•Slowing trains for cattle is another reason why we should ranch
In an age that trains do 200- 500 km/hr and more, transportation minister Rotimi Amaechi’s disclosure that the Abuja-Kaduna rail line will not do more than 90 km/hr must have come to many Nigerians as a rude shock. The reason given by the minister makes the matter even the more ludicrous: that this is to avoid a situation where cows would be killed on the train route! “We are doing 90km/hr with Abuja-Kaduna, the reason we are doing 90 km/hr is because there are cows everywhere, and we don’t want to kill cows. The other day they tried 100 km/hr and they killed many cows, and they said ‘you people should replace the cows you killed”. From that day, I have said let us maintain 90 km/hr; at 120 km/hr you get to Kaduna in one hour”, the minister stated.
Absurd as this might sound, it merely confirms the fact that Nigeria is yet to resolve the question of what to do with cows and herdsmen. Yet, we have said it before; and it bears restating, that cows in civilised parts of the world are ranched and this comes with several advantages. First, it eliminates all the troubles associated with farmers/herdsmen’s clashes, thereby saving precious lives and property. Above all, beef and milk from cows that are ranched are by far more nutritious than the ones from cattle that trek long distances in search of food and water.
It is a national embarrassment that in Nigeria, we cannot have speed trains just because we do not want to kill cattle in the process. Nigerians have made huge sacrifice for this outdated mode of cattle rearing: limbs have been lost, lives lost, property destroyed, and what have you. Indeed, the question now is: what more are we going to sacrifice for cows in the country?
Those who conceived the idea of the Abuja-Kaduna rail project, which was completed and commissioned by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016 must be stunned that the project which they conceived as the first of its kind in the country is now being reduced to a glorified narrow gauge. The aim is to enable faster movement of goods and people between the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and its commercial capital, Kaduna. The passenger trains on the line can make between 200km/hr and 250km/hr. This implies that travel time would be reduced to about one hour, with each passenger train carrying up to 5,000 commuters.
It is indeed a matter for regret that trains on this route are now forced to do a maximum 90km/hr. What we see in other parts of the world are fast trains that move people across long distances in no time. For instance, in India, trains, technically, can exceed 160km/hr during trials and tests but commercial services are restricted to not more than 160km/hr. In other places, fast trains move at 200km/hr to 500km/hr. By the original design of the Abuja-Kaduna rail project, people living in Kaduna and working in Abuja only need about an hour travel time, which saves them a lot of stress, time and even money.
Another worrisome aspect of the project is the subsidy that government is paying on the train shuttles monthly. According to the minister, “we spend N56m per locomotive, and we get N16m. If we increase it, you will start abusing us, ‘we won’t vote for these people’. But, you see, it is subsidised … At the end of the day, we lose every month N40m, in fact, it was worse initially because it was N600 per passenger and nearly N1,000 for business class”. We hasten to say that subsidy as we have come to know it in Nigeria is prone to fraud. This project, if well executed, is capable of sustaining itself. The problem is with the unnecessary interference by government, which brings all manner of primordial considerations into play in a purely commercial venture.
Trains do not have to give way to cows; rather, it should be the other way round. There is nowhere else where cows are allowed to wander like sheep without shepherd. Instead of slowing down the trains for cows, perimeter fence should be provided and gated to prevent the cows from straying into the rail tracks.
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