Officers from Zambia’s Department of Forestry have seized 218 rosewood logs and 149 pieces of sawn timber at a yard in Manyinga District, a haul of a species that is not listed under the treaty governing trade in the world’s most trafficked endangered timbers. That is according to Zambia’s National Prosecution Authority, which named Senior Public Prosecutor Alex Yanganani, of its Environmental and Wildlife Crimes Department, as the prosecutor overseeing a raid on the Zam-Viet yard late last month.
The wood counted at Manyinga is Guibourtia coleosperma, the African rosewood Zambians know as muzauli, and it is not the mukula whose trade built the country’s rosewood name over the past decade. No CITES appendix covers it, and the convention lists only three Guibourtia species: demeusei, pellegriniana, and tessmannii, all bubinga timbers of Central Africa.
“There is some momentum for a Guibourtia genus listing,” Naomi Basik Treanor wrote for Forest Trends in 2022, in a warning that traders would move to lookalike timbers once West African kosso came under a CITES compliance squeeze. Four years on, the genus still carries no listing, and Zambian officers have now counted 218 logs of an unlisted Guibourtia in one yard on traditional land at Manyinga.
Alongside the logs and sawn timber, officers took five trucks, two of them running and three of them not, two Wood-Mizer milling machines, and a forklift, all of it now in state custody. Prosecutors expect charges under the Forestry Act and section 120(b) of the Environmental Management Act No. 12 of 2011, which covers unlawful possession of biological resources, with a forfeiture action to follow under the Forfeiture of Proceeds of Crime Act No. 19 of 2010.
Arrested at the yard were Ngu Yen, a Vietnamese national and Director of Zam-Viet, and Alick Mwanga, a 37-year-old from Chalala in Lusaka, who claimed some of the recovered timber as his own but produced no papers showing its origin. Both men remain in custody at Manyinga Police Station, and investigators are securing a court interpreter before the Vietnamese national takes the next step.
“Even the term rosewood is tricky,” Paolo Cerutti, a forester at CIFOR-ICRAF who led the 2018 study of Zambia’s rosewood value chain, wrote of a trade name stretched across hundreds of species on three continents. A listing that names one species leaves that problem open, because wood left off the appendices reaches buyers under the same trade name as wood the convention protects.
Successive Zambian governments have issued and withdrawn export, production, and transport bans over the past decade, the cycle Cerutti and his co-authors recorded across four districts. Their work put the amount of rosewood-linked bribes paid on Zambian roads at US$1.7 million a year, most of it collected from trucks moving toward export points.
Vietnam ranks as the world’s second-largest buyer of African timber, behind China, and its import rules require buyers to provide additional paperwork for wood from high-risk countries and species. The prosecution authority has not named a market for the seized timber, and no export shipment appears in its account of a raid that ended with the wood, the trucks, and the mills seized before any of it moved.
It comes as the Atlantic Council counted exports from Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria past $2 billion between 2017 and 2022, in a brief that ranks rosewood ahead of ivory and rhinoceros horn combined as the most trafficked wildlife product on earth. Chinese mills cut those logs into veneers and furniture frames for a market in classical furniture that has pulled African timber east for more than a decade.
