Reclaiming the Green: Senate Pushes Forest Guards to Secure Nigeria’s Food Frontier

Favour Ojo

Nigeria’s forests have stopped growing trees and started growing fear. For years, bands of kidnappers and armed groups have turned reserves and border woodlands into staging grounds. The result is what we’ve been documenting at AgricNews Digest , farmers abandoning ancestral land, food production collapsing, and prices climbing beyond the reach of ordinary families. The Senate has now weighed in, and this time the resolutions are pointed directly at the forests where Nigeria’s food security is being lost.
The upper chamber is demanding a comprehensive security offensive to clear bandits from forest reserves across the country. Lawmakers want the security architecture around forests redesigned and strategic formations established to prevent further attacks. The urgency is visible in Oyo State, where attacks linked to Old Oyo National Park have escalated. The Senate acknowledged that FG has approved 1,000 forest guards for that area, but insisted that isolated deployments will not work. Forests in Kwara-Kogi, Kebbi-Zamfara, and Niger’s Shiroro-Rafi-Munya belt have become safe havens and transit routes for criminal groups. Until those corridors are shut, rural communities will remain under siege.
Senate President Godswill Akpabio captured the mood when he described the abduction of pupils and teachers in Orire, Oyo as an assault on Nigeria’s future. The Senate also pressed FG and security agencies to secure the immediate release of 42 schoolchildren taken in Borno’s Askira-Uba LGA and the Obalohun of Okoloke in Kogi. When children cannot attend school and farmers cannot access their farms because of forest-based kidnapping, the attack is not just on individuals. It is an attack on the nation’s food system and on the next generation of growers.
The Senate is urging President Bola Tinubu to urgently sign the Nigerian Forest Security Service Bill, 2025. The bill has already passed the National Assembly and is awaiting assent. Its purpose is simple but critical: give forest guards legal authority to patrol, arrest, and secure rural and forested areas. This aligns with FG’s proposed Forest Guard initiative and could close the gap that has left Nigeria’s forests ungoverned. Communities in places like Woro, Kaima LGA Kwara have been asking for structured local security for years.The bill could provide the framework, but only if it moves from paper to patrols
The Senate’s resolutions echo what farmers in Ayegunle-Igun, Woro, and Benue have been saying: the forest is no longer a forest. It is a barrier. You cannot mechanize farming, distribute inputs, or stabilize markets if the farmer cannot reach his land. The Senate admitted that remote, forest-bordering communities are highly vulnerable. That admission is important because it connects directly to FG’s plan to reach 1.2 million farmers with 2,000 tractors. Tractors are useless without safe access roads. Seeds are wasted without safe soil. Clearing the forests is the prerequisite for any agricultural intervention to work.
The Senate also called for humanitarian and economic support for displaced farmers and residents of Woro and neighboring communities affected by violence. They understand the chain reaction we’ve been tracking: when farmers flee, barns stay empty, supply drops, transport risks rise, and a bag of rice moves past ₦50,000. Wounded land wounds the entire food chain.
Signing the bill and funding forest guards will cost budget allocations. Not doing it has already cost Nigeria IDP camps, lost planting seasons, and lives like the head teacher killed in Ayegunle-Igun.
The hard truth AgricNews Digest readers know well is this: Senate resolutions do not patrol forests. For years, the Shiroro-Rafi-Munya axis and the Kwara-Kogi borderlands have been flagged as bandit territory. Motions have come before. The real test now is implementation

Will intelligence and early warning systems detect threats before farmers are killed or abducted? Will criminals be arrested and prosecuted, not just pushed deeper into the bush? And will farmers feel confident enough to return to their ancestral land before the next phase

The Senate’s message is clear and aligns with what the farming community has demanded: Nigeria’s forests must stop being criminal territory and become food territory again