Great Green Wall, Great Green Gaps

SOStainabilityWeekly

Edited by Oke Epia, E-mail: sostainability01@gmail.com  | WhatsApp: +234 8034000706

Washing and Hushing

Across Nigeria’s northern belt, where the land steadily yields to desert winds, the promise of the Great Green Wall is simple and powerful: plant trees, restore livelihoods, and hold back the advancement of the Sahara. It is a vision rooted in the hope of greener landscapes, cooler climates, and communities that can thrive again. But somewhere between policy and practice, that promise has thinned out. In many places where forests were meant to rise, there is little to show beyond scattered seedlings, dry soil, and unanswered questions. 

Bold vision and a complex reality

Nigeria’s Great Green Wall programme, implemented by the National Agency for the Great Green Wall (NAGGW), is part of a broader African Union initiative to combat desertification and climate change. The agency was formally established under an Act of Parliament in 2015 to drive afforestation, land restoration, and climate resilience across frontline states. And on paper, the mandate is clear. The funding streams are also significant, drawn from ecological funds, federal allocations, and international donor support. The ambition: millions of trees planted, degraded land restored, and livelihoods improved. Yet, the lived reality in many communities suggests a troubling disconnect between what is reported and what is visible.

Global Forest Watch data are equally unsparing. Between 2001 and 2024, Nigeria lost 1.44 million hectares of tree cover, a 14 percent decrease from its 2000 baseline. In 2024 alone, the country lost 253,000 hectares of natural forest, generating carbon emissions equivalent to 114 million metric tonnes of CO₂. These are not guesswork. They are satellite-verified measurements of a country whose stated environmental policies are being contradicted, year after year, by events on the ground. The gap is not just between policy and outcome. It is also between what the NAGGW reports and what credible international monitoring systems can verify from space. Nigeria’s afforestation claims have cited millions of trees planted across eleven states. The ground assessments conducted by a parliamentary committee, and the 80 percent tree mortality finding, suggest that the numbers reported to Abuja and passed on to international partners have not been subjected to the independent verification that would distinguish a planted tree from a surviving, thriving one.

The ₦81 billion question

In 2023, Nigeria’s House of Representatives launched a probe into the agency’s finances, focusing on the utilization of ecological funds from 2015 onward. What emerged from the hearings was a confusing and, at times, contradictory picture. Lawmakers were presented with claims that as much as ₦81.2 billion had been spent to plant over 21 million trees across 11 states. But scrutiny revealed inconsistencies. Financial records from different government institutions, including the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF) did not align. Even more troubling, the committee noted that the agency struggled to substantiate many of its projects, with claims that up to 80 percent of planted trees did not survive. The probe also uncovered questionable expenditures, including large sums spent on office renovations and capacity-building activities that appeared disconnected from the agency’s core mandate.  And then there was the issue of missing documentation: the agency acknowledged receiving funds from donor partners but could not provide detailed records of those inflows.

To make matters more unsettling, the committee also found that the financial figures submitted by three separate government bodies, the CBN, the OAGF, and the NAGGW itself, did not match each other. The OAGF reported that ₦19.37 billion was released from the Derivation and Ecology Accounts to the agency from February 2019, plus an additional ₦11.02 billion in capital expenditure. The agency’s own numbers told a different story yet. As reported in the media, the lawmakers expressed open displeasure at these conflicting financial reports from three agencies of government that should all be looking at the same money. Eventually, the committee’s final report walked back the ₦81 billion figure, stating that about ₦53.4 billion had actually been received since inception. But even this clarification did not resolve the deeper concern: if billions have been spent, where are the forests?

Between claims and reality

Numbers can tell one story. Landscapes often tell another. While official reports highlight millions of trees planted, lawmakers themselves acknowledged “persistent environmental challenges despite funds put into the programme.” In practical terms, this gap shows up in three ways: First, survival rates. Planting trees is only the beginning; maintaining them is the real work. The reported high mortality rate suggests weak post-planting care, poor irrigation, lack of community ownership, or unsuitable species selection. Second, visibility. In several frontline states, the expected transformation, dense green belts, and restored ecosystems are not evident at scale. Instead, interventions appear fragmented and inconsistent. Third, impact. The programme was designed not just to plant trees but to restore livelihoods. Yet, many rural communities continue to face the same pressures: soil degradation, declining agricultural yields, and climate vulnerability. This disconnect raises a difficult but necessary question: is the programme measuring success by outputs (trees planted) rather than outcomes (ecosystems restored)?

Policy Strength, Implementation Weakness

Nigeria does not lack policy frameworks. The Great Green Wall Act provides a legal foundation, and climate commitments at the national level reinforce the importance of land restoration. However, implementation tells a different story. The 2023 parliamentary probe revealed structural issues that go beyond funding: The agency reportedly operated for years without a governing board, weakening oversight and strategic direction. Funding flows have been inconsistent, with ecological fund allocations reduced from the statutory 15 to 5 percent in recent years. There have also been delays in fund releases and limited access to international financing, slowing down project execution. In essence, while policies exist, the institutional environment needed to deliver them effectively remains fragile.

Climate finance without transparency

At the core of the issue lies climate finance, money meant to secure environmental futures. Nigeria’s Great Green Wall programme sits at the intersection of domestic funding and international climate finance. This makes transparency not just desirable, but essential. Yet, the probe exposed several red flags: Conflicting financial reports across government institutions, unclear accounting of donor contributions, weak auditing practices, including reports that the agency had not conducted comprehensive financial audits since inception, retention of unutilized funds in accounts without timely remittance back to government coffers. These are not minor administrative lapses; they point to systemic weaknesses in the tracking, reporting, and evaluation of climate funds. And in a sector where trust is everything, especially with international partners, such gaps can undermine future funding opportunities.

Even today, long after the headlines of probes and promises have faded, many Nigerians are still asking the same difficult questions: what exactly is the National Agency for the Great Green Wall doing, and where is the visible impact of years of funding and planning? In frontline communities and among concerned citizens, there is a growing sense that silence has replaced accountability, and that updates are either too vague or too removed from realities on the ground. The issue is no longer just about what went wrong in the past, but about what is being done differently in the present. Nigerians are not merely looking for new figures or fresh declarations—they are demanding clear evidence of restored land, surviving trees, and improved livelihoods. Until those answers are matched with tangible action, the gap between expectation and reality will continue to widen, and public trust in one of the country’s most critical climate interventions will remain fragile.

Who Is Accountable?

Accountability in this context cannot rest on one institution alone. The NAGGW, as the implementing agency, carries primary responsibility for execution, reporting, and transparency. The 2023 probe raised the right questions. But it also revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, how many actors share responsibility for this failure and how few have been required to face consequences. The Federal Ministry of Environment, which supervises the NAGGW, must answer for eight years of absent oversight. Where were the ministry’s annual performance reviews? Why were there no flags raised all this time? If the OAGF, the CBN, and the agency itself are giving the House of Representatives three different accounts of the same money, either the record-keeping across government is dangerously inadequate, or the numbers being reported are not reliable.

The National Assembly itself, specifically the committees with direct oversight over the environment and the ecological fund, must also answer for the years it failed to address these discrepancies before it became a scandal. 

Bridging the gap

The Great Green Wall initiative, imperfect as it is, remains a viable continental framework for addressing the Sahel’s environmental crisis. Nigeria, as the most populous country in the region and the rotating chair of the initiative, has both the obligation and the opportunity to lead. But leadership requires honesty about failure. It requires effective oversight bodies, independent, external audit of every naira received and spent by the NAGGW from 2015 to date. It requires verification of claimed restoration achievements by satellite data and community-based assessments, not agency self-reporting. And it requires that the House of Representatives’ own committee recommendations, made four months after one of the most embarrassing institutional probes in Nigerian environmental history, be tracked and enforced.

Most of all, it requires treating the communities of northern Nigeria not as passive beneficiaries of distant decisions made in Abuja, but as the central actors in any restoration that is going to last. Senegal plants trees that survive because communities choose them, plant them, own them, and protect them. Nigeria has done the opposite: trees chosen in offices, planted without community buy-in, and abandoned to an 80 percent death rate. That approach has had its chance. It has failed comprehensively.

The desert does not read committee reports. It does not wait for governing boards to be constituted or for ecological fund allocations to be restored. Every planting season that passes without genuine, transparent, community-driven restoration is a season that cannot be recovered. The land does not negotiate. It does not offer extensions.

Nigeria has the frameworks, the resources, and the international attention needed to turn this around. What it needs, urgently, is the will to be honest about what has gone wrong and the courage to hold those responsible to account, not just on paper, but in consequence.

Trends and Threads

Nigeria: Waste, Recycling, and the Circular Economy 

On the occasion of this year’s International Zero Waste Day on 30 March, global attention was focused on a fundamental rethink of how societies produce, consume, and dispose of materials. This entails a world where waste is designed out of existence, not managed after the fact. 

Nigeria is dealing with waste at scale. According to the World Bank, Nigeria currently generates at least 32 million tonnes of solid waste annually. A 2024 study estimated that Nigeria’s urban areas alone generate approximately 27.3 million tonnes annually, of which only 11.2 million tonnes is collected. That means at least 16 million tonnes of solid waste generated in Nigerian cities each year, more than the entire annual waste output of many European nations, is never collected at all. It does not disappear. It accumulates on streets, in waterways, on open land, and in street gutters.

The plastics problem 

Of all the waste streams flooding Nigeria’s environment, plastic is the most visible, the most studied, and the most persistently mismanaged. Nigeria generates approximately 2.5 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. This figure, cited by UNEP and reflected in independent reporting from multiple sources, is not declining but growing. Of those 2.5 million tonnes, less than 10 percent is effectively recycled, according to UNEP estimates. The rest clogs drainage channels, floats in the Lagos Lagoon, washes into the Niger Delta, buries farmland under plastic film, and burns in compounds. The data place Nigeria’s situation in stark global context. Nigeria ranks among the world’s top 20 contributors to marine plastic pollution, according to World Bank and UNEP reports. This reflects the current trajectory of a country producing plastic at scale with infrastructure incapable of recovering it. The scale of the specific plastic problem is not difficult to understand. Sachet water — the ubiquitous small plastic pouches that provide drinking water to millions of Nigerians who cannot afford bottled water or lack access to clean taps, is one of the most consumed single-use plastics in the world on a per-capita basis. It is also one of the hardest to recover. Its light weight and low material value make it unattractive to informal recyclers. Billions of these sachets are consumed and discarded in Nigeria every year, and they end up everywhere: in gutters, in the soil, wrapped around the roots of street trees, and in the stomachs of animals.

Styrofoam food containers, single-use plastic bags, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, and plastic straws fill the landscape of everyday Nigerian commerce. They are cheap to produce, cheaper to discard, and almost nowhere collected with sufficient consistency to be kept out of the environment. The 2024 study estimated that out of the 11.2 million tonnes of municipal solid waste collected in Nigeria’s cities, approximately 1.1 million tonnes is plastic, meaning a substantial volume of plastic waste is collected but only a fraction of that is actually recycled.

The policy response

It would be unfair to say Nigeria has done nothing about its waste crisis on paper. The country has a substantial body of environmental policy that, if fully implemented, would represent a genuine attempt at tackling the problem of waste. The National Policy on Plastic Waste Management (NPPWM), introduced in 2021, sets out clear and ambitious targets: reduce plastic waste in the environment by 50 percent of its 2020 baseline by 2025; phase out single-use plastic bags and Styrofoam by 2028; and ensure all plastic packaging in the market is recyclable or biodegradable by 2030. NESREA – the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency – the government’s primary enforcement body for environmental standards is currently working with the European Union to develop a National Plastic Waste Regulation and Control framework. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations, which would require manufacturers to fund and manage the end-of-life disposal of their products, are being developed with UNEP support.

In June 2024, the Federal Executive Council approved a ban on single-use plastics, specifically PET bottles, Styrofoam, plastic bags, sachet water, and straws — across all federal ministries, departments, and agencies, as a first step toward a nationwide ban in January 2025. By August 2024, the government announced that a ban on single-use plastics in government offices, airports, and train stations had entered into force. A committee was inaugurated in late 2024 to develop the enforcement framework.

Some states have also acted. Lagos State’s Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) has been more active than most in pursuing collection contracts and private sector participation. Rivers State, Abuja’s Environmental Protection Board, and several others have enacted environmental regulations and waste management guidelines. The Circular Nigeria initiative, chaired by the NESREA Director-General, was established to drive a systemic shift toward circular economy principles across government and industry.

Clearly, Nigeria has policies. What is lacking is the enforcement, the infrastructure, and the political will to make them real beyond the press releases.

Health dangers of waste 

The health consequences of waste are well-documented. Research found that open dump sites and illegal landfills near residential areas, particularly in Lagos and Abuja, are linked to spikes in diarrhea, dysentery, malaria, typhoid, and cholera in surrounding communities. Leachate from open dumps contaminates groundwater, the primary drinking source for millions of Nigerians who rely on boreholes. NESREA has the legal mandate to prevent open dumping and open burning. It has regulations — including the National Environmental (Control of Bush/Forest Fire and Open Burning) Regulations, S.I. No. 15, 2011 — that prohibits the burning of waste materials that release hazardous air pollutants. But enforcement, by NESREA’s own admission in various contexts, is severely undermined by insufficient staffing, inadequate funding, and the sheer scale of the problem relative to institutional capacity.

The recycling gaps

Nigeria’s recycling sector is incipient. There are burgeoning entrepreneurs, waste pickers, aggregators, and processing companies working every day, often informally, often without safety equipment, often without any government support — to recover value from the waste stream. Their work is the closest thing Nigeria currently has to a functional recycling system. And it is nowhere near sufficient. Investigation into Nigeria’s recycling economy, found that the sector is crippled by a combination of inadequate infrastructure, limited public awareness, insufficient funding, weak regulations, and a lack of coordination. 

The capital intensity of formal recycling is a genuine barrier. A PET plastic processing facility capable of making a dent in Nigeria’s plastic waste volume requires significant investment in sorting equipment, cleaning infrastructure, shredding machines, and extrusion lines. Even smaller-scale operations demand capital that most entrepreneurs in the sector cannot access without loans, which the Nigerian banking system has historically not been structured to provide. The result is that the recycling sector is dominated by informal operators who work at the low end of the value chain — collecting and aggregating — without the formal processing capacity that would generate real volume reduction.

The EPR regulations being developed with UNEP support represent the most promising structural intervention available but it requires manufacturers and importers of plastic products to fund the collection and recycling of their packaging at end of life, creating a stable revenue stream for the recycling sector that does not depend on government budgets. But as of the time of reporting, the EPR framework is still in development and has not entered full force. More than 40 food and beverage companies have joined Nigeria’s Food and Beverage Recycling Alliance (FBRA), a producer responsibility organisation but many plastic producers remain unaware of the programme.

The House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Preparedness for the Ban on Single-Use Plastics in Nigeria, chaired by Hon. Terseer Ugbor, has proposed important legislative instruments, including a green tax on polypropylene manufacturers and legislative regulation of polypropylene production to promote recycling. These proposals, made at the committee’s inaugural meeting in October 2025, are steps in the right direction. But the Nigerian legislature has a documented history of proposing, investigating, reporting, and then not following through. The committee’s mandate must be pursued with the urgency that a public health and environmental crisis demand. Every month that the single-use plastic ban exists only in government offices while the rest of the country continues as before is a month of avoidable harm.

Low public awareness 

There is a persistent awareness gap in Nigeria around waste reduction, separation at source, and the difference between materials that can be recycled and those that cannot. Most Nigerian households have no consistent access to waste segregation information or equipment. The concept of separating organic waste from plastic from paper at the point of generation, which is the foundational practice that makes recycling economically viable, is not being taught systematically in schools, nor built into the design of any national waste programme, and is not communicated through any sustained public information campaign.

Spotlight

NASENI’s Update on Gora Renewable Energy Park

In January, this page called attention to the state of affairs on the renewable energy park being built in Gora, Nassarawa State. It can be recalled that the project was launched with much fanfare in March 2023 by former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Last week, the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) released a statement to provide an update on the project. The agency said work is ‘gathering momentum.’  

“There will be a wind assembly plant, small hydro power equipment production, and solar panel manufacturing; Renewable energy goes beyond just solar, and this park reflects that broader vision,” an official was quoted to have said in the statement, which went on to restate the value proposition of the park: “This initiative will localise the renewable energy value chain. Instead of relying on imports, Nigeria will begin to produce and eventually export these technologies, starting with the West African market and scaling up to the rest of the continent.” The statement explained that ongoing construction is “being handled by about 35 contracting firms, each handling specific components at varying levels of execution such as Multipurpose Halls for industrial productions, Research and Development (R&D) Centre, Knowledge Park, Energy Centre, Workshops, Researchers Lodge, Studio Apartments, Clinic, Restaurant, Wellness Centre, Solar Farm, Drivers Lounge, Gate House, Internal roads and drainage system and Fencing. The Gora Renewable Energy Industrial Energy Park is considered a key component of the Federal Government’s Renewed Hope Agenda, aimed at strengthening local manufacturing, enhancing energy security, and positioning Nigeria as a renewable energy hub in Africa.”

This page will keep tabs on the project.