The pan-Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, has criticised President Muhammadu Buhari over moves by his administration to recover 368 grazing reserves in 25 states of the federation.
The president on Thursday had approved the recommendations of a committee to review “with dispatch,” 368 grazing sites, across 25 states in the country, thereby kickstarting the process of retrieving the grazing sites that have been encroached upon in the said 25 states.
The recovery process, according to the president’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, begins with “the collection of field data on 368 grazing reserves across 25 states to assess encroachment and encroachers, stakeholder engagements and sensitisation.”
Afenifere, in its reaction rejected the move, describing it as a waste of taxpayers’ scarce resources.
According to the group, the plan to recover grazing reserves is an ethnic agenda aimed at allowing the Fulanis to settle in the ancestral lands of other ethnic nationalities.
This was contained in a statement issued by Secretary General of Afenifere, Sola Ebiseni.
The group said non-Fulani Nigerians were not stupid and are aware that the concept of grazing reserve was a plot to officially dispossess them of their ancestral lands for the inheritance and use of the Fulani than Cattle Colony, RUGA and Grazing Routes, which they have rejected.
The statement reads, “It does not also matter that having felt the pulse of the nation in his interview with the Arise Television in June, the president is still wasting taxpayers’ scarce resources on a programme whose conception lacks all conceivable growth capacity,” Afenifere’s Secretrary General, Olusola Ebiseni, said.
“It is instructive that the recommendation and implementation committee is headed by Professor Ibrahim Gambari, the Chief of Staff to the President who, in conjunction with Professor Attahiru Jega, during the first term of Buhari, presented a ‘Memorandum On Pastoralist-Farmers’ Conflicts And the search for peaceful Resolution’ published in January 2018, which contained the same recommendations now being foisted on the nation.
“The recommendations which pandered to deceptive national solutions to orchestrated farmers/herders clash, nonetheless reek of the odiferous stench of ethnic agenda for settlement of the Fulani in the ancestral lands of other ethnic nationalities,” he said.
“The non-Fulani Nigerians are not stupid, as the Federal Government, probably imagine, not to know that the concept of Grazing Reserve, by the Gambari and Jega definitions above, is a worse form of official dispossession of their ancestral lands for the inheritance and use of the Fulani than Cattle Colony, RUGA and Grazing Routes which they have roundly rejected.
“We recall and support the resolutions of the Nigerian Governors, particularly from the south of the country, banning all forms of open grazing and it does not matter to us that some elected governors, in a federation, would condescend so low to function as members of a Committee presided over by an appointed aide of the President, no matter the name in which his office is painted.
“The concept of Grazing Reserves, otherwise known as Hurumi, which was introduced during the colonial and immediately after independence failed in the north particularly in the Middle Belt provinces, notwithstanding a monolithic one North government and permissive land-use regime.
“For the umpteenth time, let the President be told that the constitution which he reveres relentlessly and the Land Use Act which derives equal force therefrom, extols the majesty of the people over their land.
“Even the Governor who holds the land in his state in trust for the people cannot dispossess any citizen thereof, except for proven overriding public interest through the due process of law.
“The current exercise is not only a waste of taxpayers’ money but also a sweet pipe dream in a fool’s paradise.
“Every herder has a state of origin. Let the governments of the respective states make arrangements for settled life for them in the territory where the culture is fully appreciated.”
