MUCH more than any other state in the North, Benue State is the touchstone of the bruising and bloody battle raging between herdsmen and farming communities in Nigeria. If the federal government cannot get the hang of the crisis in that bloodied and now bowed state, it will be hard to see them get it right elsewhere. All the indices of the battle are starkly evident, not in the silhouetted forms that often entrance leisure theorists propounding esoteric reasons from safe distances, but in the brutal, bloody interplay of factors and forces clearly arrayed along political, economic, sectarian and ethnic divides. Virtually everything pertaining to the killings stare the casual observer in the face, offering him an easy comprehension of the issues involved. Why the problem has persisted cannot be unconnected with the deliberate manipulation of these forces, display of primordial prejudices, lack of critical reasoning, and absence of courage.
During his last trip to Germany, Information minister, Lai Mohammed, suggested to the Nigerian community at a town hall forum in Berlin two Fridays ago that climatological forces working in dissonance with exploding population increases and shrinking resources were more to blame for the clashes drenching Nigeria in blood. He debunked ethno-religious factors as causative agents. He was, however, not reported to have offered any insight into why the government he serves inexplicably thinks the attacks and killings are consequently inevitable. Both the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Ibrahim Idris and the Defence minister, Mansur Dan Ali, have been quoted as suggesting, in line with what is probably the dominant view in the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, that restriction of grazing routes and enactment of hostile anti-open grazing laws were probably responsible for the clashes and bloodbath.
It is therefore not illogical to assume that the Buhari presidency views the clashes with a mixture of despondency and helplessness, concluding unwisely, if not naively, that if only Nigerians valued peaceful co-existence and saw the clashes from the exhausted and overstimulated perspective of the president’s inner security council, peace would easily be restored in the troubled states. Worse, the president’s men now seem angry and baffled that most Nigerians do not see eye to eye with the government on both the diagnosis and prognosis of the bloody attacks. In his Berlin talk, the Information minister was obviously reluctant to admit that in a country where dividing lines are sometimes neatly drawn, it is not difficult to see socio-economic crisis morphing dangerously into ethno-religious crisis. The herdsmen are principally Fulani, whether the herders are the owners of the cattle or not, and the farmers are principally not Fulani.
Nothing, however, stops a government that knows its onions from finding urgent and lasting solutions to any crisis, whether bloody or not, or whether ethno-religious, or socio-economic, or climatalogical. The government’s mindset has been appalling right from the beginning, particularly in their presumption that some crises are either good or more tolerable than others. Unfortunately, too, the government has seemed embattled and bogged down in trying to explain why the herdsmen-farmers clashes are more environmental than anything else, and appearing in the process to neglect the urgent need to proffer sensible and practicable solutions to the crisis.
If the problem is climatological, as the Information and Defence ministers think, and as the president also obviously suggested rather offhandedly, what practical steps have they taken beyond advocating the reclamation of Lake Chad? Have they not instead advocated the balm of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between farmers and herders without objurgating herdsmen for the forcible possession of other people’s lands? Have they not seemed to give the impression that the onus to engineer the so-called peaceful co-existence lies with farmers rather than herdsmen? The Defence minister was brazenly prejudiced in his analysis of the herdsmen attacks, and the IGP insouciantly dismissed the anti-open grazing laws of some states as insincere and provocative; why is the presidency surprised that many Nigerians suspect that his presidency is neither neutral nor interested in justice in the matter?
President Buhari’s visit to the bruised and bleeding Taraba State, supposedly to condole with the state and victims of the clashes who number in their hundreds, did not quite end as inspiringly and nobly as many Nigerians hoped. The fault was not that of the victims who craved for succour and uplifting and reassuring words, nor that of the state government which rolled out the red carpet, nor still that of stakeholders who patiently endured their president as he limited his visit to the state capital and, worse, shockingly appeared to embrace only one side of the story and mouth only platitudes. He seemed really to have nothing to say. No, the fault was squarely that of the president. He needed to visit a few distressed settlements or sacked villages — Fulanis and farmers alike — Internally Displaced Camps (IDPs), and speak with understanding to the nature of the crisis and the fairness of the solutions his government had thought through. Instead, he left Tarabans considerably perplexed.
It was expected that having been roundly criticised for a poor outing in Taraba, the president would, in clear mortification, put up a stellar and deeply empathetic performance in Benue, his next port of call, a state that more or less serves as the undistinguished epicentre of the herdsmen-farmers clashes. Not only was the Benue visit astoundingly brief, probably because of the coincidental visit of the outgoing United States Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, to Nigeria, it was more remarkable for his inimitable gaffe on the IGP, and his brazen acquiescence to fatalism. The killings in Benue State have since January monopolised headlines, both in terms of their severity and the accompanying dramatic mass burials, at least two of which were widely reported. Having ordered the IGP to relocate to Benue ostensibly to firmly address the crisis, it is bewildering that the president made no follow-up and was not shocked that no abatement accompanied the deployment he ordered.
It was even worse that the president publicly admitted he thought the IGP had deployed in Benue as he ordered. The order, to be sure, was inadvisable, even imprecise, and shows the emotiveness and lack of painstaking thoroughness that hobble public policy conception and execution in Nigeria, but an order is an order, and ought to be obeyed. Beyond the dramatic vitiation of his authority which the disobedience exemplified, there is also the emblematizing message of the IGP’s action and the president’s unawareness. Benue people distraught over the killings and the unchecked rampage of the herdsmen can be forgiven if they simple assume that the president appeared disinterested in the troubles visited on the state. It is clear to them that despite all the frightening reports from Benue, the president was not asking the IGP pointed and revelatory questions and updates, assuming the subject came up in their interactions. Benue’s disillusionment now seems complete. First was the impatience the president exuded when Benue elders visited him after the January massacre, when he told them to learn to accommodate their fellow countrymen herders. And second is the issue of his seeming disinterestedness, despite his repeated avowals of concern and love. And third is his refusal to indicate a rethinking of the origins of the crisis after the serial misspeaking of the IGP and Defence minister.
If the president ever gave deep thought to the causes of the herdsmen-farmers clashes, that thought did not seem to have gone beyond the theological fatalism that has corrupted and disennobled public thinking, especially among Nigerian leaders. “The governor and I, and others here, know that we will leave one day,” began the president inelegantly, “but the relationship between farmers and herders will continue. I urge you to keep in touch with them and advise them to live peacefully. Nigeria has over 250 ethnic groups with different cultures and nobody can question God for putting us together.” Quite apart from the fact that his admonitions have become nothing but mere fair words, it is deeply troubling that he seems at bottom to think that the clashes witnessed in Benue and other troubled states appear to question God’s wisdom in putting over 250 ethnic groups together in one country.
It is a historical fact that the British cobbled Nigeria together in 1914. But even if God inspired it or allowed it, does it imply that injustice must be endured because to fight evil would amount to questioning God? This unfortunate fatalism and generalisation could cloud proper thinking at the highest level of government and occlude any chance of devising appropriate solutions. If God put Nigeria together, did He also inspire the herdsmen attacks, the disgraceful lack of proaction that has seen grazing lands constricted, and the embarrassing inability of Nigerian leaders to acknowledge that new economic models were urgently needed for livestock farming? If God inspired the creation of the Soviet Union, did it amount to questioning Him by fighting its tyrannical disposition and eventually breaking it up? If God inspired the creation of Czechoslovakia, did it amount to questioning Him and throwing his wisdom back at His face when the political elite met and divided the country into two? Did God also put evil in the heart of Adolf Hitler to murder six million Jews, despite the prophetic underpinnings of the recreation of Israel?
What is clearly evident, as this column has maintained, is that the president is at sixes and sevens over public policy, and his limitations are not helped by his severely limited and insular kitchen cabinet and security advisers. His trips to Plateau, Taraba and Benue have merely exposed those limitations. The upcoming visits to other parts of Nigeria battling with one emergency or the other will simply confirm what is already known about the chasm between what the president’s admirers describe as his honesty and good-naturedness on the one hand, and his evident and dreadful shortcomings in public policy in a complex and modernising polity on the other hand. This was why he admitted his inability to promise the distressed people of Benue anything except when he would return for re-election campaigns.
There is no anti-grazing law in Kogi State — indeed that state’s giddy and impressionable governor has foolishly welcomed grazing colonies — and Plateau State has openly and cynically forsworn the law. But both states have witnessed herdsmen attacks so severe that it would not be out of order to invite IGP Idris a second time before the Senate to defend his atrocious conviction of the existence of links between anti-grazing laws and herdsmen attacks. What is eminently clear is that as the sophistry in the presidency blooms, and prejudiced public officials and security chiefs submit to amnesia with careless and suicidal disdain, the bloodletting in many parts of the country will continue unabated. More, the killing fields will expand, and soon the government itself will run out of excuses and explanations. But, of course, they will not run out of futile admonitions anchored on their poor theologies and exegeses.
