Nobody Needs Grazing Reserves Now

By Rotimi Fasan

There was in this past weekend at least one reported incident of a ghastly nature between Fulani herdsmen and hunters. This happened in Koh village in Adamawa State. Five lives including that of one hunter and five herdsmen were lost in that encounter. This would be the latest in a long series of bloody encounters between cattle herders who have since replaced their prodding staff and concealed daggers with the more modern and effective assault rifle.

While clashes between farmers and herdsmen have a long history in different parts of the north, there has been an exponential increase in such clashes in different parts of the country, mostly outside the north, in the last one and half years. As always in these recent cases the herdsmen have been the main aggressors for the simple reason that they’ve been responsible for leading their animals into other peoples’ properties, practically turning such persons’ means of livelihood into grazing fields. But like the herdsmen, farmers are in their line of business to make money. Beyond leading their cattle into farmlands herdsmen or people who pretend to tend cattle have been known to engage in wanton acts of criminality.

They are involved in armed robbery, raping and abduction of women and children in isolated communities. But the one aspect of the activities of these herdsmen that have been most controversial is their readiness to place their rights as diary farmers over and above the rights of food and cash crop farmers. For them, their activities seem to say, their cattle is worth more than human life to say nothing of anybody’s farm. They would kill at the least provocation just in order to assert their right to graze their cattle. And with assault rifles now part of their paraphernalia of business, their criminal tendencies go unchecked.

They’ve decimated families and sacked villages from places as far-flung apart as Benue and Adamawa to Ekiti. From Oyo, Plateau, Enugu to Ebonyi, it’s been a harvest of deaths and destruction. Yet, the response from the authorities has been one of accommodation if not outright appeasement. Rather than taking a firm hold of the issue and tackling it headlong, state and federal authorities have tended to be weak-kneed in terms of what they ought to do. But this ought not to be so. The number of lives that have been lost to clashes between herdsmen and farmers or members of other communities ought to make our civil authorities ashamed. They’ve practically abdicated their responsibilities as Nigerians saw recently with the Agatu and Nimbo massacres. People are now contemplating self help in the face of the irresponsible abdication by municipal, state and federal authorities.