By Sogbeye R. J. Douglas
‘And all this because of a poor dog named Buhari which we are told had to be quietly put down and sent to the great beyond by its owner so that it couldn’t be used as evidence against him in court’ – Femi Fani Kayode.
You remember Harambe? The silverback (Gorrilla) of Cincinnati USA., who was violently put down because a derelict mother could not control her sneaky child and the boy fell into the guerilla’s enclosure in a gorilla show in the zoo. Animals are meant for our entertainment in life and may be food. The humane world was outraged by the violent fate of Harambe. I was so moved in empathy, I wrote a funeral prose for Harambe “Requem Harambe.’ The piece was my song of funeral oration for Harambe. I wrote how in the place of a real gorilla we, the animal loving world was short changed with an effigy gorilla that was set up to receive funeral oration for Harambe while the real Harambe was laid to rest in eternity.
However, Harembee is not native to Cincinnati. Harambe was an orphan and a refugee of a brutal circumstance in Africa that consumed his family- that landed him in a zoo in Cincinnati USA. Harambe’s natural home is Africa in the tropical forest of Congo. Environmental degration, political instability, Poaching, bush meat and corruption in Africa occasioned an African holocaust of fauna and flora in which Harambe is a martyr. He was brought up by a seventy two years old man in Cincinnati. This is how Harambe found himself in Cincinnati USA in a zoo where he met his brutal fate. Would Harambe’s fate been better were he in his natural habitat in Africa? I wouldn’t think so. Africa is hell to animals. We still lack rudimentary humane civilization to attach any value to animal life. The Judeo- Christian Injunction ‘Peter kill and eat’ is a patent to Africans to be cruel to animals, to indiscriminately kill eat animals even our pet animals. Harambe is relevant to my discussion because he is an African fauna tragedy that prorogued in the African Congo forest but epilogued in Cincinnati USA. Henceforth, if you are an African, especially a Nigerian; when you see in your holiday packages; zoos to visit in Europe and the in US etc, it is an invitation- a marketing relation politeness inviting you to animal orphanages to pay and see how your neglect, stupidity, inhumanity, and greed can be nurtured to blossom in a more sensible and humane environment. This is because most of these zoos have a reasonable population of African fauna and flora in Diaspora. We decimate their populations in Africa, only to travel abroad to pay hard earned foreign exchange to attend their animal shows.
There is a drama of a controversial dog in Nigeria, that the police said its owner named Buhari as per the citation in the preamble .The dog is said to have been put down under what condition we don’t know; what we are told is that the dog was put down to erase evidence against its owner in the case of Citizen Joachim Iroko Chinekwe versus the commissioner of police, Ogun State in suit No MOT/617c/2016. The drama just offered a new act- the brutal circumstance of Buhari’s ‘murder’-the vicarious killing of an innocent dog in a human comedy of misnomer, calls for reflection, investigation and interrogation of our environment and attitude toward animals cruelty we mete to them for every imaginable whim. Dog Buhari’s fate is synoptic – ‘he was like a sheep that is led to the slaughter so he opened not his mouth’. In civilized clime there are laws guiding the putting down of an animal -to death. The conditions are spelt out, guided by humane and veterinary considerations. There must be veterinary recommendations for an animal to be put down. The humane consideration is that it must be done in a condition of not increased pains and further suffering to the animal. The condition that Buhari was put down was not for veterinary or humane reason, it was for purely political reason that the animal was put down. There are two versions of the story for putting down Buhari; one version said Buhari was put down by his owner to circumvent the law of evidence. The second version has it that before Buhari ‘s owner was granted bail and released, the police out of taking matters into their hand, cruelly ‘Murdered’ Buhari. In either case, I know Buhari was not tranquilized for an euthanasia- given mercy killing. The likelihood is that after its brutal killing, Buhari ended up in somebody’s pot as ‘404’- a local name dog eaters give to dogs to eat them. The police too is complicit; where is Buhari’s carcass? Is it in the custody of ‘peace of a grave’ or in the stomach of the police or is its owner? These questions can never be answered as the true purpose of Buhari’s untimely fate in the hands of any of the suspects is for the self serving purpose to erase evidence. Buhari’s murder whoever is responsible; its owner or the police only acted in political expediency or correctness- the police assuming a new role of identity purifiers and the owner acting in ignorance that the law will come against him and the dog might be subpoenaed to court to give evidence against him in a case of misnomer and identity trolling. If this is his reason, the one hundred SANs and human rights lawyers who contributed for his bail should have advised him against the cruelty to put the innocent dog down for such ignorance. They should have told him animals don’t have the faculty of humans to give evidence in court. And the law of evidence does not recognise animals to give evidence in court. That putting down the animal just for this reason is cruelty to animal and vicarious.
I was in a magistrate court in the early seventies when my uncle accused a masquerade group for having stolen his goat, slaughtered and eaten the goat. The goat was a nursing nani and that rendered the goat’s two kids orphaned. The police made some arrest and made a charge of theft in a magistrate court. My uncle and the police wanted to rely on the two kids of the goat as their principal witnesses and evidence to prove their case. After taking plea from both parties, my uncle was simply advised by the magistrate to go and nurse the surviving kids under good protection. The surviving kids cannot, being animals be witness and give evidence in court as to who stole their mother. I just hope the status has not changed. Animals cannot give evidence in court. Probably, this is where the misplaced fear of Mr. Joachim can be located. He was contemplating a drama in court where the police to prove their case will call Buhari, Buhari, Buhari, to test the dogs response to press a case of mischievous conduct likely to breach public peace with a deliberate and derogative misnomer.
The tragic end of both animals in the anecdotes above present me with rare opportunities to bring into focus two critical issues of cruelty to animals and the consequence of environmental degradations that have fanned the amber of a Diaspora for African fauna. A critical place to start my interrogation is the Congo tropical rain forest second in size, natural beauty, flora and fauna and in critical economic value second only to the Amazon rain forest. This forest outlining the River Congo is said to be still pristine thanks to the many wars of the CDR and her neighbours which has made the forest inaccessible to incessant illicit logging. However there is a great abuse of the animal population there. Animals are not that lucky as the flora that suffers limited destruction in the hands of loggers. Poaching by locals who slaughter the animals for food, trophy and pets to sell to a growing array of international black market gangs is a disturbing trend- this underpins the very subject of my essay -cruelty to animals in Africa, the insatiable appetite to declare every animal as bush-meat meant for slaughtering and eating in an environment with other useful potentials -enormous potential in tourism, power generation, irrigation, agriculture etc.
The river Congo and the tropical rain forest should be a tourism and economic paradise. Electrical engineers and environmentalists backed by studies have long concluded that the River Congo can supply the whole of Africa electricity for the next two hundred years. The waters can irrigate Africa half of Africa, it can provide tourism opportunity with multiplier effect of generating employment, economic developments and open Africa up to the investment world as a an economic center and investment hub. But the Congo forests and Rivers are better known for two notoriety – intractable civil wars and unending chains of state induced corruptions has stifled the great exponential benefits of this great environment to be put into the service of human economic progress. A French Journalist wrote during the Rwandan and Burundi genocidal wars that; ‘The River Congo wore the face of a horsetail soup, but there are lumps in it, the lumps are the bodies of the victims of the genocide’. This is the gory metaphor that the river elicited for its notoriety in the intractable internecine wars and fratricidal wastage in the countries surrounding the River Congo. Below is how a pristine African paradise is painted as a man made immitigable hell:
‘Corruption and Infrastructure Megaprojects in the DR Congo By: Augustin Nguh and Rudo Sanyanga Tuesday, December 17, 2013 Report details corruption in DRC, potential for marring Inga dam developments The Inga II Dam The DRC government – with financial support from the World Bank, African Development Bank, USAID and European Investment Bank – plans to construct the lworld’s largest hydropower scheme: the Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River. The scheme is expected to generate 40,000MW of electricity, most of it for export to South Africa. Unfortunately, mega projects such as this scheme are often beset by corruption. The Grand Inga Dam’s price tag of US$80 billion (a huge investment for a country with a GDP that averages just $348 per person), coupled with the country’s poor governance record and its unstable political climate, could be a recipe for fueling corruption. Annual corruption indices by Transparent International, the World Bank and other anti-corruption monitoring organizations show no improvement in the status quo despite legislation that Joseph Kabila’s government is credited for. The DRC government has largely failed to transform the huge export revenues it accrues into development benefits for its people. Under these circumstance the Grand Inga hydropower project can be expected to lead to a “resource curse” just as oil and mining extractive industries have done across the continent. Public and private investors should be wary of supporting such a huge project in such a dysfunctional system’.
The beautiful African elephant described as a living Dinosaur by elephant ecologist and other wildlife enthusiasts is not spared. It is a victim of poaching for ivory. Mike Chase of the Great Elephant census (GES) a conservation project that targets elephant population painted this grim picture below:
‘Slaughtered for their ivory, the elephants are left to rot, their carcasses dotting the dry riverbed; in just two days, we counted the remains of more than 20 elephants in a small area. Visitors and managers at the tourist camps here are frequently alarmed by the sound of gunshots nearby.’‘Chase and other scientists feared they were in a race against time, which is where the Great Elephant Census came in.The speed and scale of the project is unprecedented. Funded by Microsoft co-founder and Vulcan CEO Paul Allen, it brought together some of the best-known conservation groups and individuals, and teamed them up with the best bush pilots’ And the specific cases are even more disturbing: In the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, and Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve, elephant populations have plummeted by more than 75% in the past ten years as poachers cut down family herds, according to the survey’.
Poached for their tusk; this is one great concern that has drawn the attention of the humane world to the environmental plight of African elephants.
The African leopard, you see on your paid cable televisions in Kruger and other national parks in Southern Africa is an endangered animal. There is a cultural resistance to save the population of that animal especially in South Africa. The hide of the leopard is a well sought after relic as a proud display of strength and agility in the cultures of Southern African countries. To get the hide of that beautiful animal means the devastation of the population of that animal. Conservationists are trying in vain to convince the people of these countries to use the synthetic version of the hide in their ceremonies to no avail. Surprisingly even President Zuma who is expected to use his position to make a statement for conservation is on the side of culture. During cultural festivals you will see him proudly don his leopard hide. All entreaties drawing attention to the depleting population of the Africa leopard has fallen on deaf ears. In these countries
The situation in Nigeria is even grimmer. Not because of the political expediency that cost Buhari its life but because of our primitive and inhuman cruelty to animals. There is a conservation program in the Obudu forest in the Cross River State of Nigeria, that is advertised on the CNN that tells a very gory story of our attitude to fauna and the environment. The advert tells the bizarre story of a breed of monkey (Drape?) whose population was eaten to near extinction by the locals but thanks now to conservation efforts that is trying to resuscitate the population of the monkey. Interestingly I found out that the resuscitation efforts is even spear headed by foreign wildlife interest. If Cross Rivers State our emerging Kruger cannot save the population of monkeys, what right or claim do we have as a country that wants to package and market tourism to the wide world?
I was so pained recently to see on facebook some fishermen in Degema local government area in Rivers State Nigeria, butchering a manatee. The animal strayed into their net but instead if freeing it, the animal was killed for food. The fishermen did not waste time to butcher the animal while some onlookers posted the picture on facebook. For the people of my generation in the Niger delta, manatee is more of a myth than a real animal that inhabited the fresh waters of the Niger Delta. The very one that was sighted after years of population depletion almost into extinction was killed instantly. The manatee is a fresh water animal that we were told in high floods occasionally strays into the salt water sections of the Niger Delta and it is well adapted. The only live one I sighted on facebook, unfortunately was a dead and butchers one. I may not see another manatee dead or alive in my part of the Delta in the rest of my life. The story of this great animal was told to us as a remote myth by elders until I saw the pictures on facebook, I never believed if survived extinction. The extinction?, and chance appearance of this animal attests to the tragic level of environmental degradation, inhuman aggression towards animals and pollution visited on the waters, fauna and flora of the Niger Delta by oil exploration and exploitation. The disposal of effluents and crude oil into the waters of the Niger Delta has taken more deeper toll in the marine, animal and flora life than evidenced by the chance appearance of the solitary manatee. The industrial practice of the oil companies is very reckless when it comes to the environment. This will be discussion for another day.
Similarly in another part of the Niger Delta, in Delta state, A picture of a dolphin was shown that was caught by some fishermen. The animal was also butchered for food. I also saw on the social media a whale that beached that was being butchered for food. Whales and dolphin are well equipped with sonar by nature. When you see them in shallow waters, it is a signal that their sonar is confused and that is a signal for disease that will eventually lead to death. There is no guarantee that, looking at the level of toxin in such animals, they are fit for human consumption. Even the animals we consume, they are supposed to have veterinary and health approvals before we do so. However, nature has built its own mechanism for checks and balances; to check and moderate what we consume in the food chain- that is why the consumption of bats gave us Ebola fever, rats gives us laser fever, cats and chickens gives us respiratory diseases etc. This is nature’s way of defending its own or building a wall of protection to save itself from primitive consumers. In my subjective ecology, I call it ’the natural defensive chain of nutritional selection against primitive consumption’. We are on top of the food chain, does not give us license to primitive and cruel consumption and devastation of our environment. Agreed by our standards there are probably no laws protecting these animals, however we need common sense more than law to protect our environment.
There is an echo of hope from a most unlikely of all places- Bonny. Bonny is positioning itself as our wildlife and tourism renaissance only if allocation-oil-gas centric politics will re-orientate itself to know that Bonny and the Niger Delta offer more potential in tourism than the environmentaly adverse hydrocarbons production. Thanks to Shell and LNG partnership in Bonny to make conservation as part of their corporate social responsibility, to have factored in a natural park it created to protect the indigenous hippopotamus population. The effort has started yielding result. A rare breed of python was sighted outside the park. It was encouraging locals did not kill the python for food. Instead park keepers were called to relocate the snake into the park. In that same park, rare Nile crocodiles were also sighted and photographed. The rare elephants of eastern Niger Delta recorded on colonial documents with their vestiges of bones and ivory found in some shrines in Andoni and Bonny were also sighted and photographed. However, the antelope that was seen was not that lucky. It was killed by locals for food before park officials could intervene. So the problem of consumption and cruelty still exists despite the efforts of Shell and LNG. More needs to be done to educate locals that wildlife can have other benefits apart from killing them for food. That Bonny with its natural beaches can have more tourism prospect than hydrocarbon if well harnessed. Unfortunately, this prospect is inhibited by lack of road to link Bonny with the mainland. How do we access tourism without road? How can we nurture this mustard seed promise of Bonny to blossom for our aesthetic comfort and material benefit?
In our national life in Nigeria , we are too immune to national shame and embarrassment. The facebook founder just visited Nigeria and left for Kenya. What did we entertain him with? Nothing to showcase for his natural enjoyment, because we have decimated all our wildlife populations. The only thing we entertained him with was a plate of akpu, fullsize tilapia with ogba, ogiri, jugging on a bridge and some selfie. How do you transfer or assimilate even ‘steal’ technology from a man that is not comfortable in your environment? Aman that is wary of your environment. An environment that is not nature friendly will be averse to technology; because technology only appropriates nature. The Sambisa forest and Niger Delta that should be our tourism paradise are put into inimical uses other than tourism. It should be instructive that Kenya presented a different ball game that should Shame Nigeria; a natural diversity of fauna and flora. They took him and showed him the varieties of their natural endowment. He was taken to see giraffe, lions, rhinos etc. Where Nigeria offered akpu and tilapia, Kenya offered real natural pleasure indicating that mere size can be big for nothing. If we had cared for the Sambisa forest and the Niger Delta, they would have been a Garden of Eden to showcase the peace of country and nature, just the right ingredient to make him relax, build confidence, and bet his dollars here. We were showing him selfie in the State house Abuja. How do we sell ice to the Eskimos? Why are India and Pakistan two nuclear powers squabbling over Casmir? Just because of natural and tourism potential of the Casmir Delta. However in Nigeria, our Niger Delta and the great Sambisa forest said to be the size of Belgium are conflict bazaars- where the government, militants and their conflict entrepreneur meet to negotiate, ransom, politics, greed and avarice. Too many redundant tourism potentials abound in my country Nigeria but the government is inebriated by its focus on easy money from its oil and gas to easily fuel her corruption, kleptocracy, social and political injustice: On the 6th of Sept, 2016, a UN., report was carried by all online publications in Nigeria that summarized the Nigerian environmental tragedy below:
“Despite the fact that Nigeria is a signatory to a number of protocols on sustainable and renewable environment, the country had, over the decades, failed to protect the environment, ecosystem and natural resources. Over-exploitation of natural resources and pollution of the environment, desertification are exposing the population to vulnerability and risks caused by climate change, among others. “Nigeria is well-endowed with forest resources, accounting for 2.5% of GDP. But Nigeria has one of the highest rates of forest loss in the world. Between 1990 and 2000, Nigeria lost an average of 409,700 hectares of forest per year on average deforestation rate of 3.5% per annum’.
The enviromental tragedy that Africa is, also include countries where government has made seemingly visible progress in conservation; an example is South Africa. The CDR and Nigeria are microcosms of the wider problem. There is no space to engage the problems country by country. Hunger, wars, iliteracy, corruptions, habitat loss, deforestation, pollution are known factors distructive to Africa’s conservation civilization and the lose of the African paradise. The inability of African government to take meaningful ownership of the environment-as most potential tourism sites are militarised by poaching gangs and militants of government induced conflicts. Government must take ownership of the environment as to put it to economically beneficial uses by promulgating environmental laws and corruption averse environmental regulatory institutions- means the farther we are from paradise.Africa need humane societies, animal and enviromental rights activist, general civil society consciousness to protect fauna and flora, the general environment and to educate the citizenry that nature can only flourish for our material progress and aesthetic enjoyment when we cultivate and nurture it. Human life only matters- when the environment- plant and animal lives matter.
Sogbeye R. J. Douglas
sosodogi@yahoo.com. 08099252690 text only.
