First, a beautiful polemical piece titled Let’s Talk RUGA http://www.bellsnews.com/sports/match-preview-rivers-united-vs-niger-tornadoes/ a.k.a Cattle Colony has been trending online and in various platforms with the name “Nnamdi Elekwachi” and equally have I been tagged by certain of my lovely virtual friends here in that post. As rich as that post is with qualitative and quantitative research technique and depth, I wish to make it clear that even though I share in most of the points raised therein, I did not author the said post. This disavowal is not with prejudice to any one who tagged me unknowingly. I respect that I could be tagged in such a beautiful post but further silence from me may appear plegiaristic. I thank those who believe I could write such a piece.

Having said that, it is my personal and strongly held view that RUGA, Cattle Colony, Cattle Ranch or any other name so called and however so defined is, without mincing words, a misallocation of priority, especially by the very inventors of such idea, this time being the federal government. I so posit because the very peaceful basis for such project has been ruined by the Nigerian state under president Muhammadu Buhari. The federal government has first failed to build the mechanism for peaceful coexistence among the diverse ethnic elements playing as leaguists in the Nigerian project by its past appointments and clear marginalization of the south– mostly the south east– and so its rather hollow claim of RUGA as a framework for peaceful settlement of farmers/herders clash is a brittled frame. The first thing Buhari needed to build and which unfortunately he did not build was peace and peace alone not any RUGA.

Nigeria has never been this torn and divided, not even in the sixties of “Araba”, “wetie”, “Aburi”, “penkelemesi” had that nation shown debilitating signs of crack along faultlines as it does now. But while Lugard’s house burned the majordomos of the colonial construct themselves go singing their own funeral.

It is clear that within us as a nation-state has risen a cliquish rogues of guns-toting herders who have left trail of tears in their nomadic passage through settled human space, mostly farmlands, and none of whom has been prosecuted nor summarily punished. Places like Benue, Agatu, Nimbo, Asaba and many others have harvested from bloody tragedy than from their produce. Displacement and sackage of peoples from their farmlands characteristically mark the “reign of terror” against unwilling host communities.

This apparent state-sponsored violence has often been attended to by self-righteous responsibility of silence which when broken had equally had the elected president of millions tell the grievers to “accomodate” their killers. Allegedly, billions of naira were dolled out to the appanagists of these deadly herders and even radio station would be built for them whose transmission would exclusively be in Fulfude language. This unsystematic kid’s glove is the Buhari-led government’s strategy in combating a group described by Global Terror Index as the “fourth deadliest group” in the world in our 21st century.

It is a huge shock that for a nation that does not rank among the 100 richest in milk and dairy production; not among the leading in leather or hides and skin; not a world producer of even cheese and fertiliser, Nigeria thinks of establishing colonies for herding community nationwide. Even the economic principle of comparative advantage disfavours this practice. I mean to say here let each region thrive on her God-given resources and not some bogus policy at a time when security threat has visibly risen to all time record high.

Those who have elected to squeal like the parabled and proverbial “stuck pig” in defence of this scheme should be mindful that the demonym “Fulani” is not shared by Nigerians alone. I wish to expressly remind them that not even in any recognisable history did we hear Gambian Fulani, Senegalese Fulani, Chadian Fulani or Nigeriene Fulani but just Fulani. And where you settle these nomads in any settlement what measures would be taken to ensure that only “Nigerians” are settled given the porosity of our sometimes unmanned borders. This is a future invitation to conflict, I dare say. Fulanis are nomads who in their passage settle in a land only to sack or dominate their hosts. The 19th century jihad of Uthman Danfodio was aided in part by the warlike nature of the Fulanis who along their pastoral routes fought against the Bedouins and so when Hausa states fell victims, they too were captured as they lacked internal unity.

Certain persons are given to hold that there is no such thing as “Fulanisation” and I am often led to think if these humans are blind to see the patterning and zoning of appointments within national security apparatus. It smacks of something too and that is the fact that as structured, the Fulanis here want power not just for its use alone but for the very sake of power itself.

President Buhari while abroad had told the international community once that the herders were foreigners or merceneraries from Libya and not Nigerians but that begs the question therefore that in building RUGA, the federal government is throwing open and direct invitation to the same aliens since the same federal government said RUGA is in line with sustaining peace between farmers and herders. Of what peace does the federal government now speak? Between “Libyans” and Nigerians?

Writing in the ’70s, Mvendaga Jibo, a Benue-born Nigerian journalist, also a radical left man then, once styled a Northern cliquish camarilla as “The Kaduna Mafia”. Many, even within the clique insiders remained escapist if not totally dismissive of the faintest and foggiest knowledge and membership of that order but subsequent events showed that many business tycoons, technocrats and academic doyens of the Northern extraction were the be-all-and-end-all of politics in Nigeria and that certain of this coterie had drunk from the Pierian Spring of Barewa College. As I recall, it became a hindsight knowledge that a cabalistic culture had begun in Nigeria among the indifferent. That is what Nigerians are good at, hindsight knowledge.

Many today are content to believe there is no cabal in Aso or that there is no plot at vicious use of power against a part by a part; I recognise their right to hold any political view but then for how long? For me, any attempt to settle a Fulani nation of herders here in the south east is nothing but a Greek gift and there are kinds of Greeks I fear: “the Greeks bearing gifts!”

IstandWithSouthEastGovernors

The barter, the better
Roughage for Beef

Nnamdi Elekwachi
Aficionado
2019
Aba.