Fanning the flames of conflict

After the Security Council meeting of January 25 2018, the Defence Minister, Mansur Dan-Ali briefed the press where he gave the position of the federal government on the conflict between herdsmen and farmers in North central states thus:“Since Independence, we know there used to be a route whereby these cattle rearers use. Cattle rearers are all over the nation; you go to Bayelsa, you see them, you go to Ogun, you see them. If those routes are blocked, what happens? These people are Nigerians; it’s just like you going to block river or shoreline, does that make sense to you? These are the remote causes. But what are the immediate causes? It is the grazing law. These people are Nigerians; we must learn to live together with each other; that is basic. Communities and other people must learn how to accept foreigners within their enclave, finish.”
This position, as many keen watchers of the polity has noted, is indistinguishable from that of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore – the group being accused of sponsoring the killings in the first place.
There should be no doubt that this is the official position of the government on the crisis. After a long period of silence and refusal to visit the victims, the President recently invited some Benue elders to the State House to discuss the conflict. His admonition to them after a lengthy meeting was exactly what Dan-Ali amplified. He was quoted as telling the Benue delegation to “in the name of God accommodate your countrymen”. What his statement simply means is that the problem arose because of the failure of Benue and other states to accommodate the herdsmen. Therefore, herdsmen must be accommodated for peace to reign.
Perhaps, we need to remind the government and the Minister of Defence who was delegated to make the nonsensical statement that whereas the population of Nigeria in 1960 was just 45.14 million, the population of Nigeria today is adjudged to be over 180 million. It therefore makes perfect sense that there will be more demand on land and less land available for grazing. To expect herdsmen to still have access to lands for grazing like they did in 1960 in other parts of the country is not only unrealistic but uncharitable.
What is more, the current spate of killings precedes the anti-open grazing laws passed by three states in the country. The Agatu massacre of over 500 villagers by armed herdsmen; the constant killings in Plateau state and southern Kaduna are cases in point. The truth is that the anti-open grazing laws passed by the three states were a response to the violence of herdsmen, not the other way round. Plateau and Kaduna states, for instance, have no anti-open grazing laws but hardly a week passes without reports of herdsmen killing people in farming communities there. For the government therefore to cite the anti-open grazing law as the immediate cause of the killings is to refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation and to continue to blame the victims.
The biased position of the government is becoming clear with each passing day. The Fulani militia killing people for sports all over the North central states have absolutely no blame. They are rather the victims, the wronged side. Therefore, there is no need to mobilise the military might of the state to go after them and halt the killings. The solution is to appeal to the communities being killed to learn to accept the herdsmen, vacate the lands where the herdsmen used to graze in the 1960s and there will be peace. It is no wonder the Inspector General of Police described the killings as mere communal clashes.
This clannishness must stop. Like a US based Nigerian academic remarks recently, clannishness can trap a leader in a bubble. “It creates an incestuous, provincial world that reinforces the leader’s own pre-existing parochialism and hubris…it blinds the leader from a broader reality, causing him to remain completely out of touch with what is really going on…it causes him to value above all else the deceptive but comforting narrative of kinsmen advisers who are moored to ethnic loyalty.”
President Buhari was elected by all Nigerians to be president of all Nigerians and not the Fulani’s alone. He must always act in ways that promote national unity and not support one side against the other.