As we daily weave through our several insurgencies in pain, one that is soon going to balloon in nuclear fashion, continues to be nurtured! The insurgencies I count include treasury looting, all forms of violent expressions of resource control, and political and ethnic sovereignty.
Pastoralists and agriculturalists are today, incessantly engaged in bloody clashes with flash points all over Nigeria. It is also an insurgency, and one that should in all honesty, be our concern today, and sadly Nigeria pays lip service to this catastrophe that registers on a Richter scale measured in grave humanitarian toll and low agricultural output. There is yet no serious move by Governments at Federal and State levels to sincerely address the challenge with a view to bringing it to an end.
We delude ourselves if we continue to think that Fulani herdsmen we see, are the same marauders armed with modern weapons that attack farming villages killing people, raping women, and burning houses. Does it make sense that those simpletons who seek grass to graze their herds and settle down on unused patches are the same ones that group at night, fetch AK47s and brutally harm their host communities?
The common scenario is that a lonely farmer and an equally lonely herder clash because animals stray into a farmland either accidentally or deliberately. The clash gets violent and results into injury or death of one of them. If the farmer is killed, then the villagers organise a revenge. If the herder is killed then his kith and kin retaliate. Other times, it is cattle that gets rustled and the herders accuse a community following which raids and retaliatory reprisals continue endlessly. In all this our lush green grass lies waste and is no longer used for grazing, and for farmers to tend their crops, while the bloodletting continues senselessly. In the past, these incidents allowed community heads to intervene through dialogue. Blames were appropriately apportioned and reparations were adequately made. Life went on. Today, no chance is given to dialogue because all confidence has been lost that the authorities at all levels will deal justice, hence the resort to taking the law into own hands, with the orgies of killings that we know, naturally following suit.
It is the spectre of the use of assault weapons by clearly well trained fighters that has begged my quandary. Do we not delude ourselves if we believe that across the country, Fulani cattle herders take vengeful steps in those military fashions to address killing of a herdsman or the rustling of their cows?
Obviously there is a security failure to develop a clear narrative that will help us address the disturbing trend. I am worried that it is growing in proportion as I just watched features on television in which the problem of supposed Fulani raids is being addressed in Plateau, Benue, Anambra and Imo States, and it scares to know that the anxieties are the same in Taraba and Adamawa States and indeed, all over Nigeria. That the attack of communities by herders is organised implies that there is a management that ensures logistic challenges of arms and ammunition, mechanisation and “procured security clearances” for the ease with which the marauders fizzle into thin air after the attacks. If the nation’s security institutions continue to fail to establish where the global retaliation by armed “herders” is organised, managed and launched as an operation, things will get out of hand.
Devoid of sentiments, we can with ease, locate the causes. Farming is an economic community activity with land as its asset. Equally, cattle rearing is an economic community activity with land as asset. Land meanwhile has continued to diminish due to population growth effects on land use. Traditional cattle routes overnight become farmlands. And we seem oblivious of the encroaching desert moving at a speed that must have surpassed the bandied 500 metres per annum by now. This has forced a natural migration such that overnight, new roadside settlements germinate alongside most of our highways, depicting the movement southward from desert North, in lands like Mali, Chad, Niger, and even Sudan. Sadly our North East has been destabilised by the senseless Boko Haram insurgency and a buffer can not even be contemplated. It is thus an unwinding spiral out of control.
As long as we continue to pay lip service to land management and use, so long will these perennial brutal clashes continue to the detriment of life, property, peace and economic progress. First is a need to restore assurances of justice to all interests using the well established traditional processes. Under Sule Lamido, Jigawa State developed and applied a template that brought about a cessation of such conflicts which before then, were often just as brutal as the ones we witness today, despite the fact that both pastoralists and agriculturalists were Fulani to put the ethnicity and religious factors to lie.
The Jigawa template may be borrowed for the immediate situation. It allocates cattle routes on road shoulders across the state and certifies grazing lands. Pastoralists should be encouraged to acquire land through statutory allocation and purchases to develop ranches, it is just a matter of promoting the idea by Government. While ongoing peace efforts continue, it is known that the cattle herders are members of socio cultural associations to whom they religiously make financial contributions and it should be expected that chartered therein are notably protection of culture, assets and rights to grazing land. The associations must be included in all the peace processes, while traditional authorities also play their own cut out roles. Governments at all levels need to end their complacency and tackle land use with workable templates and ordinances. There is every reason for cattle herders and rural farmers to be the best business partners.
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