When will cooking with firewood stop

Some of the tell-tale indices of underdevelopment are commonplace in Nigeria – people carrying load on their heads or in the more urbanised areas scores of wretched-looking women and children, plastic containers in hand while on queues or fighting at petrol stations to purchase kerosene. A sure sign of poverty in any country – and you do not need to be an economist at the Central Bank of Nigeria to know this – is cooking with wood fuel. Fire from wood also provides heating in the cold nights of mountainous areas such as Jos in Plateau State and Obudu in Cross River State.

But in 10 years all that will change! Our former central bank governor and his wise men announced that in the year 2020, thanks to a strange combination of fossil fuel and low-carbon economy, Nigeria will become one of the top-20 economies on earth. The government believed him, and did not have second thoughts even after he put out a contradictory statement that 60 per cent of Nigerian school-leavers were not employable.

How would a national economy make a global impact without a cutting-edge work force?

If the CBN factored ecology into economic analysis, some questions should be emerging. For instance, how could Vision 20:2020 be achieved with 2,900 to 6,000MW for a population of 140 million? What are the projected economic losses of gulley erosion nationwide, or of sea level rise in Lagos? Will desertification from Sokoto to Borno trigger social dislocation and internal migrations? Are unmanageable municipal wastes and tailpipe emissions from industry quantifiable in terms of economic losses? Where and how do unclear land tenure laws affect the property and the shelter rights of Nigerians?

Impact of global warming

People are increasingly worried over the approaching impacts of global warming, but no one bats an eyelid when trees and shrubs are cut down in the full view of everyone. Parts of a complex equation could be filled by primary health and HIV/AIDS impacts on productive labour, as well as the poor quality of education nationwide. A national economic vision must not lead to blindness to hard facts on the ground.

A major component of forest loss in Nigeria is the collection of wood for cooking. A large proportion of national household energy requirement is supplied from wood fuel, notwithstanding the vast hydrocarbon resources of Nigeria. From a gustatory viewpoint, Nigerian dishes cooked using firewood taste better than products of gas-fired or electric stoves. This could be romanticised ad infinitum. The costs to the environment, to health and to the overall economy of the country are, however, prohibitive.

Apart from traditional recognisable impacts of intensive wood fuel harvest – biodiversity loss, contribution to global warming, soil erosion, nutrient depletion, siltation and pollution of water courses, the time used for collection of firewood by Nigerian women and children could have been channelled into productive agricultural labour, thereby enhancing farm output and subsequently food security.