AFTER more than three years in office, and despite persistent clashes between herdsmen and farmers, it is surprising that President Muhammadu Buhari has still not got a great and realistic perspective on the seemingly unending violent struggle for land convulsing mostly the Middle Belt of Nigeria. During his interactive session with the Nigerian community in Beijing, China, last Sunday, the president offered two bewildering perspectives on the problem, indicating clearly that he had either given up on the problem or was yet to find time to deeply reflect on it. First, he suggested that the problem was much simpler than many Nigerians made it out to be, and it was a question of climate change and its deleterious effect on the Sahel region of Nigeria. And, second, he expressed his disappointment in the media, particularly in Nigeria, for failing to understand the issues involved. “To my disappointment,” he moaned in a press statement by his spokesman, Garba Shehu, “the members of the press in Nigeria do not make enough efforts, in my observation, to study the historical antecedents of issues that are creating national problems for us.”
Few will agree with the president that the media share any part of the blame. The media simply report the herdsmen-farmers crisis, and have done so since its beginnings even before his assumption of office in 2015. They may sometimes get their statistics a little wrong, and even exaggerate the consequences of the clashes, but they cannot be accused of failing to understand the historical antecedents of the issues involved. Surely the president must know that it is not in every report that reporters must keep reminding the public of historical antecedents when in fact the scale of killings and the magnitude of destruction of settlements, at certain points of reporting, far outweigh anything else. The president obviously thinks that the media often get it wrong and, worse, perhaps fuel its barbarous underpinnings. While the press can do much better than they are doing at the moment in reporting the crisis, they are not responsible for its beginnings or its aggravated course.
The herdsmen-farmers conflict undoubtedly predates the Buhari presidency. However, historical antecedents or not, the responsibility for finding a solution rests squarely on the president’s shoulders. He has a duty both to understand the crisis, as he sadly has controversially been unable to do so far, and in resolving it, if he can find the magic wand. But if he cannot understand the problem, how can he be expected to find the solution? In the past one year or so, as the crisis becomes exacerbated, the president has oscillated between a multiplicity of conflicting diagnoses and prognoses. Not only do the diagnoses acutely illustrate the confusion in government as well as indicate presidency officials’ lack of surefootedness, they also amplify the far more worrisome suspicion that there is neither cohesion nor fidelity to facts among those saddled with the responsibility of devising solutions to the problem.
Since 2015, and in particular after the 2018 New Year’s Day massacre in Benue State, officials of the Buhari presidency have toyed with about five theories to explain the clashes. This column twice published the theories, complete with timelines and identities of their authors. They range from the competition between farmers and herdsmen for grazing lands that leads inevitably to fierce attacks; restriction, and in some cases, eradication, of grazing routes that compels violent attacks to open them up or appropriate them; simple communal misunderstanding; violent activities of remnants of the Libyan civil war; and lack of tolerance by host communities to pastoralists. The president himself is author of two of these theories. Now he has added a third: the issue of climate change, and the drying up of Lake Chad leading to reduction of grazing lands. Not one of these explanations addresses the problem of why these deficiencies must inescapably trigger bloody attacks with little or no recourse to adequate law enforcement actions that culminate in prosecution.
If the presidency had paid a little more attention to what analysts said, rather than continue to listen only to its own voice and hear only what gratifies its desire, they would have realised that Nigerians and their media always suggested that the herdsmen-farmers crisis contained elements of all the explanations proffered to explain the problem. It is rare for such a violent crisis to be caused by only one factor. There is no doubt that climate change has dried up a huge part of the country’s grazing lands; there is also no doubt that arms from the unexpired Libyan war have been smuggled into Nigeria to give a dangerous and undesirable impetus to some of the violent conflicts taking place in some parts of the country; and the competition for fertile land and burgeoning population have led to drastic reduction in the quantum of land available for grazing; etc. But because the government has been unable to coherently and with consistency explain the crisis, and partly also because it has been unable to approach the delicate problem with the detachment and neutrality many expect of it, it has found it very difficult to devise the right cocktail of practical and lasting solutions. It is clear that neither the problem nor the solution has anything to do with the media’s so-called uninformed reportage. The government should look inwards first.
If the government really desires a lasting solution, two of the theories adumbrated to explain the crisis readily lend themselves to easy understanding and a way out. Take the restriction of grazing lands, for instance. Why would the government continue to pursue outdated animal husbandry methods that evoke the spectre of ethnic cleansing and interethnic conflicts when it can lend financial and logistical support for pastoralists or states which embrace modern methods of animal husbandry? Only the government can explain why the idea of ranching, when it was finally and reluctantly conceived, was invariably turned into a quasi government business, one in which states were being mandated to offer ranch lands and the federal government itself was determined to allocate taxpayers’ funds to build private businesses. Ranching was a sound idea; but it was nevertheless misapplied. Encouraged by government’s patronising and indulgent partiality, herdsmen themselves have dug their heels in and exuded the spirit of exceptionalism and entitlement.
Then take the even more critical but less complex problem of climate change that has led to desertification. The government uncritically believes that the solution is for everyone to resign to fate, and for farmers and other landowners to open up their lands, accommodate their fellow countrymen, and stoically bear the destruction of their farmlands. This is as unrealistic as it is fatalistic. The clashes are not inevitable, as the government mistakenly and pigheadedly projects. If officials cannot initiate novel ways of tackling the problems of climate change, and cannot devise novel ways of curing dry and unproductive lands and making them usable, then they can at least borrow from other countries that have found a way round climate problem. But not only has Nigerian governments over the years abandoned measures to solve the crisis caused by climate problems, even the Buhari government has also felt pessimistic about arresting and reversing desertification. Restoring Lake Chad is not the only solution, especially considering that the government has gone laboriously a-begging to restore the lake. Desertification can be arrested and reversed, and grazing lands do not have to be seized from their owners.
But as long as the government continues to indirectly seek justifications for the bloodletting orchestrated by aggrieved herdsmen rather than arrest and prosecute the offenders, and also spend quality hours to find a lasting solution, the crisis will persist. The government must then hope that the problem will not eventually metamorphose into an ogre capable of endangering the national cohesion it has clumsily and short-sightedly tried to engineer over the decades.