Written By Dr. Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji
Nigeria’s forest reserves raise a question that goes beyond legal ownership. A forest is not simply land with trees on it. It is a stock of natural wealth yielding benefits to people who may never enter it. The state holds legal authority; the benefits are collective. Nigerians inherited them, depend on them now, and owe the next generation whatever has not yet been consumed.
So destroying a reserve is not an ordinary dispute over land. A miner clearing vegetation, a timber operator removing trees without regeneration, a farmer burning regeneration for cocoa: each reduces a stock of natural capital the wider population draws on. The private gain is immediate and identifiable. Much of the public loss is neither.
Forests yield timber, fuel and food, but their value extends well beyond what can be sold. They regulate water flows, protect soils, shelter plants and animals, support pollinators and sustain agriculture. FAO identifies forests as important for climate regulation, soil and water protection, biodiversity and livelihoods. These services are easy to overlook because most carry no price. A felled tree can be sold. The water cycle maintained by the forest around it cannot.
Carbon deserves attention. Degradation and deforestation release carbon accumulated in vegetation and soils; healthy forests keep storing it. FAO identifies both as important sources of carbon-stock loss. What is held in Nigerian forests is Nigerian natural capital, and replacing it once released requires time, land and successful regeneration.
This makes the forest a collective inheritance, provided the phrase is understood properly. It does not mean every Nigerian owns a piece of every reserve, or that customary claims should be ignored. It means the benefits of the country’s natural wealth should not fall to whoever extracts them first. Extraction can occur. Liquidation is another matter.
Osun makes this concrete. Research on southwestern Nigeria’s forest reserves reports extensive encroachment and weak enforcement, including in Osun, and a separate study of reserve administration there found long-term shrinkage from uncontrolled felling. Conditions are not uniform, but this is not isolated trespass. When Osun transferred Oba Hills Forest Reserve, about 4,225 hectares, to the National Park Service in 2024, it acknowledged degradation from logging, hunting and other activity. Why should a state lose control of its natural capital before a different arrangement is considered?
Mining is the hardest case, because its benefits are real: employment, income and revenue. But where it occurs inside a reserve without environmental control, vegetation is removed, soils disturbed and water systems affected, and the costs fall on people who receive none of the mineral income. This is a standard problem of external costs. The answer is not to deny mining’s value but to make its costs visible, regulated and, where appropriate, paid for through restoration and enforcement.
Timber and farmland pose the same question. Forestry is not inherently destructive; a forest can be harvested while regeneration continues. The problem begins when harvesting becomes liquidation, mature trees removed and young ones neither protected nor replanted. Burning regeneration for cocoa is that problem in another form: the farmer gains a productive asset while the forest’s wider benefits never enter the calculation. Farmers are not enemies of the forest, and policy ignoring their need for land will not be enforced.
Traditional authorities are not a single actor either: some facilitate access to land, others resist encroachment or mediate disputes. What matters is the interaction between customary and statutory authority. Where one institution grants recognition while another still protects the land, competing claims develop and enforcement suffers.
Capacity matters as much. A guard cannot protect a large reserve without transport, equipment and staffing; officers cannot manage regeneration without inventories, mapping and monitoring. Forestry is technical work, and a department can exist in name while lacking the expertise to run a forest.
The distinction is between formal and effective authority. A government can declare a reserve, publish regulations and set penalties. None of that keeps a forest standing. Effective ownership means being able to define boundaries, exclude unauthorised users, monitor change, enforce rules and restore what has been degraded.
Without those functions a public forest becomes open access in practice, and incentives run one way. A profitable cocoa farm inside a reserve is noticed. Mining without consequence lowers the risk the next miner perceives. Timber unprotected by regeneration rules is worth taking first.
The question is not whether Nigerians should earn a living from natural resources, but whether that can happen without transferring collectively held wealth into private hands at little or no cost. Osun tests whether public ownership means anything beyond a legal declaration.
A forest need not generate a commercial receipt each year to be valuable. Sometimes its greatest contribution is that it continues to stand. What belongs to everyone cannot be allowed to become the property of whoever gets there first.
Dr. Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji is a development economist and agricultural policy researcher whose work examines food security, poverty, markets, agricultural policy and economic development, particularly in Africa. His research combines empirical evidence with policy analysis to examine contemporary economic and development issues.
… there is a deeper question here: when a government allows a collectively held natural asset to be depleted for private gain, what exactly is being transferred, and to whom?
We tend to describe the outcome as environmental degradation, but it can also be understood as a transfer of wealth across people and across generations.
The person who clears the forest captures the immediate return; the wider public absorbs part of the ecological cost; and future Nigerians inherit a smaller stock of natural capital.
If that is what is happening, should the debate really be framed only as a question of environmental protection, or should we also be asking who has the right to convert public natural wealth into private wealth, under what conditions, and with what obligation to compensate those who bear the cost?