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Planning Bovver and Communal Acrimonies in Nigeria By Aminu F. Hamajoda
Unless the nation reconsiders its myopic agricultural policies in the face of the encroaching desert, stopping communal conflicts, ensuring lasting security and achieving vision 2020 will be a grand delusion. Due to the current planning bovver bedevilling Nigeria, agricultural policies of the 60s and 70s are far more concrete than the current perfunctory agricultural plans that mainly encourage cash crop cultivation to the total neglect of livestock, land management and rural development as vital aspects of food production and poverty reduction.
Studies have shown that by the turn of the next century most of the northern states would turn into desert, the current middle belt states, becoming the nation's future Sahel. Playing an ostrich game with the disastrous climatic changes looming ahead only show the perfunctory nature of our development plans and the alienation of our current leaders to the serious needs of this country. The forecasted climatic changes will witness higher temperatures, erratic weather, incessant floods, land degrading and deforestation due to primitive cooking methods, peasant farming techniques and nomadic livestock grazing. Government has so far no visible urgent and intelligent plans to mitigate the impeding changes leaving farmers, graziers and rural dwellers to the rescue of ancient methods. Unfortunately however, these imminent ecological changes remain unpardonable to traditional forms of agriculture, livestock and cooking. Aridity reduce water sources, land fertility and available pasturage, resulting into forced migrations, land conflicts, reduced animal population, poor farm yields, and destitute rural life.
Nomadic herders are forced to move southward in search of pastures resulting into violent conflicts with farmers on the Plateau, in Benue and the northern fringes of states in Southern Nigeria. Since 1965 grazing laws were created and later in 1974 detailed pastoral corridors and grazing reserves were mapped targeting 22 million hectares of land as pastoral reserves but hardly one million hectares were ever developed. The initial pastoral corridors are all but lost to farm lands forcing nomadic herders to migrate on nation's major roads blocking traffic flows. The documented violent conflicts between herders and farmers in the past ten years would have merited an agricultural revolution in any serious country.
But in Nigeria livestock is continuously neglected in development plans. The neglect apparently stems from a parochial sentimental view that livestock and its attendant dairy production is the exclusive occupation of the Fulani people and hence the attendant hostilities and lack of an integral view of it as part of the nation's agricultural development. Presently none of the three tiers of government in the federation is posed to tackle the issue of pastoral nomadism despite the violent conflicts it generate because many, especially in the middle belt and the south, prefer ethnic and religious pathos to dictate their perception of the situation. The Federal Government New Agricultural Policy Thrust unfortunately entrust state governments with the duty of creating pastoral estates and grazing reserves. In 2010 when Adamawa State established a company (AADIL) to develop pastoral estates as integral part of rural development, a group of politicians, who should know better, published a petition castigating the program as an ethnic agenda by the governor. Yet when graziers and farmers clash across the country, the only solution always proffered, is the annoying balderdash, 'peaceful dialogue', disregarding the need for agrarian plans, new land polices and integrated rural development. For decades cattle herders have been roaming the savannah and the northern fringes of the south without any meaningful national plan to change their transhumance nomadism. No serious country in the world will allow a major aspect of its agriculture to be regarded as an ethnic affair. It is surprising that a nation that plans to reduce poverty and ensure food security is neglecting livestock. In an ideal situation both farmers and herders are symbiotic integrals in rural development especially here in Nigeria where subsistence farming predominates.
But even the subsistent farmers on whom the nation depends for food are vulnerable to the ecological disaster. Late last year in Cross Rivers State a murderous communal conflict between the Boje and Nsadop communities left several hundred dead. In the past one decade, over 10,000 Nigerians lost their lives due to conflicts that have direct connection to contestation for declining land resources. A recent donor agency survey reveals that 56% of recent violent communal conflicts are triggered by land issues that are climatic in origin. It is pertinent to appreciate that the impact of the current climatic changes cut across ethnic groups and regions in this country. Just as desert aridity is affecting the north so is ocean swelling threatening the south, and both regions are losing arable lands anyway. Therefore it will only portent more violent conflicts if affected state and local governments focus on heightening divisive pathos like ‘indigineity’ or ‘ethnicity’ as against imbibing dispassionate adaptation strategies that ensure equitable land use, integrated rural development and pro-poor policies.
All the required visions and policies are already enshrined in NEED, MDG, National Policy on Integrated Rural Development, Vision 2020, etc, but these are only a motley of frameworks that remain perfunctory until all tiers of government create specific strategies and targets in their budgets to address highfaluting statements like ‘alleviating rural poverty’ ‘rural energy supply’, etc. Specific goals like implementing a model cooking hearth or supplying innovated cooking stoves to all rural dwellers and banning logging trees for cooking within a year is more objective. Similarly all states where there is herder-farmer conflict should demarcate grazing reserves where suitable fodder will be grown to prevent livestock roaming on farm lands. But better still pastoral estates and allied cottage industries of livestock feeds and dairy production should be developed by the Federal government in all conflict areas in the federation. In addition, land reclamation through the restoration of degraded and impoverished lands into arable lands using all techniques, modern and traditional, should be pursued starting this year. The idea is to have complete strategies for addressing the needs of groups vulnerable to climatic and ecological impacts without further delay.
All these targets should be concretely reflected in the 2012 budget and SURE program. If however the Executive continue to be rudderless amidst its cacophony of visions and plans, then it becomes the bounded duty of the Legislature to use it fiduciary and oversight functions to ensure capital projects are taken this year that will reduce communal conflicts in Nigeria through pro-poor projects. |