Commentary: Herdsmen And Farmers Clashes: Copying The Anambra Model

Nigeria is a fascinating study in human tribulations and resilience. However, every progressive society has its own stories of socio-political turbulence, mutual suspicions, bitter rivalries, armed conflict or full blown war.
Essentially, since the end of the Biafran War, Nigeria has had many dangerous disagreements, violent eruptions, wild protests and other symptoms of a society in transition. But none of these past experiences is as menacing and wide-spread as the recent clashes between farmers and cattle herders. However, the questions are: why is it that everyday, people, who have lived together for ages, would suddenly become each other’s dread? Why is it that the farmer, who is bound to his ancestral farmland by sweat and blood, should run for his dear life whenever he hears a rustle in the tree? Why should the herdsman, who had walked the open fields of Nigeria with his dropping straw hat and a harmless stick across his shoulders, suddenly become a source of fear and anxiety?
No doubt, Nigeria is the 12th largest producer of petrol in the world, the 8th largest exporter and the 10th largest confirmed reserves of crude oil but what keeps Nigeria going is Agriculture. In the light of this therefore, a disruption of the natural balance that has kept things together is bound to throw large populations out of employment, create avoidable food scarcity and lead to loss of revenue.
One of the most recurrent causes of conflict between the cattle herders and farmers is cattle-rustling. Herders often point fingers at farmers for their missing cattle which they consider a serious loss of revenue. There is also the usually unspoken emotional attachment that the herders have to their cows. It is believed that herders exact revenge in blood for missing cows because of this strange attachment. Another point of conflict that is regularly cited is that cattle herders graze their livestock on the crops of farmers, ruining a whole season of work and throwing families into avoidable hunger. In some instances too, herders brazenly graze on large industrial farms thereby destroying huge investments. There are so many other reasons offered for these bloody conflicts. But no one has been able to tell us why the conflicts seem to have risen just when the flames of Boko Haram began to die down.
Anyone who has followed the farmers and herdsmen conflict will recall that it began slowly like a typical quarrel between unfriendly neighbours and quickly grew in dimension and scale into a national tragedy. And when conversations eventually began about it, views were polarized along ethnic and religious lines.
Thus, there have been strong moves for the establishment of Cattle Colonies. There has also been an effort to introduce a National Grazing Reserve Bill. Interestingly, non of the moves has gained the acceptance of Nigerians. On the contrary, many prefer that rather than roam freely in the wild, cattle should be properly ranched as is the case in most countries of the world. They argue that since cattle-herding is a private business, it should not be allowed to evolve into a public headache.
To reduce the incessant clashes between farmers and herdsmen, therefore, the federal government and indeed other thirty-six states and Abuja are urged to copy the Anambra model in handling the impasse. In Anambra State, Governor Willie Obiano realized that diversity is life. Hence, during his routine scenario-planning in 2015, he foresaw the impending threat by herdsmen in some parts of the country and moved quickly to save Anambra State from the looming attack. The state government’s counter strategy was to include the threat of a possible attack from them into the security architecture of the State. Anambra had prided as Nigeria’s safest state for a while and no one wanted that profile to be shattered.
Another step was for Governor Obiano to set up the Herdsmen and Farmers Cattle Menace Committee. Members of the Committee are leaders of the Hausa-Fulani Community, government officials, the traditional rulers of agrarian communities and the Service Commanders of the various security agencies in the state. Through the mediating influence of this Committee, an agreement was sealed between the agrarian communities and the herdsmen, which specifies that compensation would be paid by either party for breaching the rules of engagement between them.
In other words, the herdsmen would pay compensation if they allowed their cattle to destroy people’s farms, while the host communities would pay for confirmed cases of cattle rustling or any other breach of the agreement reached with the herdsmen. To further strengthen the interface with the Hausa-Fulani Community, Governor Obiano appointed one of them as his Special Assistant with the mandate of nurturing and sustaining cordial relations between the farming communities and the cattle herders.
So, the conflict between herdsmen and farmers is another hurdle Nigeria must scale on her way to a stronger union. And we can all lend a hand in the search for a sustainable solution to this dilemma by building more tolerant, more diverse and more inclusive communities. This can be achieved by imbibing the Anambra model on the herdsmen and farmers impasse.