Kene Obiezu
For the IPOB, cattle are the new target; the new battleground, the new irritant. After suffocating the very people they are supposedly seeking to liberate from imaginary oppressors, the IPOB recently indicated it was turning its attention to cattle while its leader languishes in detention in Abuja. However, this surprises me only a little.
An organization that apparently prides itself in misplacing its priorities is bound to always have eggs on its face. This is precisely the lot of the IPOB at the moment. The climate around its camp is certainly that of confusion as it mulls the additional steps to force the release of its incarcerated leader, Mr Nnamdi Kanu. And now, there is an ultimatum.
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The IPOB recently came out with a warning that stood out for its starkness that by April 2022, the movement and consumption of ‘Fulani cows’ in the Southeast would be proscribed. In a latter statement, the group was at pains to clarify that its decision was not borne out of hate but to safeguard its land and people from the ‘evil agenda of the Fulani.’
In a statement on February 7,2021, the group reiterated that the decision was borne out of the natural desire to preserve their race from being wiped out by the Fulani terrorist herdsmen. While saying it would no longer tolerate the criminal silence and the failure of the Federal Government to protect its territories against attacks, the group said that it would support its people to boost farming and animal husbandry business particularly by supporting the breeding of their local cows (Efi Igbo) so as to preclude the wastage of N3bn every year which was what the Igbos spent on cow meat.
It bears note to state that the Giant of Africa does not belong to any one person or group and can never so belong. The clear import of this is that no one person or single ethnic group can lay claim to any region of the country and proceed on the strength of such claims no matter how outlandish or hopelessly spurious to ask select persons or groups to leave any such region.
In spite of the yawning cracks in the foundation of the country, the country remains one single entity until validly dissolved. For now, the 1999 Constitution prescribes Nigeria as it is and how it should operate. Until it says otherwise, no contrary prescription can be entertained or enforced from any one person or group. In the light of this, the IPOB seems determined to embark on another episode of its now customary foolhardiness. It explains the epistle from IPOB.
There can be no doubt that some herdsmen have by their wantonly murderous folly contributed to the terrifyingly negative perception many Nigerians have of them. There have been rapes, murder, arson, wholesale destruction of livelihoods largely attributed to them as they move their cattle from place to place.
Allegations and lamentations have been rife that bloodthirsty mercenaries have infiltrated their ranks, but even if this was true, they must bear some responsibility for not identifying and fishing them out.
Indeed, the question of whether or not Fulani herdsmen have become synonymous with menace and especially the question of the place of their cattle in Nigeria today is at the very center of fierce arguments about Nigeria`s frayed unity.
Notwithstanding, the IPOB cannot do what it has proposed for April 2022.It has said rather blithely that it would support Igbo farmers to breed their own cattle. But it did not say what the plan would be between when the ban would come into place and when Igbos could start raising their own cattle.
The IPOB has in the past shown that it is not averse to the acrobatics of shortsightedness. This is yet more proof. It was precisely this self-inflicted shortsightedness that conduced to drawing it the highly unwanted tag of proscription as a terrorist organization.
It was the same shortsightedness that landed its leader in the lair of the Federal Government. Even, its response to the continued detention of its leader betrays more incredible shortsightedness. Suffocating the Southeast with inane sit-at-home orders has only made whatever sympathy a historically single-minded people had for it to congeal into defiance from which there may be no thaw any time soon.
Nigeria’s diversity has never really been the country’s problem. Nigeria’s diverse ethnicities have never really been the reason the country is in such dire straits.
The reason the country remains rooted to a spot, only episodically taking painfully small steps is that the country is starved of the degree of justice that makes every developed society work. This well goes beyond the question of cattle or who lives in which part of the country and the business carried on.
IPOB does not know that driving every last Fulani man and his cattle away from the Southeast would not hasten the actualization of Biafra or wriggle its leader out of the iron clutches of the DSS.
What the IPOB knows is that such a move is a recipe for disaster which may have ripple effects on many people from the Southeast who are themselves found all over the country.
As the IPOB again prepares to indulge another of its sinister derelictions, it will do well to remember that a better Nigeria will be operated on the wheels of justice and equity. It will not be run by expelling any ethnic group from any part of Nigeria.
Kene Obiezu writes in via [email protected]
