Dear Mrs Amina
Mohammed,
The Deputy Secretary-General of UN
Your rejoinder to
EIA’s report proved unsatisfactory according to them; Nigeria’s corruption
index ever seem to deepen. It becomes difficult
to believe the Federal Government that all the export and import papers
passed due process particularly bearing in mind its one of the entities accused
by Washington based non governmental organization.
What do I think?
Perhaps someone in
Washington wants your office in UN removed handed to another country maybe.
Americans know how to get office holders out. Were they not the ones who
assisted in removing President Jonathan? Americans also got the former IMF Boss
Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn the French
politician, and replaced him with Ms Christine Lagarde.. I never thought
you/ President Buhari’s would make the mistake of being enmeshed in whopping
$300million trade (international) of felling trees against Int’l
conventions which you, PMB and FGN are obliged to promote.
What to do?
EIA said they are
coming for you PMB and FGN. Please let’s brief a US Attorney at this time
before it is too late. Only God knows when another Nigerian woman would get a
UN top job with the level of lobbying expected even for local positions; much
more UN post!.
A group of women, I
don’t know how they came about adding my name to the group on Facebook. I just
found my name there as a member. I am by no means coordinating it and they don’t
seem a lot of scholars there but women and girls who are “street wise” they say
they are determined to tackle Nigerian men politically, not by “grammar”. And I
am still contemplating to stay or opt out!. On the first day I posted
contributions to underscore 35% affirmative action. That was all. The FB campaign cliché is “No Woman No Nation”.
I am watching them and reading their messages calmly. Considering that ours is
a patriarchy, you spend 9 months carrying a precious being and some have
multiple births only for the man to just come and own it, own everything including
you, your labor & life!. God forbids if few Nigerian women are led into
hell by men would God allow the few women to say Sorry God I committed Sins
Because of Men?. Each person on his/her own.
All the Best
C N AJIE ESQ
The
Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency, known as EIA,
said in the report that multiple sources told its undercover investigators
that over $1 million was paid to top government officials in Nigeria to
release wood stopped by Chinese authorities because there were no CITES
certificates.
CITES Thursday released
a 40-page report alleging that Mohammed’s approval
of the kosso exports violated the CITES agreement.
According
to report in the United State Thursday Amina Mohammed who is now
the U.N. deputy secretary-general, spent her final days as Nigeria’s
environment minister doing something that has outraged activists. Despite
a ban then in force on the export of rosewood, an endangered resource, she
signed thousands of certificates authorizing the shipment of vast
quantities of the wood.
The
certificates “came in bags, and I just signed them because that is
what I had to do,” she recalled in an interview last month in her
sprawling 38th-floor U.N. headquarters office in Manhattan overlooking the
East River. “I don’t remember how many, she admitted.
EIA
said rosewood is coveted in China for furniture and over the past five
years “exploding Chinese demand” has depleted forests across West Africa.
As supplies in Gambia and Benin dwindled, it said Chinese traders moved to
Nigeria, which had the largest untapped resource.
Since
2013, the advocacy group said, Nigeria has been transformed from a
net importer to the world’s largest exporter of rosewood logs, which is
causing desertification, threatening national parks and imperiling the
livelihoods of millions of people.
Mohammed’s
11th-hour decision to approve the kosso shipments was first
documented by a Washington-based environmental group and is now part of an
inquiry by the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), to which Nigeria is a
signatory.
In
a letter to Nigerian authorities in August 2017, John Scanlon, CITES’s
secretary-general, raised concern about information his agency had
received indicating that as many as 10,000 containers of Nigerian rosewood
had been stopped by Chinese authorities between May and December 2016,
because they were not accompanied by the proper CITES documentation,
according to Michael Osakuade, the acting director of Nigeria’s Department
of Forestry. On Dec. 31, 2016, Mohammed herself imposed a three-month ban
on the trade in rosewood. Yet following Mohammed’s mass signings, more
than two weeks after the ban went into force, the trade quickly resumed:
Chinese trade data show that between then and April, as many as 12,000
containers of kosso logs were cleared to enter the country.
EIA
estimates that Mohammed’s approval of certificates in January 2017
allowed the delivery of more than 1.4 million kosso logs that had been
illegally exported between May and December 2016 and were detained in
Chinese ports. EIA furnished FP with six copies of certificates signed by
Mohammed and dated Jan. 16, a little more than two weeks after she ordered
the temporary three-month ban on the export of Nigerian kosso wood. A
senior Nigerian forestry official confirmed the authenticity of the
certificates but denied that they were issued for rosewood that had
already left for China.
The
thousands of “hand-signed permits violate both Nigeria’s export ban”
and provisions of the endangered species treaty, Alexander von Bismarck,
the executive director of EIA, claimed in an interview with FP. “More
importantly, the laundering of Nigerian rosewood decimates millions of
hectares of fragile forest and imperils the lives of millions of people.”
The
question of who bears the ultimate responsibility for Nigeria’s
shrinking forests remains hotly contested. Rebecca S. Manasseh, the
environment commissioner for Tarawa state, where most of the
rosewood
exports originate, placed the blame on Asia.
“It
was the Chinese,” she said. “They were the ones who brought the idea
of cutting down the wood. Before it was not like this – it was when they
came into the country that it became so bad.”
But
Manasseh also pointed fingers at the central government. “Our governor
wrote to the federal government, pleading with the government to stop the
exportation of that wood,” she said.
When
confronted with Manasseh’s accusation, the second federal forestry
official interviewed by FP fired back: “Why are you complaining to us when
you are the ones issuing approval for the exporters to go and harvest and
you are taking the money as revenue for your state?”
For
Mohammed, the rosewood issue was one of trying to strike a balance
between the legitimate economic interests of Nigerians involved in the
timber trade and preserving the country’s forests. She said the series of
decisions she made, from issuing a temporary suspension to signing the
thousands of certificates, was part of trying to find a strategy for
sustainable development.
“We
were doing this for the right reasons,” she said.
Foreign
Policy reported Thursday that CITES “has shown no indication that
it is satisfied by Mohamed’s account … and it intends to address Nigeria’s
conduct during a meeting of treaty signatories in Geneva from Nov. 27 to
Dec. 1.”
