By Joseph Ziem and Edward Adeti
After scores of mature trees were “illegally” hacked down at the Urban Afforestation Project site in Bolgatanga by some “unauthorised” persons, the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) has joined the extending string of activists and environmental authorities calling for the heads of the perpetrators.
Edward Ayiriba Ayagle made his position known during a conference with newsmen at his office. “We must punish perpetrators for causing both physical and economic harm. We are committed to protecting our environment and it is against such background that I welcome and support the growing calls to bring the perpetrators to book. I can assure all and sundry that they will not go unpunished,” he affirmed.
Some assumed owners of the land at Bukere, where the project is sited, led by one Joseph Apakre, had finally stormed the forest reserve to decimate it during the last Christmas and New Year holidays after reportedly being refused permit from the Municipal Assembly as well as some key departments and agencies over a long time.
Dislodged winged creatures, thousands of them including bats, formed an aerial network, hovering above the bulldozers and trespassers as though in protest as the decades-old trees (which bore their homes and young ones) crashed to the forest floor. As newsmen gathered at the scene and engaged authorities on the phone about the foray, a number of daytime animals, in whose absence the demolition exercise began, arrived home to a visible shock and had no option but to hang around in fear.
In no time, happy-looking rural women and children appeared on the devastated portions of the thicket, swaying back and forth between the site and their huts under bundles of logs sawn from the felled trees. Several dozens of rodents, which were buzzed out of their hidey-holes by the chainsaw noise into surprise attacks, turned into barbecues in the awful scale of abuse that lasted freely for three days.
The MCE himself had been together with the Municipal Planning Officer, Felix Offei, blotted all over with widespread allegations that they had given the perpetrators the green light in exchange for two free plots each from the site allegedly promised by those behind the demolition. He was also said to have sold the site to an unspecified developer.
Another report had it that he was aware when the trees were being axed and parts of the forest reserve were being bulldozed, particularly as the site was sharing just a thin wall with offices of the Municipal Assembly, but did nothing to stop the demolition from the beginning and throughout.
But, brushing the accusations aside, the 61-year-old MCE described as “absurdity” the public notion that a personality of his age with a background as a former official of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) and the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) and current public figure as Chief Executive of a Municipality would back or condone deforestation. Mr. Ayagle, who hails from Sumbrungu, also refuted claims that he sold out the site, saying that it was an unfounded assertion that as a stranger in Bukere he could have sold out a site that belonged to neither him nor his forebearers. Besides, it is impossible for anyone to sell the site and get away with it since it belongs to government, he pointed out.
“The attempt by some said owners of the land to rezone the afforestation site started when my predecessor, Harry Epsona Ayamga, was in office, and it continued after he handed over to me in the middle of 2011. When their agitations were brought to my table I told them that any decision on their demand, difficult as it seemed though, was subject to a meeting of the major stakeholders including the Forest Services Division, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Lands Commission, the Town and Country Planning Department and the Survey Department among others.
“I also made it very clear that the Assembly would also have to meet on the matter before anything could be said on their demand. It became obvious that as they did not get the nod of the mentioned stakeholders, they subsequently decided to take the law into their own hands by ‘cleverly’ using the Christmas and New Year holidays (when no one was around within the Assembly block and when none among officials of the other major stakeholders was around) to cause that irreversible damage. All that while, I was in Accra. It is painful that they had succeeded in taking everyone by surprise during the holidays before anyone could notice and raise an alarm in time,” the MCE narrated.
Mr. Ayagle, who was being driven in his official Nissan Patrol into Bolga from Accra when some newsmen in the Municipality summoned his attention to the ongoing “illegal” demolition exercise at the site, had rushed to the busy scene, stopped the action at once and openly scolded the leader of the incursion, Mr. Apakre.
Mr. Apakre defended the depletion, first of all saying it was selective felling and that permission had been granted him and his group by the Survey Department. He then justified the exercise by saying that it had become necessary as the mute forest reserve had become a den of horrors where drug and substance abuse, suicide, untraditional burial of strangers, open love making, used condoms, stealing of stray domestic animals and rape had become every-day common sights.
He argued that clearing some of the trees and developing the flattened portions into private and public amenities was a better option than the insecurity that the forest was posing to the surrounding families and innocent individuals who unavoidably might want to use the forest for positive purposes.
Reports, however, indicate that there are big shots behind Mr. Apakre and that the rationale he mentioned to the MCE and the media for the demolition is only a veil on an ulterior motive, which some say is to put up a luxury resort at the site.
The site, as confirmed by authorities, was developed into a vegetative cover about four decades ago under the Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong Regime and regional administration of Mr. A. A. Ampofo (widely known as Kofi Charlie). Grown by students as paid-for vacation jobs, the forest cover hitherto had stood over the years as a local lonely reminder of the global campaign on climate change. Local activists and environmentalists, who fear that the destruction could seriously embitter and repulse foreign donors who expend millions of hard currencies into such pro-environment projects as the Greening Ghana Project and the Ghana Environmental Management Project (GEMP), are also recounting and mourning how much of financial loss the perpetrators had caused to the State which paid thousands of students to nurture and grow the trees in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, the major stakeholders in the Bolgatanga Municipality have dissociated themselves from the demolition and condemned it, with some of them describing it as a “criminal offence”. They maintained that the site must continue to exist as the “Urban Afforestation Project” location that it originally was meant to be.
In the World Bank’s recent estimates, as quoted by the MCE, the revenues lost in terms of uncollected taxes and royalties in Ghana due to illegal operations in the forestry sector amount to five billion US dollars every year.
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