In September 2015, Chief Olu Falae, former Secretary to the Federal Military Government and a presidential candidate in 1999, was kidnapped from his farm in Ondo by Fulani gunmen. A loud uproar erupted. A prominent South-West organization issued a frightful ultimatum such as hadn’t been heard since 1967. Falae was released—and the weekly or twice-weekly reports of burning villages and bloody massacres of farmers by Fulani herdsmen dropped back into the obscure inside pages of newspapers.
Meanwhile, the governors, NASS legislators and public service executives from the Middle Belt states and the South-East, South-South and South-West have said nary a word about these horrors which have been going on within their domains—for decades in some areas.
Is it fear, cowardice or narrow self-interest that makes these leaders pretend not to notice what is going on? Are they waiting until there is open warfare—and conquest? If these leaders have any commitment to the security and welfare of their people they should bring this matter into open national dialogue so it can be resolved once and for all. It is in furtherance of such dialogue that I am reprinting this article.
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Nigeria urgently needs a National Animal Farming Policy, promulgated by the federal government and implemented and enforced by the state governments, confining cows and other commercial animals to animal farms or ranches.
The aim of this policy is twofold: (a) to bring to an end the many decades of bloody clashes between two important citizen groups—itinerant cowherds (“Fulani cattlemen”) and sedentary crop farmers; (b) to lay the groundwork for an agro-industry with a lucrative animal-growing and processing component.
Even worse than Boko Haram terrorism, the biggest threat to Nigeria’s corporate existence today may well be the relentless pitched battles between cattle herders and the farmers whose crops the cattle trample and gobble up. For years, these battles were confined to states of the Middle and Lower North; now they have filtered down to the Southern states.
Reports of these clashes are usually tucked away in the inside pages of newspapers. Rarely do they make front page headlines. But their frequency (sometimes twice or thrice a week) must be deeply disturbing to anyone concerned with good citizenship and good neighborliness among our many ethnic nationalities. Accounts of the violence are blood-chilling, and the body count from each encounter ranges into the hundreds.
In other words, a nasty war (nothing less!) has been taking place, with little public notice, right under our noses!
The cattlemen have a cause: they must feed their cattle. They are necessary to the national economy—but so are the crop-farmers. Neither group (and not even Cabinet ministers!) have been able to devise a way to feed the cattle without chewing up the crops. All they know is the old, un-improved tradition of open-country grazing which dragged the nomadic Fulani in a centuries-long trek across the West African savanna from Mauretania and Guinea to Nigeria and Cameroun.
As an elusive, itinerant group with “no fixed address,” the cattlemen’s style of warfare is hit-and-run. They used to come with spears and bows-and-arrows; today they come with machine guns. Always, they have the advantage of pre-meditation and surprise. They descend on farmer-villages in the night—eerily reminiscent of the two to three centuries of slave raids which laid waste the West African territory and decimated its population!
The worst part of it is that the police authorities today are fully aware. They neither prevent the raids, nor intervene while they are in progress, nor punish the aggressors. On the contrary, they seem to believe that trampling and eating up farm crops and attacking and slaughtering farmers who resist is the constitutional citizen-right of the cattlemen.
In furtherance of such a view, there are now demands that cattlemen be granted “grazing rights” in all the 36 states—that is, that their cattle be permitted by law to wander freely over the land and eat what they wish.
(At the very least, this would be reason to argue for a state-controlled police force which identifies with the needs of the local people—after half a century of feeble policing dedicated to other interests and directed from some distant federal capital).
The in-equity of it is simply astounding. That a nation which aspires to join the elite company of “most developed economies of the world” should tolerate such barbarism is as shocking as our numerous incompetencies in little things that led some to judge Nigeria a “failed state.”
Because the solution to the cattle-feeding dilemma is actually quite simple. The “most developed economies of the world” breed their farm animals (cattle, chickens, goats, etc.) in animal farms or ranches surrounded by sturdy wooden or metal wire fences. The animals are never permitted outside the farm. They are given expert medical care by animal doctors (veterinarians). They wander freely and graze on the greenery INSIDE the ranch. In addition, they are fed with dry grasses (hay), corn, and other animal food preparations. No wonder they are healthy, well fed and plump. Their eggs and milk are harvested daily in commercial quantities, and their flesh, skin and other byproducts are processed for the domestic or export market. Those destined for the slaughterhouse are transported there by train or trailer.
By contrast, Nigerian cattle are forced to tramp and trek all over the countryside every day looking for something to eat. No wonder they regularly look haggard, under-nourished and exhausted, their ribs showing and skin hanging loose on their bones. In such circumstances they can only support a marginal market of eggs, frozen chicken, beef cutlets and powdered milk.
There is no reason why numerous fenced-in animal farms cannot be created in every state of the federation. Not as charity but as commercial venture. And the cattlemen who know the industry best will be at best advantage to operate it at this higher, modern, more profitable level.
Onwuchekwa Jemie
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