Human Eyes, Divine Motive

Hon. Peter Kanang Gwom. Source: Gwom's Facebook Picture Library

On Friday, 28 August, an event was held at the conference hall of the Plateau State Head of Service's office. It was in honour of the then Commissioner of Environment, Climate Change and Mineral Development, Honourable Peter Kanang Gwom, who was leaving his portfolio to assume office as the new Commissioner of Lands, Survey and Town Planning.

A month earlier, a stray thought had crossed my mind: What happens if the Commissioner is taken away? It was not based on any rumour I had heard—just a quiet premonition that wandered in uninvited. Then, it came to pass. In a major cabinet reshuffle by Governor Caleb Mutfwang's administration, Honourable Gwom was moved to the Ministry of Lands, Survey and Town Planning.

Why was I fearful? Over the years, we have had a series of commissioners, each with their own idiosyncrasies. Some were difficult to work with; we often prayed for their departure—whether through reshuffle or resignation. We rarely cared when a bad commissioner left. But this time, the fear was different.

My second concern stemmed from the wealth of experience Honourable Gwom had accumulated during his three years at the Ministry of Environment. In that time, he attended conferences from Cape to Cairo, Somalia to Gambia, and everywhere in between. He also initiated and completed beautiful projects. This built for him a towering expertise in environmental matters. His transfer meant he was taking that expertise away from a ministry that needed it one hundred percent, to one that required very little of it. To my human eyes, this looked like a loss.

In his farewell speech, the Commissioner cited moments when he had wanted one thing, but something else came his way. Eventually, he said, he came to understand that what came was actually in his best interest. He remarked that humans often look at events "with human eyes," missing the divine motive behind them. That phrase stayed with me.

Reflecting on this, I recalled that a former long-serving Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Environment—who had also been moved to Commerce—was now heading to the same Ministry of Lands, Survey and Town Planning. This coincidence suggests that perhaps the Ministry of Lands has pressing issues that require people with environmental insight. What seemed like a subtraction may, in fact, be a strategic redeployment. But we could not see it—not with human eyes.

Still, no experience gained is ever wasted while you are alive. The greatest challenge our planet faces today is the threat of environmental doom, unless we act to reverse or build resilience to climate change. That is why we must build strong momentum in this fight—and it is a fight for everyone, whether in government or outside it. Governments design policies; the private sector cooperates to achieve goals. Early in his tenure at the Ministry of Environment, Honourable Gwom was quoted as saying there was too much redundancy and that he wanted to see things happen. That passion defines his approach to any role. His drive suggests that even outside government, his experience could still be put to meaningful use.

Perhaps the real weakness is not in what we see, but in our assumption that what we see is all there is. You never know when the tide of life is leading you to a destination that will benefit you and humanity. Often, you gain experience without immediately seeing the full picture—but eventually, the pieces fall into place. The divine motive, hidden from human eyes, slowly reveals itself.

And when it does, you realise: you were never really losing. You were being repositioned

 

Living with Fulani Folks

AI-generated Image

I was born in Jos South, but I am native to Irigwe land in Bassa Local Government Area of Plateau State. I attended primary school and the first three years of secondary school in Jos South. I spent the last two years of secondary school in Irigwe land.

During my time in Irigwe land, I met a classmate with whom I became close. He was Fulani by tribe and spoke Irigwe fluently—Fulani people have a talent for understanding languages with ease. Of course, he also spoke Fulani, Hausa, and English, which he learned in school; this is common among children born in that part of Nigeria.

My friend felt that our school lacked the resources to help him achieve his dream of becoming a medical doctor. It was ironic: I had left my previous school because I felt it lacked the resources to help me fulfil my ambition in the sciences. I tried all I could to persuade him to stay, especially since we had become inseparable. We were so close that he often took me to his ruga home, where we would spend weekends. Eventually, he left for Science School, Toro, in Bauchi State. I remained in Irigwe land in Plateau State, pursuing my dream of building a solid science foundation. I had no intention of becoming a medical doctor, preferring instead to acquire a solid science foundation before making a decision. I knew, however, that I would not study Medicine or Pharmacy—careers that teenagers were crazy about.

I achieved my dream of a solid foundation, just as he did. That was why we met again at the University of Jos. I was studying geology, while he was not in medicine. Instead, he had enrolled in one of the biological sciences, a field he disliked. He later moved to the University of Maiduguri to study Veterinary Medicine.

It was at the University of Jos that the bond of brotherhood became unmistakable between us. Each time we wanted to communicate in secret, we spoke in Irigwe. That was when I learned that if you grow up in the same locality, you become brothers in a foreign land. I felt this too when I was in Port Harcourt. Whenever I became homesick, I would go to the Presidential Hotel in Port Harcourt, meet the Hausa people selling their wares there, and spend some time talking about Jos. Though he was not Irigwe by blood, he felt that Irigwe land was home to him. And indeed, we never felt that Fulani people were strangers until the devil paid a visit and poisoned our minds.

After graduating from our respective universities, we met a few times and then lost contact. That was in the mid-nineties. When the security situation deteriorated on the Plateau and elsewhere across the country, I started thinking about him. He seemed to have vanished so completely that none of our schoolmates could say where he had last been seen or heard of. Thanks to social media, someone posted his phone number on a Whatsapp group for our former secondary school classmates. Posting his number on that group meant that his whereabouts were unknown not only to me but to many others. That was my interpretation of seeing his number alone on Whatsapp.

I quickly copied and saved the number. When I called for the first time, he did not answer. I tried again a couple of days later. This time, he answered. He told me he had been living in Kaduna and practicing his profession. I asked why he never visited. His answer was, in his own words, “the thing is that your land has become what it has become.” Then he asked which part of Jos I lived in. I told him. He then promised that whenever he was passing through, he would give me a call.

Since then, he has not called—probably because he has not visited, or because he has visited but his schedule made it impossible.

This is how things have become messy between native Plateau communities and settlers—so messy that the feeling of brotherhood has eroded. In its place, there is now only hatred and enmity

 

A Chronicle of Faith Under Fire: Documenting Christian Persecution in Northern Nigeria (1999–2025)

For more than two decades, Northern and Central Nigeria have witnessed recurring waves of violence in which thousands of Christians and other civilians have lost their lives. From the early riots of 1999 to the Boko Haram insurgency and the continuing attacks in the Middle Belt, these tragedies have scarred communities and deepened divisions. This compilation presents a factual record of major incidents affecting Christian populations across the region since 1999 — not to inflame old wounds, but to preserve memory, promote accountability, and call for justice, peace, and reconciliation. Download the pdf in table form here

The Futility of Violence: Resolving Nigeria's Herder-Farmer Conflict

Video Showing a farmland in Plateau State

It has gone more than a decade and half since the deadly herders’ quest for grazing lands started in Nigeria. Thousands have died and many more are still dying on a daily basis, yet the government seems to have given up on the issue.

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.