Editorial
Many Nigerians held their breaths for this verdict. The word RUGA (Rural Grazing Area) has over the past couple of years waxed volatile and turned a section of the country against another, and underpinned the deep suspicion that continues to loom in the polity.
The verdict, for all its intrinsic fairness, may not promise peace, but would have stirred more discomfort to the indigenes of Benue State. A Federal High Court sitting in Makurdi ruled that RUGA is not only unwarranted but also illegal and unconstitutional.
The suit was filed by the Benue State Government through its attorney general and commissioner for justice, Mr Michael Gusa, against his counterpart in the centre, the attorney general of the federation; Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Minister of Agriculture. Justice Mobolaji Olajuwon who presided accompanied the verdict with a warning and an order that the federal ministries and any of their agents should not make any attempt to hold, administer, use or allocate land in Benue State for RUGA settlements, cattle colonies or any other purpose contrary to the 1999 constitution, the Land Use Act and the Open Grazing Prohibition Ranches Establishment Law 2017.
Tapping into what was an act of impunity from the Federal Government in carving up plots of land for the purpose, the justice ruled that such a move contradicted the rights of the governor of the state who reserved the right to grant statutory right of occupancy to any person or groups of persons.
A few states of the middle belt area have been in the centre of the RUGA controversy, especially in the light of the fights between pastoralists and herdsmen, a phenomenon that resulted in deaths in states like Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Adamawa and Taraba.
In Benue, the Federal Government had moved ahead to acquire lands in what some of the indigenes thought was a hegemonic move over the ethnic minorities who live in the state. One of the locations is Ukum on the border of Taraba State. Another acquired territory is Tarkaa Local Government Area at the heart of the Tiv society. The third RUGA proposition is at Otukpo, along the Otobi Road on the border of Igboland.
The locals, including the governor, have seen this as a sign of what they see as a move to make them slaves in their own land and in their own country. The governor, Samuel Ortom, has turned in the past few years not only an elected governor but a fighter for a besieged people. The Fulani herdsmen have, in the past few years, unleashed episodes of slaughter in the state and led to the sacking of villages, the dissolution of families and ways of lives. At best, fathers were killed and wives raped, and children wiped out. It is a very bad part of the Nigerian life that a state cannot trust its Federal Government to keep it safe, and has to rely on the courts to rule for them.
It was not long ago when a mass burial was organised in the state for victims of the onslaughts. The herdsmen and their apologists in government have defended the RUGA, known as a Fulani word for colonies, as a way to put an end to the mobile life of the herder. That way they can live in one place. But the locals say they have a right to decide who lives among them, and that is a core principle of the federal idea.
The locals believe that the RUGA is a ploy for colonialism. The Fulani herdsmen may become not just settlers but may grow into overlords or scheme to impose themselves as overlords.
This is central to the distrust that overwhelms the country, and it is at the bottom of the court case.
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