Inside Nigeria’s Criminal Rosewood Economy

The cold bites harder at night. Nathaniel Bitrus* feels it on his face as the motorcycle roars along the dirt path to Sunawara, a small community in the Toungo area of Adamawa State, north-east Nigeria. A chainsaw sits carefully on his lap, and with two other men, he disappears into the forest.

Mr Bitrus has spent nearly half of his 45 years taking this three-hour trip. It has helped feed his family, but it has also taken lives and stripped the forest bare. Once, he says, the forests were so dense that the sun barely touched the ground at noon. Now, there are clearings everywhere. Loggers like him have carved paths through the vast Gashaka-Gumti National Park, cutting less lucrative trees to reach the prize – rosewood.

The forest is patrolled, Mr Bitrus says, checkpoints mounted along the main routes. But with a government permit and the usual bribe, he says, a passage can be bought.

The men prefer the cheaper way, the secret trails that slip past the eyes of rangers and guards, the paths only loggers know. One such road is called Yaro Me Ka Dauko, a Hausa phrase meaning, “Boy, what are you carrying?” It is the road of the daring. Mr Bitrus takes it again in silence tonight. He does not have a choice.

When farming is no longer enough

Mr Bitrus was a farmer first, or at least he tried to be. He grew maize on a small plot outside Toungo, enough to feed his wife and children. But then the seasons turned. The rains came late or did not come at all, and so the harvests shrank.

In 2001, some men from Lagos, south-west Nigeria, came asking for people who could supply rosewood. They showed pictures of the trees they wanted. The locals knew exactly where to find them. Mr Bitrus was in his twenties then, strong enough to swing an axe all night, and the pay was good – ₦1,000 (about $10 then) per tree log. It was enough to buy food, pay school fees, and buy fertilisers and insecticides, he recalls.

He signed up.

Soon, there were chainsaws, trucks, and high-paying middlemen. They cut faster and worked into the nights.

David Isaac*, another Toungo farmer-turned-logger, tells us he has been at it for 15 years. “I cut trees to feed my family,” he says. “Farming does not pay anymore. This one does.”

In Baruwa, a forest community tucked in the Mambilla Plateau in the Gashaka Local Government Area of neighbouring Taraba State, George Johnson* has been logging for three decades. He first came to Gembu, a cold town on the plateau, to work on people’s farms. But farming paid too little.

“Things were expensive,” he says. Logging was better. Sometimes he harvests eucalyptus for local farmers. Other times, when dealers call, he travels three hours to Baruwa to log rosewood.

“The work is dangerous,” Mr Bitrus says.

They spend days deep in the forest, cutting trees. At night, they sleep with one eye open in makeshift tents. Wild animals prowl close.

“Sometimes people die or get injured,” says Mr Isaac. “Trees fall on people.”

It happened to him once. He lived. Others were not so lucky.

Rosewood is heavy. When a tree falls, the men loop chains around the trunk and drag it out of the forest until it reaches the dirt road, where trucks wait to transport the logs to a depot outside Sunawara. But as more people joined, they pooled money for a crane.

“We did not choose this job,” Mr Bitrus says softly. “We went to school. But there is no work. If I had a choice, I would not do this.”

Road to China

The real money is not in Toungo or Gashaka or the Mambilla Plateau.

It is in the hands of dealers, foreign buyers, and complicit officials who turn forests into fortunes.

When a dealer receives a consignment request, he calls loggers like Mr Bitrus.

“We have dedicated loggers, the ones we contact anytime there is demand,” says Charles Ekene*, a Gembu-based dealer. The buyers rarely visit, he says. “They communicate over the phone.”

The dealer commissions the loggers, supplies chainsaws and trucks, sets the prices, pays the transporters, and handles all the paperwork.

Loggers like Mr Bitrus have their own tools and work independently. “We meet with loggers at a place called ‘Kan Cross, where we negotiate prices,” says Aliyu Muhammad, a 20-year-old Toungo-based motorcyclist. A trip into the forest costs about ₦4,000 ($2.68), he explains.

Inside the forest, the loggers cut the trees, paint their initials onto the stumps to mark ownership, and drag the trunks to the roadside. From there, trucks carry them to depots beyond Sunawara.

“They pay about ₦20,000 [$13.40] per log,” Mr Bitrus says.

The logs are measured with tape, he adds.

“And since we do not have access to the buyers in Lagos, we accept whatever the dealers pay us,” says Mr Isaac.

Mr Johnson says he gets ₦40,000 ($26.81) no matter the size of the log. This is where the real profit begins.

“A truck could fetch ₦3 million [about $2,100] or more on a good day,” Mr Ekene says.

From Taraba and Adamawa, the trucks head southward. “From Baruwa, we drive to Jalingo,” Hamma Yusuf*, a 38-year-old truck driver, tells us. And from Jalingo, they reach Lagos, passing through Abuja.

“It is close to the water,” he says vaguely of the final location. “There are a lot of containers there.”

Logs from Sunawara follow a similar path, passing through Yola, the Adamawa State capital, then Abuja. “Other drivers head first to Kano,” Mr Isaac explains. “A few take the hilly roads through Gembu before reaching Baissa in Taraba.”

Mr Yusuf has been transporting timber since 2010. It is mostly intrastate – moving logs from Baruwa and Nguroje, another logging hotspot in Taraba, to a major depot in Baissa, a town in the Kurmi Local Government Area. Occasionally, he makes the longer trip to Lagos.

Mr Yusuf works under someone else. They handle the paperwork and negotiate with the dealers, he explains. He carries the documents only to present at checkpoints.

“Most of the money goes to the owner,” he says.

Like with the loggers, truck owners decide the pay. Mr Yusuf says he earns what could sustain him and his family.

A 2022 Arise News investigation confirmed what Mr Yusuf and Mr Isaac describe: rosewood from the region passes through Sagamu, Ogun State, before reaching Apapa Port in Lagos, where cargo ships carry it to China. Our GIS analysis corroborates this route.

Between 2014 and 2017, an average of 40 shipping containers – about 5,600 logs, or 2,800 trees – left Nigeria for China every single day, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). In 2016 alone, the EIA reported, more than 1.4 million rosewood logs worth $300 million were smuggled into China, despite the species being listed under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a classification requiring strict permitting and oversight.

Today, the financial losses remain unquantified. Neither the National Strategy to Combat Wildlife and Forest Crime (2022–2026) nor the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) performance reports estimate how much Nigeria loses annually to timber trafficking.

In search of clarity, we filed Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the Federal Ministry of Finance and the NCS, asking for revenue-loss data. Neither agency had responded at press time.

China’s official 2025 import figures are also unavailable. However, Statista reports that in 2023, China imported $17.1 billion worth of wood products, second only to the United States. Meanwhile, the Enhancing Africa’s Transnational Organised Crime (ENACT) 2017 report estimates that Africa loses about $17 billion annually to timber smuggling.

Much of this demand traces back to China’s enduring cultural fascination with rosewood, known as hongmu. Once reserved for emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, rosewood furniture became a coveted status symbol, admired for its deep hues, durability, and capacity for intricate carving. That appetite lives on.

But China’s own forests could not sustain this demand. Large-scale logging was banned decades ago.

The hunger simply shifted elsewhere. First to Southeast Asia, and more recently to Africa, which now supplies the lion’s share. A 2022 Forest Trends report shows that by 2020, 83 per cent of China’s wood imports came from Africa, while shipments from Southeast Asia declined. CITES data adds that over 41 per cent of China’s rosewood log imports from range states – more than 2.2 million cubic meters worth about $1.037 billion – came from Africa.

The scale of demand is staggering: Forest Trends noted that between 2000 and 2015, China’s rosewood imports surged by 1,250 per cent, with the value nearly doubling in a single year between 2013 and 2014, reaching $2.6 billion.

Laws exist only on paper

Nigeria’s laws against illegal logging look formidable on paper. The Endangered Species Act (1985, revised 2016), the Nigerian Customs Act (2023), prohibiting the export of endangered timber, the pending Endangered Species Conservation and Protection Bill (2024), and multiple state laws ban or criminalise rosewood trafficking. Yet in 2022, CITES issued a rare Article XIII intervention, citing “persistent governance failures” and warning of possible trade sanctions if enforcement did not improve.

State-level bans tell the same story of power without teeth. Taraba State outlawed rosewood logging in 2023. Yet, Mr Johnson insists he pays ₦10,000 ($6.70) each to both local and state governments for annual permits. When asked for proof, he claimed he left the permit at home and promised to send a photo later – a promise he never kept.

Our attempts to verify his claim led nowhere. Officials at the Taraba State Ministry of Environment and Climate Change declined to comment. The ministry’s director of planning, research, and statistics, Fidelis Nashuka, told us, “We have a department of forestry which has no more details on this.”

That same year, Adamawa State Governor Ahmadu Fintiri announced a tree-felling ban but framed it as a measure against burning trees “in the name of charcoal,” without naming specific species. Loggers say the ban changed nothing.

“We obtain permits from the local government,” Mr Isaac says.

A permit used to cost ₦30,000 ($20.11), he adds, but now goes for ₦50,000 ($34). Mr Bitrus agrees. “Officials could even issue them at ₦70,000 [$47],” he says, “because the business became competitive.”

When asked to produce these permits, none of the loggers could. They claim carrying the documents is risky, so they leave them at home unless heading deep into the forest. HumAngle wrote to the Adamawa State Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to verify these claims. However, we got no response.

On paper, Nigeria has the laws to end this trade. In reality, enforcement bends under corruption.

“We pay money at every security checkpoint for us to be allowed to pass,” Mr Isaac claims.

The problem runs far deeper than local bribes. In 2017, the EIA revealed that Nigerian officials retrospectively issued about 4,000 CITES permits for rosewood logs seized in China, allegedly after payments of over a million dollars to senior officials, with the involvement of the Chinese consulate. Former Environment Minister Amina Mohammed reportedly signed the documents in her final days in office before becoming UN Deputy Secretary-General.

And this is not just a West African story. In 2021, a Kenyan court ordered the country’s Revenue Authority to return $13 million worth of confiscated rosewood to alleged traffickers. The timber had been seized at the Port of Mombasa while in transit from Madagascar through Zanzibar to Hong Kong

A 2022 report by the Institute for Security Studies argued that illegal African rosewood trafficking thrives on corruption, weak enforcement, and legal loopholes across Madagascar, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Kenya, with China’s demand as the engine driving it all. The report shows how high-level officials, court decisions, and lax port regulations across East and Southern Africa have turned enforcement into theatre, allowing traffickers to sidestep both domestic laws and CITES restrictions.

The Nigeria-Cameroon border tells the same story. Porous and poorly monitored, it serves as both a source and a smuggling corridor. Once, Mr Bitrus crossed the border into Cameroon. The locals there, he recalls, are not as deeply involved as those in Nigeria. The trees felled in Cameroon find their way into Nigeria, he explains.

A 2022 investigation traced the journey of logs from the forests of northern Cameroon through Taraba and Adamawa, showing how the wood, cleared to look Nigerian, made its way to export points. Forest Trends’ Illegal Deforestation and Associated Trade database confirms Nigeria’s role as both a major source and transit country.

People were caught along the way, Mr Bitrus says. “Our people were beaten, locked up. Some died in prison. At one point, we had to run to save our lives. Our equipment was even set on fire after clashes with security officials in Cameroon.”

There is some success. Occasionally, government officials seize illegal timber, arrest a handful of loggers and dealers, or burn trucks on the spot.

In Taraba, officials insist the 2023 logging ban is being enforced.

“There are mobile courts, attached with a task force, that go round penalising illegal loggers,” says Mr Nashuka. “They are stationed on major roads. Once the task force apprehends timber poachers, the mobile court immediately fines.”

Penalties, however, rarely go beyond fines. “No jail terms at the moment,” Mr Nashuka admits. “We are still working on the law to include that. There have been arrests almost every day. But I cannot mention the scale of these arrests, as I am not part of the team.”

Yet on our reporting trip, we saw no sign of these mobile courts or task forces. Only the usual immigration, military, and police checkpoints lined the roads.

At the federal level, the Nigeria Customs Service touts large-scale seizures across ports, border posts, and inland commands. Its 2024 performance report claims that from January to June 2024, the agency made 2,442 seizures with a Duty Paid Value of ₦25.5 billion ($17 million), 203 per cent higher than the same period in 2023.

The National Park Service (NPS) also points to progress. In an April interview with HumAngle, Surveyor-General Ibrahim Goni said the NPS was working with agencies like the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency, the NCS, and others to curb trafficking in wildlife species and plants.

At the end of 2023, Mr Goni said, the NPS made 646 arrests across all national parks, with Gashaka-Gumti recording the highest number, a sign of persistent clashes between park rangers and illegal loggers, poachers, and other intruders in the reserve’s forests and buffer zones.

Regionally, Nigeria is working with the African Protected Area Directors (APAD), ECOWAS, and other regional blocs in East and Central Africa, Mr Goni says. “We take our issues to the European Union and other regional bodies. This way, we get to reach the governments of various countries.”

Yet the logging continues.

The human and ecological toll

The scars are everywhere.

“Before, this place was covered with trees,” says Mary, a 45-year-old farmer in Sunawara, pointing to the bare stretch where stumps now stand like broken teeth. We flew a drone over the hills above Toungo. We could see the empty patches where forests once stood like walls.

Gathering firewood has become a daily struggle. “We have to walk a long distance now just to find enough for cooking,” Mary says.

But the loss is deeper than firewood.

“Rosewood belongs to the Fabaceae family,” explains Ridwan Jaafar, an ecosystem ecologist from the Mambilla Plateau and lead strategist for the Nigerian Montane Forest Project. “This group of species fixes atmospheric nitrogen and enriches the soil. When the trees are gone, that function disappears too.”

Farmers feel the loss directly. “It hardly rains anymore,” says Juris Saiwa, a 68-year-old farmer in Sunawara. “Maybe it is because of cutting down trees,” he adds, convinced that history links deforestation with drought.

Yields have shrunk. “We could cultivate even without fertiliser before,” says Jauro, the Sunawara village head.

Mary agrees: “Now our crops do not grow well. The land does not produce the way it used to.”

Hamman Kamale, a geologist at the University of Maiduguri in Borno State, confirms what the farmers sense. “Deforestation degrades soil fertility. Organic matter declines, soils compact, and land degradation spreads,” he says. HumAngle reported in July that farmers in Taraba complained of dry spells withering their crops.

The damage spirals outward. Mr Jaafar explains that trees play a key role in carbon storage. “Forests act as terrestrial carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide and locking it in biomass and soil,” he says. Remove the trees, and you release carbon while erasing that storage capacity.

The dangers multiply with floods and erosion. “Deforestation removes root reinforcement, increasing landslide risk, accelerates runoff, and triggers gully formation,” says Mr Kamale. “Sediment loads rise in rivers, channels destabilise, groundwater recharge drops, and water quality declines.”

In Adamawa, floods now come almost every year, destroying homes and displacing thousands.

The damage extends to wildlife.

“The animals we used to see, such as gorillas and monkeys, are gone,” says Jauro. “We don’t know if they left or died out.”

Rosewood provides shelter for these animals, ecologist Mr Jaafar says. “They are also a food source as their leaves are rich in nitrogen. Their disappearance means animals and birds migrate.”

Satellite analysis reveals what the farmers, scientists, and ecologists are saying. Our Landsat data analysis (USGS, 2023) shows a dramatic transformation of the Gashaka-Gumti National Park between 2010 and 2023. Bare land expanded by more than 1,800 km² between 2010 and 2015 alone, a fourteen-fold increase in just five years.

Farmland and sparse vegetation actually shrank by nearly 80 km² during the same period, proving that this was no slow encroachment by farmers but a rapid, organised logging boom. By 2020, cleared land exceeded 2,050 km². Even after a slight recovery by 2023, dense forest cover stood at just 39.8 km², far below pre-boom levels, leaving the park deeply scarred.

Experts say the solutions must begin where the damage began. “Even some security agents don’t understand the environmental laws,” Mr Jaafar laments. “The government must involve the communities, enlighten them on the risks, and provide sustainable alternatives like beekeeping or shea butter processing. These are more profitable and ecologically sound. But the key is community ownership.”

Mr Kamale recommends protecting riparian zones and steep headwaters, restricting logging on fragile soils, building erosion control structures like check dams, reforesting degraded slopes with native species, enforcing low-impact harvesting, and strengthening Nigeria–Cameroon cooperation on monitoring.

But money remains the missing piece. NPS boss Mr Goni admits enforcement cannot rely on security agencies alone. “Half the success depends on local communities,” he says. “We have begun training people with new skills and giving starter packs for alternative livelihoods. It has reduced hunting and logging in some areas. But we need more resources to make this sustainable.”

The last ride

It is dawn. Mr Bitrus and his crew emerge from the forest, three men on a motorcycle, just as they had gone in.

They will not make this trip again for months, Mr Bitrus says. The trees are thinning out. The dealers have moved south, to Cross River, where rosewood still grows in abundance.

“The market is no longer like it used to be,” he tells us. “The people from Lagos don’t come anymore. The foreigners, too, we don’t see them like before.”

He sits on the stump of a felled rosewood at the depot outside Sunawara, where he speaks to us.

The air here is damp and cold; fog drifts between the few remaining trees. We can feel the cold, despite putting on jackets. The temperature is below 19°C. A few birds call from somewhere deep inside the remaining trees in the forest, their songs thinner than they were described before our trip.

Mr Bitrus looks towards the forest. He has made this journey hundreds of times, yet each one leaves him with a hollowness he cannot name. The money never lasts. The danger grows each season.

It is hard to picture the world Mr Jaafar, the ecologist, dreams of: a world where bees hum between restored trees, where tourists come to see the wildlife instead of empty clearings. Harder still to imagine a government willing to stop the trade not only with arrests but with real work for men like Mr Bitrus.

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A tricycle moves past, stacked with rosewood planks. It disappears down the road, leaving behind a ribbon of smoke and the smell of fuel hanging in the cold morning air.

Satellite image analysis and map illustrations were done by Mansir Muhammed. Imagery was sourced from Google Earth Pro and the multi-decade Landsat archive of the US Geological Survey (USGS), with official park boundaries obtained from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).

This story was produced by HumAngle with the support of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.