Grazing routes are out of tune. The future of cattle farming is in ranching

In a double down on his controversial pledge to revive the contentious grazing routes for herders, President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday approved the recommendations of a committee to review “with dispatch, 368 grazing sites across 25 states in the country and to determine the levels of encroachment.” The decision pits him against sections of the country where open grazing has been banned because of the criminality and insecurity associated with it. The president is also playing into the hands of those who have always argued that he is a sectional leader with scant regards for the feelings of Nigerians outside his tiny enclave.

On this matter of grazing routes, the president has been consistent in his disregard for public sensitivities. Yet, even if the grazing routes were still valid, they can only facilitate further clashes between settler farmers and migrant herders. Besides, by allowing some people, including foreigners, to roam the length and breadth of Nigeria, often herding evacuated cattle, we violate the rights of these animals and endanger the health of citizens through exposure to the elements and a cocktail of diseases. So, at a time the conversation is about how to modernise the way we rear cattle in our country, it is curious that President Buhari is the one advocating that a primitive idea be sustained. This is aside the threat nomadism poses to national security.

We have made this point several times: In the history of humanity, the stage of development at which man wandered for a livelihood belongs to the stone age. It was in the bid to stem the internecine violent clashes between herdsmen and farmers, that the 17 states in the Southern part of the country as well as two states in the North (Benue and Taraba) banned open grazing by livestock. With little variations that take care of peculiarities in these states, the law prohibits movement of livestock and open grazing by them. This law is what the president intends to roll back, even when the constitution grants him no such power.

As we reminded the president much earlier on his dogged insistence on ancient cattle routes, the First Republic ended 55 years ago. In the intervening period, migrant cattle herding has ceased in almost every other country. Modern ranches have replaced roving herds while beef production has become a modern mechanised industrial undertaking. Furthermore, wherever those grazing routes of the 1960s may have been, population growth and pressure of farming and land use would have brought them under new uses. In fact, under the Land Use Act, governors remain the custodians of all lands in their states.

Perhaps it will be suitable for the president to provide the platform for a wholesale discussion on the future of animal husbandry in relations to the transition from nomadism to ranching. A package of incentives, including soft loans, liberal access to land, training, and provision of inputs to herders and others can help facilitate the transition and ameliorate the challenges associated with it. If done properly, we can then employ and re-train the herdsmen in modern settled cattle farming. The animals will be healthier; the handlers will earn decent incomes, have decent accommodation, own property, and have schools for their kids. Ancillary industries will also emerge and employment opportunities will blossom.

To insist on some ancient cattle routes and grazing reserves is to further polarise an already badly divided country. A minimum requirement of the democratic ethos is close attention to the barometer of public opinion. Sadly, President Buhari is habitually indifferent to public opinion in his pursuit of personal and group interests. His latest order on the vexatious grazing reserves is a further step in the direction of deepening divisiveness and subverting the democratic will of Nigerians. It is also a serious threat to national security.

Worse still, at a time of rapid global modernisation of production processes in all spheres of the economy of nations, Nigeria seems encumbered with an elected leader with a permanent attachment to and fixation on archaic methods and ways.

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