If it were a novel, the plotline would seem far-fetched. A young British zoologist travels to Gabon, becomes the confidant of the president-for-life, takes Gabonese citizenship and ends up with the Gandalfian job title of minister of water, forests, the sea and environment. The president-for-life’s son assumes office after his father’s death, but is subsequently ousted in a palace coup and our protagonist, after 35 years in the country, flees to escape corruption charges. All a bit corny, you might say. Only this is the true story of Lee White.
White’s surname is an irony that has not gone unremarked in Gabon, a Britain-sized country of just 2mn people, nearly 90 per cent of which is covered in tropical rainforest. Gabon’s forests contain some 30,000 lowland gorillas and most of the world’s forest elephants, estimated at 95,000.
White’s notoriety, first when in charge of 13 magnificent national parks and later as minister, eventually earned him the sobriquet among his enemies of “Satan of the Waters and the Forests”. White says the real source of his unpopularity — and what he insists are the entirely trumped-up charges that followed the coup — are the criminal gangs, many linked to China, whose multimillion timber-smuggling racket he helped crack.
Long before this, some in Gabon viewed him as, supposedly typical of westerners, caring more about the forests and elephants than he did about the people whose crops, or even relatives, the animals sometimes trampled. Detractors say he ingratiated himself with the corrupt Bongo dynasty, putting aside any distaste he may have had for the regime’s gaudy accumulation and suppression of opponents, because he relished the influence it gave him over Gabon’s vast tracts of rainforest.
When White was being interrogated in the weeks following last August’s coup, he says he saw members of the forestry mafia in the building — evidence, he implies, that they have forged better relations with the new regime. “I wasn’t popular with those crooks. It’s like going up against the mafia,” he says. He had also crossed the forest ministry’s union, some of whose members, he alleges, had links to the illegal trade.
The interrogation, though never physically threatening, was relentless. He was allowed home at night, but each new day brought fresh accusations. He had, they said, stolen 40bn CFA francs (£52mn) in back staff bonuses. He had pocketed money dished out by Norway for forest protection. He had even filched the proceeds raised from selling millions of Gabon’s carbon credits. That was a funny one, White says, because, though the credits exist, Gabon, much to his annoyance, never received so much as a penny for them.
“She threw the kitchen sink at me,” he says of the prosecutor. “And then she said, ‘I know you have British citizenship.’” He took it as an invitation to flee the country, an offer he immediately took up last October.
Now adjusting to life in Scotland — where his wife Kate, is a professor at the University of Stirling and where he has swapped forest elephants and gorillas for a nearby badger set — White has seen his topsy-turvy adventures turned into a gripping Sky documentary called Gabon: Earth’s Last Chance.
We enter his house, a modest pebble-dashed affair on a busyish street a few miles from St Andrews. “I supposedly have a real-estate empire in Scotland. This is it,” he says glumly, as he leads me into the smallish kitchen-dining area. “We couldn’t afford a house in St Andrews,” he adds for emphasis. Later, on a tour of that town’s famous golf course, he says he would be tempted to play a round — if his golf clubs had not been impounded in Gabon along with the rest of his stuff. It’s all a bit of a comedown.
White’s rise and fall began in 1968 when his parents took their three-year-old son from Manchester to Uganda, where his father had secured a teaching post. His playground mates included the children of dictator Idi Amin. At home, he grew up with three younger sisters and an orphan chimpanzee called Cedric, an early attachment that kindled a desire to save the forests where humans’ three closest relatives — chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas — reside.
After a zoology degree at University College London, he did a PhD at Edinburgh on the impact of deforestation on large mammals. His research took him to Gabon. When he arrived at the research station in Lopé, a few huts in the middle of the forest, he knew the names of only two trees. “At UCL, I’d asked to do a plant taxonomy class, and my tutor had looked at me and said, ‘Lee, we’re zoologists.’”
At least he could recognise the elephant that emerged from the forest fastness, the fulfilment of a dream that may explain why he stayed in that remote spot for much of the next 15 years. Kate, a fellow Edinburgh PhD student, joined him and started her own research as well as a family. They brought up three children in Gabon, where his elder daughter developed a taste for ants, a common snack.
In 2002, things got weirder. He was summoned to a meeting by Omar Bongo Ondimba, president of Gabon for almost 42 years until his death in 2009. White was working for the Wildlife Conservation Society, an American NGO attached to the Bronx Zoo. He attended the meeting as a sidekick of Mike Fay, also of WCS, who had just completed a legendary 465-day, 3,200-km slog through the inhospitable rainforest, a feat of endurance and ecological mapping forever known as the MegaTransect.
Shortly before the meeting, the red phones on the desks of each of Bongo’s ministers had rung. Quite unexpectedly, Fay and White found themselves presenting to the full cabinet. After Fay had spoken, it was White’s turn. He displayed a map with 13 fantasy national parks, covering 11 per cent of Gabon’s territory. Bongo turned to his ministers. “I want that,” he said.
When it comes to taking far-reaching environmental decisions, White sees the advantage of authoritarian rule. He is uncomfortable at criticism of the Bongo dynasty, saying the only part of the Sky documentary that made him cringe was “all the Omar Bongo bling” — the numerous luxury cars, Parisian mansions and decadent lifestyle. Bongo went on to have more than 30 children with several wives and consorts.
White insists Bongo was elected, admittedly in a one-party system. He regards this not as a dictatorship but as the expression of a “traditional African system that operated through chiefs and paramount chiefs”. It is, he says, not unlike ancient Britain where “lineages of chiefs had a long-term vision” and were not beholden to the modern dictates of five-year electoral cycles. “I would choose a King Charles to be in charge over a Keir Starmer,” he says of a monarch with well-known environmental credentials.
Back in the noughties, White introduced the then Prince Charles, for whom he had done some consultancy work on Liberian forests, to Ali Bongo, Omar’s son and a budding conservationist. Bongo, fluent in English, had for some reason hidden his proficiency and White was obliged to translate for the future king from French. White would later be rewarded with a CBE, though the citation mentioned protection of the African environment, not translation.
As head of Gabon’s national parks from 2009, White built up a paramilitary force to combat the criminal gangs that were hauling thousand-year-old timber out of the forest. His men also uncovered an elephant poaching ring, the proceeds of which were financing the west African terrorist group Boko Haram.
He also started quantifying Gabon’s carbon. The laborious measurements he had taken in Lopé for his PhD turned out to be the same as those required to calculate carbon stocks. White helped develop the first carbon map of Gabon. By the time of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, he had become Gabon’s lead climate scientist.
Later, he made successively sophisticated calculations, eventually validated by the UN, proving that Gabon was one of the few nations in the world to be a net absorber of carbon. Even counting the emissions from burning the oil that Gabon sells internationally, the country absorbs a net 95mn tonnes a year. By comparison Britain emits 380mn tonnes.
White also developed methodology to show that sustainable forestry practices, in which one or two trees are cut from a hectare of forest on a 25-year rotation, can actually increase the amount of carbon absorbed by allowing in more light and encouraging tree growth. His idea was to sell the resulting credits. Surely, he reasoned, Gabon should be incentivised for absorbing carbon and helping the world to breathe.
White was never able to sell those credits. He regards the world’s failure to find a mechanism to reward his country — he is still Gabonese despite his change of address — as a moral failure. “If we don’t manage the forests of Gabon, they will disappear like all the other forests of west Africa,” he says. As Gabon’s oil runs out, it has to find another way to make a living. White says a sustainable forestry industry, with associated carbon credits, has to be part of the answer.
Expelled from Gabon, he is eyeing a job in the private sector, applying his experience to solutions for the Congo Basin rainforest. He regards his task as urgent. If the Congo Basin rainforest disappears, he says, it will release many years’ worth of global carbon emissions at once. Worse, it would affect rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, which feeds the Blue Nile. He once rattled a Greek diplomat by telling him that meant 100mn Egyptians heading his way.
“We have the intelligence to put human beings on Mars,” he says, referring to Elon Musk’s escape plan, “but we don’t have the intelligence to look after our planet and avoid the implosion of life-support systems affecting billions of people.”
Some humans will survive, he concedes. “But I can imagine a Hollywood doom-and-gloom scenario like Planet of the Apes.” Scotland could be 20 degrees colder. If the Himalayan glaciers melt 2bn people will be without water. And to cap it all, there’s his golf clubs, still stuck in Gabon.
David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor
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