Niyi OsundareDear President Buhari, Thisletter,my second to you in five months, will begin with avery, veryabsurdquestion:Mr. President, will Nigeria drift intoanother civil warunder your watchsimply because the'Giant of Africa'does not know how to manage its cows'Yes,absurd: for, absurdity is the faithful cohort of the grotesque and irrational,the conspicuously invisible andfalsely true. No war has ever taken place without a potent dose of theabsurdinitsmix ofcauses. No calamity has ever happened without a touch of the irrational. Thedistance between travesty and tragedy is perilously short. This is whyHistory's capacious houseis replete with the skeletons of nations which went to war, after leaving their brainsbehind.Mr. President, the country over which you preside is burning in all its flanks: kidnapping on the highways,kidnapping on village roads, kidnapping ontownshipstreets, kidnapping in the homestead, kidnapping on the farmlands.Nigeria has never had it so bad.Thenotorious perpetrators of these crimes are widely called 'bandits' and/or 'Fulani herdsmen', depending upon the speaker's degree of sensitivity or political correctness.The ethnic origination and/or attribution of these crimes is my object of worry ' and should be to anyone who cares for the stability of Nigeriaand its survival as a corporateentity. Yes, thecow,that four-legged, two-horned, long-tailed, absolutely innocent animal,has become Nigeria'scasus belli, the moo-ingmetaphor of a planless, dysfunctional country, waiting for anotherboutofabsurdityto push her beyond the brink, and plunge us all into avoidable catastrophe. Big wars are often caused bythoughtless little issues.Mr. President, war drums are already sounding in some parts of the country, provoked by a question as dangerouslyabsurdas this:when you and aherd ofcowsmeet on the road, who/which should have the right of way'When you, a struggling farmer, get to your farm and find a herd of cows making ameal of the crops whicharethe lifeline for you and your family, should you take a bow as youshoutbon appetitetothe bovine bunch'When your only child is kidnapped and tortured and murdered, even after the payment of a hefty ransom, will you ask yourneighboursto join you in the singing ofthenational anthem' Abusrdity, dangerous absurdity. But Mr. President, permit me to poach thisunavoidably longexcerpt fromaninterviewwhich was part of my contributions to the activities marking the59thanniversary of Nigeria'sIndependence:Now, on to the Fulani Herdsmen. The frightening frequency of the repetition of that designation in the Nigerian media in recent times has left me with chilling apprehensions. As I have said on other occasions, we need all the tact, all the restraint, all the wisdom we can muster to tackle this extremely dangerous development, for Nigeria cannot afford to stampede itself into another civil war. Let no one underrate the havoc and destruction that are widely caused by these herdsmen ; the epidemic of kidnapping , ransom extortion, and murder, the looting and destruction of farmlands, especially in the southern parts of Nigeria, and the uncountable bereavements that have been the lot of many households. President Buhari and his federal government cannot pretend that they do not know what is happening ' that, indeed, there is fire on the roof of the Nigeria house. How much investigation has the government done into this dangerous situation' If any, how thorough, how non-partisan' If, indeed, as we have been told, many of the so-called Fulani Herdsmen are foreigners in search of green pastures in Nigeria, how did they get into the country, and what are the border patrol officers doing about this' What do we call a country that cannot secure its own borders' With the cloud of insecurity hanging over the country, you cannot but ask 'Where are Nigeria's security authorities: the army, the police, immigration, the civildefencecorps,etc' What do President Buhari and the Heads of these security units talk about at their official briefings'Niyi OsundareTo say the least the federal government's handling of the herdsmen crisis has been amateurish, pedestrian, and dangerously incompetent. Tell me: Is someone inAsoRock trifling away while the Nigeria house is burning' Say something, President Buhari. Do something.TheRugaproposition is a 'solution' that is bound to compound the problem. That is why many people in many parts of the country have seen it as a poorly thought out attempt at the colonization of their own territories. And, by the way, there is crucial, fundamental question we have not been not asking: why do so many Nigerians, in this day and age, have to roam the entire country, in search of grass for cows they rear and nurture on behalf of richer, more powerful Nigerians' Why are they not in school ' like the children of their rich and powerfulpatrons/clients' Let no one insult our intelligence with the atavistic excuse that this wasteful mis-employment of a vital group of Nigeria's youth is a matter of culture and tradition. Genuine culture fares better; and tradition is no disempowering imprisonment.The Americans pasture their cows, the British do; so do South Africans and Ghanaians and Australians and Argentines, Chinese and Koreans, without turning a sizeable number of their young men into cow-chasers; without plunging their countries into 'Herdsmen' war. Let us try the miracle of the modern ranch: green, friendly, and peaceably/equitably located. Let us stop this ethnic profiling and stereotyping, this hype and hysteria, before they plunge us into another civil war. The War of Bullets usually begins with the War of Words. Let Rwanda provide us with a tragic ' but avoidable ' example.Mr. President,I said the abovesome17 months ago.Since then the situation has grown grimmer, theabsurditymore alarming, more dangerous.The war drums are louder now and more persistent because the tension has been left to escalate. The customary silence from the seat of power has accentuated the loudness of the drum.In theopinionof many Nigerians, your apparent silence is nothing short of ethnic connivance: that the herdsmen roam and range all over the country, killing and maiming with astonishing impunity, because'the man at the top'is their man. This feeling of untouchability, this sense of ethnic entitlement is evidenced bythe preferential treatment reportedly enjoyed by the herdsmen, and the failure of NigerianLaw to hold them accountable for their actions. Mr. President, you owe yourself, this troubled country, and the worldat largethe urgent need to show in demonstrablypracticalterms that theentire countryis, indeed, yourethnic constituency. Say more, do more abouttheviolence that is threatening the already frail fabric of the country. Go out and see things for yourself. The monsters consuming Nigeriaare not the type you can tamethroughchats with traditional rulers on emergency trips toAsoRock.The story in many parts of Nigeria today are those of murderous assaults by herdsmen and gory reprisals by local victims. A trip to Nigeria's southwest region will tell you how perilously close the country is to a civil war. Needless to say, Mr. President, we live in strange and difficult times. As a result of climate change the desert is marching towards the coast; swarths of old pastoral land have disappeared; the beneficentstreamsbetweenthe mountains have all but vanished. As the search for pasture pushes cattle rearing southwards, herdsmen and local farmers have found themselves lockedin bloody battle over theavailablegreen patch, with old friends andneighboursbecoming mortal enemies, and frequent skirmishes flaring into ethnic conflagrations, the type that consume unwary nations.But bad as this situation is, the climate-change excuse willnotsuffice. Ranches, Mr. President, ranches.Computer-regulated irrigation.Pasture colonies.Created oases. Artificial lakes. Let the cows eat and drink where they are born, not forced into endless dangerous treksacross the country in search of dwindling patchesof greenery.Ask our River Basins how it could be done. Empower the Faculties of Agriculture in our various universities,(and our Universities of Agriculture),working in creativealliance with those of Engineering and Technology, instead of stampeding them into interminable strikes that drain the nation dry. Israel made the desert bloomby putting its citizens' brains to work. Today, the country produces 95% of its food requirements,and some of the best citrus products in the world.Concerning the young men and boysnow famously known as 'herdsmen', put them in school; put their feet on the road to a worthy life. Let their rich and powerful masters/patrons (all over Nigeria!) treat them the way they treat their own children.Science, not superstition, purposive reality, notbovineabsurdity, that's the magic. Time to wake up, Mr. President.Time to wake up.Thethinking, working world has left us behind.The whole wide world is appalled by Nigeria's ostensibly incurabledelinquency.And that worldis watching and wondering at the tragic absurdity of a country sliding mindlessly into a civil war over where and how to graze its cows. It is waitingfor usto provethat we are wiser than our bovine bunch. It is, indeed, wondering whetherin'Africa's most populous country',it is the people whorearthe cows, or it is the cowsthatrearthe people.Yes, the world is really wondering who owns Nigeria: the people or the cows'Say something, Mr. President. Do something. Let us save Nigeria from another (un)civil war.Your Impatient Compatriot,Feb. 10, 2021.Niyi OsundareOpinionAddThis:Original Author:Niyi OsundareDisable advertisements:
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