How Much More Land Do The Fulani Need For Cattle Grazing?
The Oasis Reporters
May 30, 2018
There’s a post currently in circulation in the social media. So alarmist in tone, it is to the effect that “President Buhari has submitted an executive bill to the National Assembly for the Federal Government to take control of all waterways and their banks in Nigeria.
Of curious attention is the annexing of thousands of lands adjoining the river banks. These are ancestral lands belonging to poor farmers.
Without any doubt, President Buhari will, as soon as the bill is passed, hand over permanent grazing rights to his kinsmen, the Fulanis, who will come with their destructive weapons and commence expansion into/conquest of the hinterland!
Also, the bill is intended to abrogate the Land Use Act, which has vested all lands in State Governors. This amounts to bringing grazing colonies through the backdoor.
All Nigerians must rise up to resist this obnoxious bill aimed at enthroning and legalising anarchy”.
No one needs to be told before he or she knows that the Fulani ethnic group are desperate to grab land at all costs from other Nigerians and that is what is causing insecurity or instability in the country. It is almost always the Fulani at war with other Nigerians and this cruelty did not start today.
In fact, it started over 200 years ago with the entry of the Fulani who came from the Futa Jallon mountains around Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Mali for a seemingly religious jihad in which they killed the indigenous hausa kings, took over their lands and political leadership.
In Northern Nigeria all these while, the Fulani have roamed all over it with their cattle, grazing them and causing mayhem on farmers crops that often led to skirmishes of death and destruction. In President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day speech, he made allusions to farmers /herdsmen clashes that often lead to deaths and destruction.
Rather than deepen their enterprise like other cattle rearing nations, the Fulani have refused to modernise and improve. Instead, their flock has multiplied and by 2016, the Fulani were said to own over 30 million cows, yet they have not produced a single tin of milk or sachet of powdered milk for other Nigerians to buy.
Unlike the Netherlands that equally rears cattle. They have just a modest 5 million herd which they milk and sell tinned and powdered milk all over the world, yielding billions of dollars annually to their economy.
Today, the world is concerned about global warming which has affected northern Nigeria as well. The foliage is not enough to feed the 30 million Fulani cows, so the herdsmen militia are destabilizing other Nigerians in the Middle belt and the southern states to cleanse them off their ancestral lands for their cattle to eat grass on. Many cruelties have followed including killing defenceless people in churches, homes and farms to make room for cows.
The question is how much more of people’s lands do the Fulani want ?
Since their flock continues to increase as they are joined by their West African brethren to wage war on Nigerians, is this how they will continue to look for more lands to dominate and conquer?
They forcefully occupied northern Nigeria and became lords of the manor for 200 years of internal colonization. The land is now parched, dry and unable to feed their cattle. Therefore they want to press down southward, and perhaps cause more mayhem.
Imagine the wicked incompetence of taking over 20% of Nigeria’s landmass in the North where they rule over the Hausa and other tribes either as governors, lawmakers, traditional rulers, technocrats etc. At the end of it all, hausas became international food beggars having been dispossessed of land rights and ownership. There’s virtually no city in Nigeria where you don’t have poor hausa beggars at street corners.
Why?
The British took over Hong Kong for 150 years. They returned Hong Kong to its Chinese owners and left, leaving the island more prosperous and showing all of Asia the path of growth and economic revival. Even China had to thank the British by declaring One China, two systems to let Hong Kong remain on its glorious path. In the end, big China has learnt from, and become like Hong Kong while clinching the position of second biggest economy in the world.
People keep wondering if the problem does not really arise from the lack of the use of the intellect.
If global warming is inhibiting their animal husbandry, can’t they use the same global warming to tap solar energy, use it to power boreholes in the desert, get ever flowing water to grow grass in the desert or the Sahel and feed their cattle?
Why the push for war and acrimony?
Can’t they reduce their flock and replace it with better yielding stock that would be 50 times more efficient in output and profitability and everyone one wins all round?
War will not pay them, neither will it pay other Nigerians. It would be a loss loss situation for all.
The American state of California is dry. Infact, drier than northern Nigeria with less underground water. But it remains till date, the 7th largest economy in the world, after the USA, China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Germany.
What is the mainstay of the Californian economy?
Agriculture!
They export fresh farm produce, processed farm produce including dairy products, meat etc to various global destinations everyday, all from the desert!
Just like the Israeli economy in the Middle Eastern desert! All that they use to maximize the desert resources for huge economic growth is the brain!
Fulani wants to use the brawn, because they have people they believe are powerful politically. Assuming they are allowed to overrun the middle belt region then despoil it with the help of another fiercer global warming, what happens next?
They move again to other fertile lands? And keep fighting until they are confronted and overwhelmed?
That proposition is not cheery for the future of mankind. The best option is for their intellectuals to read the Bible and the Koran deeply using economic lenses to find out how heroes in the Holy Books reared animals in the desert and prospered, then travel to Israel and understudy how Animal husbandry is practiced in modern economies to yield profit multiplied by 50, with 1\6th of their current holdings so that Nigeria and West Africa can have peace. Things cannot always work their way politically or by war. Let there be change!
Written by Greg Abolo
