By Femi Fani-Kayode
On April 18th 2016, Mr. Okonkwo Afamefuna wrote the following on his Facebook wall:
“I decided to read a copy of the National Grazing Reserve Bill and I was surprised at what I saw.
The Bill creates a council to be chaired by a chairman to be appointed by the
president. The council shall have the power to take your land anywhere the land
is located in the country and then pay you compensation. Your land, when taken,
shall be assigned to herdsmen who shall use your land for grazing purposes.
They shall bring cows to the land and you shall lose the land permanently to
those Fulani cattlemen”. This is the Sudan
downloading right here in Nigeria .”
*Fani-Kayode |
On April 18th, Mr. Gabriel Ogbonnaya wrote the following
on his Facebook wall:
“I decided to read a copy of the National Grazing Reserve Bill and I was surprised at what I saw.
The Bill creates a commission to be chaired by a Chairman to be appointed by
the president, to be confirmed by the senate. The commission shall have the
power to take your land anywhere the land is located in the country and then
pay you compensation. Your land, when taken, shall be assigned to herdsmen who
shall use your land for grazing purposes. They shall bring cows to the land and
you shall lose the land permanently to those cattlemen. If you feel that the
commission was not right to take your land, you can go to court but before you
go to court, you must first of all notify the federal attorney general of your
intention to sue the commission. Apart from notifying, you must get the consent
and authority of the federal attorney general before you can sue. So that means
that if the attorney general refuses to give his consent to the suit, you have
lost your land forever to the herdsmen. And this law, when passed, shall apply
to the whole country so it means that your land in the village or anywhere is
not safe. The National Grazing Reserve Commission would have the power to take
away your land from you anytime they want and pay you whatever they want as
compensation (even when you don’t want to sell, and remember that for you to
get compensation, you must have documents showing or proving ownership). So I
think that we all in the South-West, South-South and South-East must rise up
and reject this Bill. We must do all things to force our national Assembly
members from passing that Bill into law. That Bill is a deliberate attempt to
take our lands and hand the land over to the Fulani cattlemen since it is only
the Fulanis that rear cattle in Nigeria .
That law, when passed, shall fulfill the directive of Uthman Dan Fodio and
other northern leaders to take over other parts of Nigeria . I implore you to use all
available means to implore your senator and Reps not to pass that law. That law
will destroy Nigeria .
All over the world, ranches are established and used to rear cattle. The
farmers buy land and put their cattle there. There is no country where the land
of the citizens are compulsorily acquired and given to others.
This is evil, and designed to favour the Fulanis, the
stock the president comes from. We must resist the passage of that Bill into
law to save Nigeria ,
and to protect our future generations.” This is Yugoslavia
and Rwanda unfolding right
here in Nigeria .
On April 18th 2016, Mr. Duru Collins wrote the following
on his Facebook wall:
“This National Grazing Reserve Bill if passed into law
will just mark the beginning of apartheid in our country. When the government
of Zimbabwe
collected land from the white people who naturalised there the whole world
worked against President Robert Mugabe. Sanctions were stiffened against his
regime even though the whites in Zimbabwe were not African by
origin. In our country today there are people that are not Nigerians by origin
and these people are making laws to take over our inheritance. This nation will
burn once this law is passed.” This is Lebanon
and Zimbabwe downloading
right here in Nigeria .”