Herders have lived in Nigeria for as long as the
Nigerian nation existed. They have lived mostly in the far north to the middle
belt area of the country. Desert advancement, triggered by climate change,
forced them to start seeking pasture in other parts of the country.
Nigeria has been run without a drive. There was
always the absence of strategy and little or no concern to the repercussion of
doing so. It is expected that the government should have predicted the eventual
competition for land between herders and farmers, taking a decision to deal
with it from the onset –population will always grow and force increase demand
for agricultural land.
The administration of late President Mohammadu
Buhari, in its bid to create jobs in the agro sector, banned the imports of
certain agricultural produce. Food prices soared as a result. This triggered a rush
to subsistent and commercial agriculture, increasing the demand for arable land,
thereby eating up huge expanses of land that would have been used for grazing.
It is easy to see this in herders’ habit of moving cattle to settlement areas to
graze. I have had the chance of asking a herder the question of why they still
move cattle to settlement areas, despite the abundance of grass in the vast bushes.
His answer was that there is hardly a place left uncultivated.
This year, I decided to check things for myself. By
mid-May, when farmers where fully convinced that the rains have finally come,
they moved their ploughs across the fields. I realized that, every day, the
herders come with their cattle and stand in the perimeter of the farms, not
knowing where to take the cattle to. If there are patches of land in the centre
that have not been cultivated, the farmers go to the extent of inviting other farmers
to cultivate them. According to them, if any patch of land is left uncultivated,
it lures cattle, culminating in sabotage of surrounding farms. But after crops
have been planted, weeded and nourished, however, farmers leave the farms,
allowing the crops to mature. At that time, herders move their cattle into the
gutters separating the farms to find the badly needed pasture. In doing this, crop
damages are expected.
Population will continue to grow and more land will
be needed to grow enough food to feed the growing population. This will
intensify competition for land between cattle herders and farmers. Thus, as far
as the conflict is concerned, there is no end in sight. This leaves us with just
one option: going back to the issue of RUGA, which ensures cattle stay in
restricted areas, feeding on specially grown pasture with high nutritional
content. This was what President Buhari’s administration tried to introduce but
was met with stiff resistance by certain stakeholders.
Why did the modern ranching idea of President Buhari
fail to gain acceptance? Buhari’s government intended creating herders’
settlements called RUGA. According to Scan News, RUGA would have contained
“ranches, grass or feed farms, abattoirs, dairy, meat and skin/leather
processing plants, housing, religious houses, schools, roads, power and water
supplies and the complete range of infrastructure required to support and
sustain an ultra-modern local government area.” The sheer size of the land
would have been equivalent to 216 local government areas. Nigeria has a total
of 774 local government areas. In Plateau State with 17 local government areas,
for instance, it would have meant conceding about 35% of the land to Fulani
herders. Plateau has a tribal population of about 40.
The late President and former Governor of Kaduna
State, Ahmed El-Rufai, had said in the past that the Fulani people killing
Nigerian farmers were foreigners from Mali, Chad and the Central African
Republic. So, why give this kind of land to foreigners? This weird design is
the reason why the intellectual demography kicked against the project. The
uneducated hated RUGA because it was trying to give their land to murders.
As said in the preceding parts of this article,
Nigeria’s has been run with disregard to the principles of nation-building. Why
should we allow illegal immigrants to come to our country, cause widespread
killings and end up enjoying the resources of the country in a way their
nations couldn’t provide them? This points to a possibility of fraud in the design
of RUGA, demonstrating that the project was ill-motivated. There are schools of
thought that believe that the actual reason why land is in desperate need by
herders is due to an unexplained increase in the population of herders across the
country. Perhaps, there wouldn’t have been any competition for land in the
first place.
The deadly conflict has pointed a fing
er on the dangerous
repercussion of leaving borders free to everyone. Solving the herder issue
requires, first and foremost, taking the profile of all herders across the country
to ascertain their actual nationalities, with deportation following where it
becomes necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment