After a long season of dithering over how to respond to
nationwide killings by Fulani herdsmen across Nigeria, the federal authorities
this week finally came up with an initiative proving merely to be one of the old
tricks from the bag of a hag. We are on familiar grounds again. Nothing new has
been said. It is the unveiling of the jaded strategy to bring the entire
country under the rule of the cow, the cownisation
of our communities nationwide.
From the bag of the hag has come the explanation that the
killer herdsmen are our brothers and sisters we must learn to cohabit with. From the pouch also emerged the revelation
that the herdsmen are fleeing warriors from Libya, looking for new theatres after
the bloody conflict that consumed Libyan strongman, Muammar Gaddafi.
Later, we
were told the herdsmen are simple folks affected by the climate change that
dried up the water and withered the grass their cattle fed on. The tale changed
to one that claimed that the elemental fury of the itinerant Fulanis was their
reaction to the blocking of their grazing routes in the areas they were turning
into bloody zones. Then this: the anti-grazing law passed by some state governments
was responsible for the genocidal farmers-herdsmen clashes, said to have caused
the maiming, destruction of property, deaths and displacement of thousands of
Nigerians.
The government wouldn’t listen to popular pleas by the
people to resort to less confrontational and provocative solutions to the
herders’ problems, to confine the cattlemen to their states for grazing. There
were suggestions of ranching the animals in settlements in the north complete
with the basic needs for both cowmen and cows. Some state governors even said
they were ready to accommodate the herdsmen in government ranches to stop them
from open grazing and vandalism of farms.
But the federal government and the
cattlemen set aside these proposals. The government did a lot of somersaults: first,
it talked of looking for states outside the core north to set up the cow
estates; next it pleaded for unhindered movement down south for the herdsmen;
finally, the central government decided on erecting what it called cattle
colonies, chiefly in the middle belt and the southern parts of the federation.
These proposals have all been rejected by the majority of
the citizens on account of the failure of government to capture or address the
concerns of the owners and inhabitants of the territories it wants to appropriate on behalf of the
Fulanis. The landowners are suspicious of the motives of the government and the
herdsmen it is fighting for. They do not believe the story would end with the
cession of a few hectares or acres of prized land for the herdsmen and their
families and their cows. You can’t establish an exclusive estate for a herdsman
and expect him and family and animals not to come in tow. They are one
household: the beasts, their owner and his harem and offspring. They come close
to the population of a local government area in Africa’s most populous country.
Now, despite opposition to its plan to erect these cattle
colonies in some states, the federal government is poised to ram the idea down
our throats. On Tuesday this week, the government through the Permanent
Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development,
Mohammed Umar, gave the impression there is no going back in the march to
cattle estates in the states. He called it the Ruga Settlement.
He said: ‘’The Ruga
settlement is one of the very important things being done by the ministry
and it is one of the best things that can happen not only to Nigeria but to
most of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a concept that we developed
to deal with internal security. We felt that to do away with herders-farmers’
conflict, we need to settle our nomads and those who breed animals. We want to
put them in a place that has been developed as a settlement, where we provide
water for their animals, pasture, schools for their children, security,
agro-rangers, etc…and definitely in the next five to 10 years you will never
see a nomad moving about, wandering or kidnapping. And this will end all these
security challenges.’’
He says this Ruga project
has been approved by President Muhammadu Buhari, starting with 12 states he failed
to identify. But several states have said they must not be numbered among the Ruga community of herdsmen. All the five
southeast states are saying a non-negotiable ‘no’ to it. One of them, Imo,
insists it would not allow itself to be roped into Ruga. Benue, epicenter of the early days of the bloodiest herdsmen’s
attacks, says it has no land for the cowmen. Taraba says it will not accept it.
And down southwest, Ondo has said it doesn’t believe in Ruga.
It is being rejected for a number of reasons. The central
government’s cavalier approach to securing help for the herdsmen has alienated
the people whose land it needs. The government thinks there is no alternative
to its cattle colony solution. It is not addressing the anxieties of the states
that a subtle form of internal ‘colonialism’ is in the making through Ruga. The government is about to open a
deadlier era of conflict if it attempts to foist alien citizens upon an
unwilling civilization. Why uproot one culture and plant it in a strange soil? The
Buhari administration has disowned constitutional federalism by going for
policies giving birth to suffocating centralism, uniformity and unilateral
imposition. Federalism gains strength only when its diversities are
acknowledged and respected and given depth by preserving them, not by killing
them through domination of others in the union.
President Buhari must review his stand on Ruga as it is built mainly to benefit
the herdsmen with no advantage to their hosts. He should be worried that even
at takeoff, the scheme can’t stand the simple test of acceptability in the
hands of those who are key to its success. If the community to host nomads is
already disavowing at a distance those the president is pushing towards them,
isn’t it sufficient alarm that some danger would follow when they are eventually
forced into a meeting or union?
How can a rejected Ruga
roar above the storms it would bring upon our fickle and fragile fraternity?
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