Why Benin’s famous Ogba Zoo and Nature Park suffers

The Ogba Zoo and Nature Park, located in Oko Central, Oredo Local Government Area of Edo State, was originally established in 1971 as a biological garden and nature park that would promote tourism and provide recreation. But this has drastically changed, Daily Trust on Sunday reports. Located on an extensive landscape, with the needed facilities, […]

The Ogba Zoo and Nature Park, located in Oko Central, Oredo Local Government Area of Edo State, was originally established in 1971 as a biological garden and nature park that would promote tourism and provide recreation. But this has drastically changed, Daily Trust on Sunday reports.

Located on an extensive landscape, with the needed facilities, Ogba Zoo and Nature Park provides opportunities for picnics, playground for children and forest trail, as well as recreation centre. So, fun seekers throng the environment, mainly during festive seasons and weekends. But the good news stops here.

The zoo sits on 320 hectares of land carved out of the Ogba Forest Reserve, but about 70 per cent of it has been taken over by land grabbers. In land mass, only Jos Wildlife Park and Zoo in Plateau State is a match.

The little attraction it offers

A staff member of the zoo, who spoke to Daily Trust on Sunday anonymously said, “Before now, all the cages were filled with animals, but that is not the case now. However, interesting animals still make the zoo attractive to customers. We have four lions here because the Oba of Benin brought a South African lion while the two on ground gave birth to two, making them five.”

However, John Osasu, a visitor at the zoo disagrees. He said the animals were few although the zoo still provides some fun. “I think government or whosoever is in charge should invest in the zoo so that it can attract tourists from other parts of the world,” he advised.

Another fun seeker who was at the zoo with his wife and children described the environment as appealing due to the vast forest. “But the animals are not enough,” he observed and called on the management to do something about it.

He also said the major problem in the zoo was vandalisation and land encroachment by the communities, who sell parts of the land to the highest bidder. But this is just the crust of the matter. Daily Trust on Sunday gathered that the zoo was initially an extensive botanical garden set up by the then military administration of Dr. Osagbovo Ogbemudia, to serve as a field laboratory in the biological sciences for students and researchers. Although the zoo has animals such as lions, chimpanzees, monkeys, pythons, tortoise, crocodiles, ostriches, birds, donkeys, camels, hyenas, ducks, antelopes, and several more, some of its enclosures are empty.

Presently, the zoo is faced with problems that continually lead to its deterioration, including encroachment by neighbouring communities who have taken a vast portion of the land. This has resulted in a pending court case between its management and the suspected land grabbers, including members of the state’s Sixth Assembly.

This is not all as funding continues to be a great challenge. Mr. Andy Osa Enahire, the chief executive officer of the zoo and national secretary of the Nigeria Association of Zoos and Parks, described it as one of the zoos in the country that have experienced tremendous decline.

“It is the only one undergoing rebirth under the Public-Private Sector Partnership (PPP). Being one of the ambitious ecotourism legacies of the legendary era of Brig. Gen. Samuel Osaigbovo Ogbemudia, now of blessed memory, Ogba Zoo was on a trajectory that could rival those in advanced countries. But as with most developmental efforts in this clime, it is their ruins that are subsequently salvaged.

“Our biggest regret is that Ogba Zoo was not handed over to us when it was a growing concern. It was allowed to completely collapse before our rescue mission,” Enahire noted.

Enahire mentioned the two national stadia and other projects as examples of wasted developmental efforts in the country, saying they are a reminder of what they once stood for.

He further lamented that, “Nearly 70 per cent of the 320-hectare facility was invaded and taken over. It has been a dangerous running battle for over a decade and a half with these equivalents of bandits, in which we were mostly abandoned to our fate.’’

He also said the major disaster was the loss of a primordial urban forest that serves as a field laboratory in the biological sciences, and a veritable gene bank for the Guinea lowland rain forest of the ecological zone.

“Imagine when international researchers who had raved over our forestry assets come back to find bulldozers rampaging over the zoo land and illegal buildings springing up all over the place. All entreaties to get stakeholders to help stem this major assault on our priceless forestry assets, including the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), elicited little or no response,” Mr. Enahire said.

Among the key infrastructures destroyed by encroachers are a purpose-built lion enclosure, large stretch of fences and a proposed recreational area. After exhausting all avenues of redress, it became inevitable for the zoo to invoke an arbitration clause that outlined the responsibilities of government under the circumstances, but even the Arbitral Award has been pending for about three years.

“Successive governments had sided with our concerns, but we are yet to see any tangible resolution of the issues. For a zoo that was being revived through purely private sector funding following its earlier collapse and atrophy, the current challenges are capable of precipitating a final death knell, but for the resilience of the zoo management. There was even a catastrophic flooding of the zoo in 2012, when negligent contractors undertaking the airport road project turned the road in front of the zoo into a dumpsite that triggered the floods. It took more than two agonising years to compel the contractors to come up with a dismal palliative measure,” he explained.

At the moment, major customers to the zoo, outside the few peak seasons, are school pupils and students of higher educational institutions, who come from as far as Delta, Anambra and Ondo states and sometimes even further away.

Ironically, only government schools in Edo State do not visit the zoo as they are yet to fashion out an administrative framework for school excursions.

Ogba Zoo and Nature Park operate a subsidized fare of N200 for a fully guided educational tour, with focus on conservation awareness.

“Under the right partnership, the ‘A day at the Zoo’ programme is meant to be incorporated in the school curriculum, with vertical integration of all the needed components. We had even proposed a grant that would enable us to run a free school excursion programme for students in the state, but some ideas easily get buried by bureaucracy,” Mr. Enahire revealed, adding that the management’s Memo Number 20 presented at the National Council on Tourism in 2012, sought to project zoos in Nigeria as a key element for accelerated tourism development.

In 2001, the management hosted a top management delegation from the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) when they commenced their intervention strategies as a way of getting some of their site-specific projects into the latter’s Rolling Tourism Development Plans.

Subsequently, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) also came up with detailed questionnaire for key tourism sites for NTDC’s intervention, as a way of giving Niger Delta youths access to nature-based recreational facilities.

“Even the N20 billion Nigerian Petroleum Development Corporation (NPDC) headquarters project situated directly opposite the zoo captured various intervention projects for the zoo in their Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) survey,” he revealed. But all these promises came to nothing.

Way forward

According to Mr. Enahire, although zoos under government management never operated on a self-sustaining basis, the current private sector-led management is self-funded and obliged to pay rents to government.

“There is often a misplaced tendency to put too much emphasis on revenue generation or rent increment, whereas, for an ecological project, the emphasis should be more on conservation and social benefits rather than commercial interest. We are actually in arrears of major pilot schemes, such as breeding programmes for endangered wildlife species and others, with focus on sustainable uses of natural resources. We are also keen on the development of an international wildlife rescue centre that could save many orphaned wildlife from the endemic bush meat trade, but for the many serious distractions we have experienced, including the heavy arbitration and security costs,” he said.

Mr. Enahire believes that zoos in Nigeria are generally endangered due to the near absence of institutional support, as they are easily susceptible to both internal and external shocks. He said: “This should not be misconstrued as a plea for life-support for those that are clearly unsustainable or lack critical management capacities. There has to be the right regulatory environment that identifies the strength and limitations of each facility in order to channel the required support or sanctions

“The same compartmentalisation of knowledge in a typical third-world setting has posed a debacle to effective cross-fertilisation of critically needed ideas, along with practical skills and networking. Logistical limitations apart, the technical capacities for upgrades and research are mostly non-existent, thus rendering most of our zoos obsolete or in an arrested state of development.”

According to Enahire, beyond pioneering investments in zoos by various states and Federal Government agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been nothing to sustain the glorious momentum of that era, thus resulting in a free fall with many casualties, in which some zoos had to close down permanently.

However, the management of the zoo has received assurances from Governor Godwin Nogheghase Obaseki.

“He granted audience to our management on several occasions, with regard to restoration and restitution issues concerning the zoo. With his strong links in the finance sector, we are also optimistic of a framework for major recapitalisation if we are to catch up with several lost opportunities and assuage our horrible experiences.

“Our fears for the sector remain the near absence of institutional support, as well as the critical essence of time when delicate programmes like wildlife management or zoo keeping are concerned,” Mr. Enahire said.