By Eniola Bello (Eni-B)
In January, two world leaders bowed out of office and received from their people, the goodbyes their leadership, or lack of it, deserved. While US President Donald Trump stole away like a thief in the night, without a decent farewell from his associates, the object of ridicule and scorn from many Americans, nay many more people around the world for his ignorance and meanness and insincerity and divisiveness and incompetence; German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as she handed over the party leadership after 18 years in office, received from her countrymen and women standing on their balconies, six minutes of applause for her simplicity and diligence and competence, and for making Germany the largest economy in Europe. Coming home, were President Muhammadu Buhari to bow out of office today, reactions across the country most probably would move from sighs of relief, to shouts of triumph, and to jumps of victory, and then to dances of happiness, indeed, to several joyful noises.
One can safely say that more and more Nigerians are fed up with President Buhari – his insularity and coldness and divisiveness and laziness and incompetence, and his inability, if not unwillingness, to arrest the general insecurity in the country, of which the most dangerous to national stability is the activities of terrorists in the name of herders. These people daily move from the north to the south, occupying forest reserves, destroying farmlands, burning down communities, kidnapping our people, raping our women and killing Nigerians.Buhari’s handling of the herdsmen crisis has been less than salutary, unfortunately. The president and his aides have, in their utterances, actions and policy choices, created the impression that the herders’ livelihood is more important than that of the farmers and fishermen; or that the herders have unlimited right to do as they wished, including the right to be criminals, and that other Nigerians should live with it. Buhari and his aides, when not pleading for understanding for the herders’ atrocities, explain away their actions, or justify those actions, or blame the victims, and when all this fail, hide their benumbing inaction behind the veil of threatening rhetoric. For purposes of illustration, let’s recall a few examples.
One, when herdsmen killed 73 people in some communities in Guma and Logo local governments of Benue State early January 2018, Buhari was more concerned about the victims not retaliating than he was about bringing the killers to justice. The president pleaded with the victims to show understanding, the herders being their neighbours. Two, at a townhall meeting in Abuja in January 2019, Buhari had propounded a simple-minded solution to the incessant clashes between herders and farmers by amplifying the argument his defence minister at the time, Mansur Dan-Alli, had several months earlier made at another forum that the cattle routes of the First Republic in Nigeria of the 50s and 60s, should be reopened. Dan-Ali, following the killings in Benue, and later in Taraba, had urged some states to repeal their anti-grazing laws which he had claimed encouraged the blockade of grazing routes. In an insensate, yet riling, statement of justification for the Benue killings, Dan-Alli had said: “Since the nation’s independence, we know there used to be a route where cattle rearers take as they are all over the nation… If those routes are blocked, what do you expect will happen?”
Three, sometime in July 2018, Buhari’s publicist, Femi Adesina, had in a television interview, dismissed people’s attachment to their ancestral land. In a rhetorical riposte to his interviewer, Adesina had asked mockingly: “Ancestral attachment?”, then added, “You can only have ancestral attachment when you are alive. If you are talking about ancestral attachment, if you are dead, how does the attachment matter?” Four, only a few weeks ago, another presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, challenged Ondo State Governor Rotimi Akeredolu for asking illegal occupants of the state forest reserves, including herders, to register or vacate the place. Shehu, apparently more out of mischief than ignorance, conflated the right to property ownership with a citizen’s right to live and work in any part of the country. While Akeredolu’s directive was on the strength of the violation of the former, Shehu threw the armour of the latter in the herders’ defence, saying they had the constitutional right to live in any part of the country.
When every effort to push the re-opening of cattle routes failed and
having been persuaded that ranching is the way of global best practices in
animal husbandry, the administration has made futile efforts to arm twist state
governors into ceding large parcels of land for that purpose. The
administration’s policy initiatives from Cattle Colony, to Rural Grazing Area
or RUGA for short, and then National Livestock Transformation Plan all failed
to get the necessary buy-in from state governments and community leaders in the
north central and southern part of the country. Every initiative of the
administration, however well-meaning it may appear, has been viewed with
suspicion and seen as no more than a land-grabbing scheme to settle a group of
herders who have become notorious for applying the scorched earth policy on
host communities, besides raping and kidnapping. There was a general hostility
to these initiatives in the southern zones. Many could not understand the
administration’s interests in forcing such initiatives on states when cattle
rearing or dairy farming is private business that is no different from other
such types of animal husbandry like poultry, fish and bee farming.
The utterances of the leadership of Miyetti Allah, an association claiming to be representing the herders’ interests, have not been particularly helpful. Miyetti leaders have been annoyingly haughty – they justify the herders’ atrocities, speak as if the Buhari administration exists solely to cater to their interests, act like they own Nigeria, with some even claiming that every parcel of land in the country belonged to the Fulani. It got to a point when many began to wonder if the administration and Miyetti Allah were not working together in what has been described as the Fulanisation agenda. The general expectation was that the administration would take urgent measures to stop the atrocities being committed across the country by the herders, particularly when Buhari even admitted that not a few of them came into Nigeria from neighbouring countries.
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