Please, can somebody be louder in declaring it: the herdsmen menace is real. If your understanding of this menace is limited to what is written on Facebook or the other social media, then it means that you are quite under-informed.
You actually need to witness these men – I now call them evil – in their deliberate destruction of farms and people’s other means of livelihood. I saw this clearly – with my korokoro eyes – yesterday.
On my way to Okigwe, I saw natives gathered about a spot after Awgu. I pulled over and saw what was amiss. The herdsmen had not only turned their cattle over people’s farms, but they were actively pulling up the cassava plants, revealing the roots/tubers, for the feasting of the animals. It was widespread in that spot as there were many cows and about a dozen herdsmen.
Women wailed. Men watched in humiliating silence and children yelled. I quietly asked if any person had made attempts to reach the Local Government Chairman. Each person who heard me, took a second look at me and moved some inches away. I approached a young man who was furiously making calls and enquired if he had reached any person in authority. He said “no. The Local Government Chairman was said to be living in Umuahia.”
Umuahia? I whistled and looked closely around. It was then I realised this was actually a section of Abia State.
At Lokpanta, people – Hausa, Igbo, others – were chatting and laughing, quite oblivious of what menace was afoot some kilometres north of their location. Then, my mind went back to Enugu. There is today, what is clearly understood as the “Ugwuanyi instant response” technique. He leaves everything and heads straight to the stress point for immediate assessment. And he was always in company of the leadership persons among the Arewas. Whatever help they render, i don’t know.
His arrival, in each case, gave some hope and succour to the local folks. Some say his “tears”, when the unthinkable was the case, was also a palliative. Sure, the totality of it was that there was some lowering of tension. But that is not actually my drift here. Shortly after the Nimbo tragedy, a bill, purportedly sponsored by one Mr. Chinedu Nwamba, Member Respresenting Ugwuanyi in the State Assembly, was drawn and made public, proposing establishment of Grazing Reserves, each in the three senatorial zones of the State.
Understandably, this was greeted with stout opposition by members of the public, including the very vocal social media community across the world. Nwamba’s Bill died with the noise and it was a wonder he, the author did not possibly assess the response to his Bill before he fled.
At that point, some issues relating to calls for Grazing Reserves were at front burner across Nigeria.
The Oyo State Governor was the most cerebral of the exponents of “no seizure of people’s lands” for the benefit of livestock business men from elsewhere. Then came Fayose of Ekiti State, whose new law has turned out to be as watery as any such hasty job.
When today you look at the new Ekiti law against dangerous grazing with a sight on what Nwamba proposed, you find out that the failed Enugu Bill was better.
The point Nwamba missed, may be on account of poor exposure, was that a Bill proposed was actually not a law until the processes, including dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘t”s. He was suppoosed to sift the voices that rose in the wake of his Bill, and see what points he must have missed.
Three main issues were more pungent: 1. Whose land/s would be given out to herdsmen?
2. Who ensures the heady herdsmen would follow the rule?
3. Which institution of State/s enforces the law (not Nigeria Police)?
I remember, I personally stood opposed to the Bill on the ground that it had no provision for independent State enforcement if the State was not going to establish Farm Guards or Forest Rangers. I still hold that view.
I hold that view in light of a personal experience when I tried to enlist the services of the Nigeria Police at 9th Mile in 2013, when the herdsemen were unceasingly harassing farmers in my community. They simply told me they were under instructions never to get involved with herdsmen, who they knew were more armed than the police. The Community was helpless.
Till date, I am not sure I have good information on where members of the Nigeria Police stood for the people, not necessarily for lack of interest or professional motivation to do so, but because they know, and everybody knows, that the powers that be have not prepared the police to take up such challenges.
Now, isn’t it necessary that Nwamba dusts up his Bill, studies public reaction and sends in what is fitting and which would serve any useful purpose? I think it is.
Every enterprise in Nigeria as elsewhere, is regulated.
By The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, TCFRN, there is hardly any alternative to regulating livestock grazing. Forget the Police High Command’s claim that the more destructive elements of these herders were non-Nigerians. I still wonder how he knew.
The simple fluidity of Nigerian Northern borders with neighbouring states which have great number of Hausas and Fulanin simply render it a task to simply determine by merely looking at the features of these herdsemen.
And it is simply out of the question to argue that Fulanis are not permitted to move around in their country. They have every right, but such does not include sacking village farmers from their means of living just because the authorities decided to look away from even teenagers among them carrying AK47. One of the boys I sighted on that Okigwe way was barely 13 but he had a gun slung over his tender shoulder.
Selling and doing alcohol is one business the Northern establishment viewed as antithetical to her values. For enforcement of its rule over uses and movement, of course among other elements of the sharia law, it established the Hisbah State Police in Kano, and others of sort names elsewhere.
It is true that Governor Ugwuanyi has shown impressive responses by being, timeously, at spots of stress, but Ugwuanyi is just one busy man as any governor. He must enlist others to get invoved and make the job a lot easier. From what I got at the point where these evil herdsmen were in full defiance of the people, they are decidedly on a mission of causing misery and deaths. I had no doubt in mind that day that these men were sent by some stronger forces to go provoke a fight.
There was no reason for their actions. There were wastelands around, with great foliage to be grazed but these herdsmen chose the farms. It was shocking!
I am not forgetting that the States are under a debilitating recession and may find it hard to fund a kind of State Police. But they/we must start somewhere. This danger is real!!!
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