KEN UGBECHIE

All things considered, there was a country. There was a nation where cattle herders were friendly, innocuous nomads. They wandered as you wonder at the amount of energy they expended. Their paraphernalia of office were a stick and a gourd specifically to keep water. Nothing more. When he runs out of water, he was sure he would get from the next community. He only needed to thrust his empty gourd towards you, an indication that he needed water and we would happily fill his gourd. He smiles amid a genuine hunch of obeisance, we smile back, happy that we were able to help. They had no gun, not even a machete. Growing up in my rustic Delta State community, we welcomed them; offered them water. We smiled at them; they smiled back. Communication was almost always non-verbal. For them pidgin English was a no-no. They could not speak our language, we could not speak theirs. But we were friendly and kind to each other. Nothing untoward, no ill-will.

In those days, the Fulani herdsman was a friendly, wandering soul. The cattle, only the cattle, was his article of trade, his universe, his pride. He led them by the lush verdant of green grass along our roads. Only the grass was their food. They never attacked our farms. Their herders were mindful of this: a farm is also another man’s article of trade, his universe. It should not and ought not to be plundered. They respected our farms and carefully avoided crops; but the grass they spared not. That was in those distant days.

Now, we live in a different country, at a different epoch. This time, the herdsman has also transformed to a different variant. Armed, wild, vicious and bloody. What happened to him? And his cattle has not been behaving well either. They ravage farmlands. They desecrate the most sacred places. They take over roads, halt traffic on the highways. They even overrun schools and badge into classrooms, sacking sufficiently terrified and frightened pupils.

In the former country and former times, cattle was subject to the caprice of man. But in modern Nigeria, man is subject to the whims of the cattle. The cattle has higher value. For the life of a cow, the herdsman takes scores of human lives. Hon. Aishatu Dukku of the House of Representatives in her futile and primitive attempt to defend the Fulani killer herdsmen on the floor of the House said the Fulani herdsman “values the life of his cow even more than his own life”. She says that is the way God has created them and we should live with it. Really? This argument is both sick and sickening. This explains why the herdsmen are so quick to take human lives on the slightest suspicion that their cattle has been rustled or killed by farmers (or members of the community they live in). It is illogic like this that emboldens the killer herdsmen to kill humans in lieu of cows.

Madam Dukku is only voicing an unwritten policy that aims at cattlelisation of Nigeria. The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, perhaps reading the legendary body language of President Muhammadu Buhari, is insisting that establishment of cattle colonies is the solution to herdsmen menace. But Ogbeh has not always been his own man. He vacillates. He was initially an apostle of ranching. He was opposed to open grazing for cattle. Now he wants colonies. Buhari wants colonies. Everybody in his cabinet has had his or her mind colonized. They all want colonies for cattle. The ministers are too timid they don’t even have their own mind anymore. A good 16 northern governors, we have been told, are proponents of cattle colonies. Some southern governors have ruled out colonies for cattle in their states. They are for ranching and nothing less.  If Audu Ogbeh pushes through his colony and cattlelisation project, it is expected that each of the 36 states plus Abuja will donate 10,000 hectares of land which aggregates to 37,000 hectares. Note, here, the key word is ‘donate’.

But why colony, why not a ranch? A ranch is a farm where animals are kept. In modern ranching, the animals are kept in grids where they are fed. It is a beautiful setting as the livestock are arranged in order of age, colour, species or as may be desired by the farmer who lives in the ranch house within the ranch. Here, there is order. Not so, a colony. It is a community, usually expansive, where the animals and their herders co-exist. As the cattle increases in number with time, so do the herders hence the inevitability of demanding for more space. Because, it is a colony, all too soon, they will install their own king, establish their cultures and grow into a community within a community. Their allegiance will be to their king, not to a state governor. In these days of proliferation of arms, controlling illegal possession of arms by the relevant authorities would be impossible in these colonies.

Ranching is the modern and decent way of breeding cattle. Paradoxically, Nigeria does not even rank among the top 20 cattle breeding nations of the world. According to 2017 data from the US Department of Agriculture/Foreign Agricultural Service(FAS/USDA), India has highest cattle inventory in the world with 303,350,000 cattle (30.39% of world output), followed by Brazil, China, United States, the EU, Argentina, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Canada in that order. Egypt is the only African nation on the top 20 log sitting at number 14. Yet nowhere among these countries has the cattle caused more havoc than in Nigeria. Something is wrong.

The only person who will arrest this drift to anarchical cattlelisation of the nation is the President. Buhari should rethink the cattle colony policy of his government. Already, it has split Nigeria into two halves. Southern governors have said ‘no’ to colony. We do not have the land, they say. The north wants it. There is a split. Cattle has put us asunder. Progressive nations of the world ranch their cattle. The herders of these cattle are farmers. They bear no arms, they do not attack farmlands and pillage the crops and farm produce; they do not overrun communities and kill humans in moments of madcap fury.  Buhari should first tackle the sophisticated gun culture among these herders who now appear as terrorists. He should sincerely investigate allegations that these so-called cattle herders are foreigners working with some privileged Nigerians to unsettle the nation.

It’s obvious we have lost our humanity for the sake of the cattle. No decent society gives attention to animals over man. If the Fulani herdsman values the life of his cow more than his own life as Hon. Dukku let out, the rest of the people do not. A billion cows is not worth the life of one human being. In Nigeria, we still do not have stable electricity, no potable water, no functional housing policy and no social security yet we idolize and care for cattle as the symbol of our existence. Such boundless love for cattle scares me. And I am scared for my country.

Courtesy: Sunday Sun