By Taiwo Adisa, PhD
In a real sense, we should not be talking of the South or the South-West putting up a response to the deadly invasion it has witnessed in recent times, because the country, Nigeria, is the umbrella over all the geopolitical zones. But when the head is off, what can the mouth or the nose do? The elders of my village would say that when a heavily beaded man is burnt beyond recognition, the question of where his beard is becomes needless.
If the big brother, which is the Nigerian nation, won’t rise to the occasion and snuff life out of the blossoming insurgency, banditry, and kidnapping that have taken possession of Swarts of its land, can’t the younger ones, the geopolitical zones, take up the gauntlet and defend the space God has given unto them? After all, our elders also say that, as Dada couldn’t fight, he had a brave brother. The time to display bravery is here.
It has been two weeks now that the pupils of Ahoro-Esinele and their teachers were herded into the forest by bandits, whose origin we were told is far from the location they are troubling. You can be sure that those who fathered those bandits refused to listen to the olden day primary school rhymes, which emphasised the virtues of education. Their parents apparently left them to develop the beast instinct and adapt to forest life in an age when the civilized world was already exploring space on the Moon and other planets. But the position the Southern regions, West, East, and South-South have found themselves in is unnatural, even though it is peculiar. Usually, the elders would say that when your neighbour is eating an infested kola, you ought to tell him so that he won’t keep you awake when he starts coughing endlessly at night. The situation here is, however, different because there is documented evidence that the leaders of this country in the pre-independence and the post-independence years warned the North of the danger inherent in failing to train the children of the poor. However, the leaders of each region chose the option they felt befit their people. The Western Region, under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, chose free education. The region portrayed education as the surest and shortest cut to overcome poverty, lack, and squalor. The Eastern Region, under the guardianship of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe adopted the virtues in education and commerce, propelling its people to see the two as clear routes to prosperity. The North, however, was intent on capturing political power at the centre and was less concerned about mass education. It encouraged its peasants to continue in their natural state; herders remained herders, and beggars remained in their class. Palace courtiers continued to sire their likes, and the generation went on. Only a few of the sons of the peasants were able to cross the social ladder as years rolled into decades and more.
A leader like Chief Obafemi Awolowo had long foreseen today’s situation when he specifically said: “The greatest asset of any nation is the mind of its people. If you do not train the children of the poor, you are wasting the greatest national resource.” But it appeared as if the North treated education as an optional product that should be available to a select few. So, even though the leaders of the South alerted the North to the danger of an uneducated mass of children, the people of the South are today, ironically, becoming victims of the infested kola nut some northern leaders chose to consume years back. The people of the South are victims of the crisis they never contributed to making. If you don’t blame anything, you have to blame the unitary system we practice in this country in the name of Federalism. Maybe the adoption of a real federal system would have taken care of the anomaly.
So, today, because the out-of-school children has been made a permanent feature of the North over the years, the uneducated children of the poor are outsourcing the menace they have constituted to the Northen society to the Southern parts of the country and we have started seeing banditry in Kogi, a state that is not known to joke with education, Kwara, and states of the South-West as well as the other southern regions. The kidnap saga in Oriire local government of Oyo State appears to be the most daring importation of the evil act by those who detest education.
The question now is, how does the South (South-West in the immediate case) deal with the importation of this unwanted market? The states of the South-West appeared to have foreseen today when they set up the Western Nigeria Security Network, otherwise known as Amotekun Corps. The corps was a homegrown effort of the state governors of Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Lagos, and Ekiti to respond to the growing kidnapping and other vices under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. The corps has, however, taken off with lots of divergence. First, the Lagos system, which reluctantly passed the Amotekun law, eventually chose not to inaugurate the corps on the strength of the argument that it already had a Neighborhood Watch, which it said is similar to the Amotekun concept. Other states, except Oyo, recruited a very minimal number of operatives and equipped them with the level of ammunition that could shield them from possible accusation that they were operating a local army in contravention of the 1999 Constitution.
But that appears to be the energizer for the bandits who penetrated the South-West through the Old Oyo National Park, a federal monument, which they want to turn into a killing field. As I was about completing this piece, a news story emerged that the Federal Government was readying itself to revive some 417 grazing routes as a way of tackling food insecurity. The Ministry of Livestock Development, which made the disclosure, said it would use the development of the Grazing Routes nationwide to transition herders from open grazing to sustainable ranching. It said that the development would transform the reserves into “Renewed Hope Livestock Villages, equipped with modern infrastructure.”
This is a red flag and a bid to be resisted in its entirety. I think that this Ministry of Livestock is just stuck in the past and is incapable of thinking out of the box. Who is talking about Grazing Routes at this stage of national development? Is that not the same issue that created problems in Benue, Niger, Plateau, and even the FCT Abuja, which the late President Muhammadu Buhari wasn’t able to resolve? Instead of coming up with clear designs of the ranching policy, the ministry is looking for imaginary Grazing Routes, the land that belonged to families and whose owners have already developed them into other uses.
If President Bola Tinubu does not know, he needs to be told that the Livestock Ministry is planning to set fire to this country and create unnecessary tension between farmers and herders in the name of searching for Grazing Rotes. It is also a way of entrenching the illegal hold of the forests by those who have been using them as a launchpad for criminality.
In essence, what I would recommend for the South-West and indeed the entire South is to have nothing to do with the so-called Grazing Routes. It is not only archaic and outdated, but it also presents a picture that some people are not just resisting modernity, they are also planning to plant the old prehistoric practice on us all. Anytime I see a herd of cattle crossing the roads in Abuja, I do wonder how the adults who sent the ten-year-olds to graze around with cattle feel when they know that these are kids who should be in school. Aside from that, herding cattle around this age should be an anathema.
No matter the fine grammar used to package the “Renewed Hope Livestock Village” project, the Southern states should reject the idea, ask for immediate removal of every occupants of the forests, while governments (local, state and federal) should pull efforts together to establish ranches at strategic places across the country, where the business of animal husbandry, not just cattle rearing, would take shape.
Rather than keep waiting on the Federal Government to provide succour against the invasion of its forests, the South-West states should empower Amotekun more. You cannot arm a legally established corps with firepower that is less in capacity compared to that being carried by the criminals they intend to confront. That’s suicide. Aside from that, each state should approve executive orders, if not acts of the state assemblies, to ban the occupation of the forests. Anyone arrested living in the forest should be seen as a criminal, while the states can even kickstart the process of registering all herders in their domain and then provide locations that can be converted to ranches. They need not wait for the advertised Renewed Hope Village, whose design is already faulty.
I do not know how the Western Region, in particular, sank into an era of planlessness to the extent that it jettisoned the plan by Chief Awolowo to make the region self-sufficient in animal husbandry. For instance, the Fashola Farm settlement in Oyo and some others spread across the states that formed the Western Region were used to nurture special breeds of cattle. It is sad that today, the farm settlements have vanished, the cows are nowhere to be found, while the beef that comes from across the Niger is associated with huge threats of bloodshed, kidnapping, and banditry. Southern Nigeria, and indeed the entire country cannot afford to live with such criminality.