Nigeria turns illegal loggers into rangers

JAMES Leleghale Bekewei knows the Okomu forest well: he used to make a living illegally logging trees in the Nigerian national park.

- JAMES Leleghale Bekewei

Now, Bekewei is on the other side of the law, working as a ranger tracking down hunters and loggers in the sprawling reserve.

“We made a lot of arrests,” he said. “You can ask my team members, I run very fast.”

In some ways, a repentant logger like 26-year-old Bekewei is the ideal type of ranger: national parks in Africa’s most populous country face a slew of difficulties, many of them stemming from people having few job opportunities.

Poverty - and a weak state unable or unwilling to enforce regulations - has made illegal hunting and logging in protected areas an attractive way to make money.

That puts places like Okomu, a tropical forest in the country’s southwest - and the endangered buffalo, forest elephants and white-bellied pangolins that live in it - increasingly at risk.