when we will invite people from all over Africa to see Nigeria’s incredible parks and to learn from our experiences in managing these places.