Desertification Gathers Force As Nigerian Homes & Villages Vanish Under Sand - BBC

Ciroma Mohammed is standing on the spot he says was once occupied by his house in north-east Nigeria. "We lose houses to the desert every year," he says from the village of Bulamadu in Yobe State. The fine sand is swallowing up houses and roads every year.

Almost all the villagers in this dusty arid region say they have lost homes and farms to the Sahara Desert which is expanding southwards. "What we do is that when the sand moves and buries our homes and farms and even our wells, we simply keep retreating southwards," says Aminu Mahmud, another villager who says he has already lost two different houses to the sand. He says the situation deteriorates every April when strong pre-rainy season sandstorms sweep sand into their settlements.

"The desert's unrelenting onslaught is pushing us further away from our original homes and it seems there's absolutely nothing we can do about it," Mr Mahmud says.

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Further east in a village called Damasak, Sani Yunusa, 56, says the sand dunes were "not so strange". He claims he had witnessed something similar as a child. "The sand should not prevent people from cutting down trees as they have been doing for centuries," he says. "Desertification is just nature at work and it will reverse itself when it is ready." But Mr Yunusa is no expert on desertification and the experts say that the march of the sand towards Nigeria's south has become almost irreversible.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6288445.stm

...take up his new position as head of the EPA?

But then, I don't know if citizenship requirements are involved.