Mr. President, Get Herdsmen Off Our Farms!

By MajiriOghene Etemiku  

As part of what I do in my spare time, and in line with my belief that the earth is the Lord’s with the fullness thereof, I tend a farm in my compound. On that little farm, I cultivate shallow rooted crops like maize, watermelons, tomato and pumpkins leaves and manage a mini poultry. Every morning after my family wakes up and finish with our prayers, we descend on our farm.  And on weekends I would gather the whole family together to weed the farm, tend and water our crops. While in the farm, the feeling is akin to obedience to a holy injunction that we should till the earth, subdue and take care of it.

*Buhari 

Some of my friends and colleagues who have seen my farm are pleasantly surprised at the emerald effervescence of my maize, melon and pumpkin. They have no idea that I had taken the trouble to visit the ADP in Benin City for healthy seedlings which I understand can be harvested in three instead of six months it takes for crops to mature. I know that Nigerians are a laid-back lot, preferring to import food rather than grow it. My wife has happily taken to harvesting pumpkin and water leaves from this farm with which she prepares the family’s favourite – vegetable soup.

I don’t joke with my farm. I am my farm, my farm is me. Even though it is not as large and as capital-intensive as the Obasanjo Farms, I take great pride in it. I see myself as a metaphor for the thousands in my village Uzere who have invested time, money and their lives into eking a living from the land like our ancestors. Touch my farm, go near it and you would be looking for trouble. I remember growing up as a child in Uzere – that I ate so much fish and so much kpokpo gari to the extent that it seemed like paradise.

Over the years, however, as a result of the activities of the Nigerian government and its cohorts, the multinationals that prospect for oil to feed Nigeria, nearly every piece of land and river has been polluted. The pawpaw trees are dead, the cassava, the yams are not growing anymore and that is because the soil is soaked with crude oil. The rivers where we once took a haul of shrimps and baskets of eba and ero fishes, where we once took our bath and drinking water are all dried up. In their places are artificial lakes, aka burrow pits that have dislocated the aquatic balance of our community. When it rains, we dare not drink the water, and that is because gases that have been flared since 1957 in my village coagulate and return as gooey residue on the pots and pans which we put outside to collect the rain water. These were the issues that Ogoni leader, Kenule Saro-Wiwa, took head on, and which his predecessor Isaac Adaka Boro championed before they were killed.