Despite widespread outrage and condemnation trailing their dastardly acts and wanton killings in many parts of the country except, of course, the North-east and North-west, the so-called Fulani herdsmen have continued to spread their deadly campaign unhindered.
The herdsmen, whose activities have been described as perhaps the most dangerous threat to safety of lives and property in the country and who have been classified by a global report as the world’s fourth most lethal ‘terrorist group’ measured by number of people killed, have been rampaging villages in North-central Nigeria for many years – from Jos to Lafia, Katsina-Ala, Vandekya and many others – killing, maiming, stealing, raping, burning down houses, destroying farms and sacking whole communities.
This time, however, they have taken their murderous campaigns further south into the hinterlands of Idomaland, South-east, South-west and innermost recesses of the South-south. Their series of attacks on Agatu communities in Benue State and the recent one on Nimbo, a sleepy community in Uzo-Uwani Local Government Area of Enugu State, which left hundreds dead and many others wounded, battered, homeless and exposed to famine, are still fresh in Nigerians’ collective memory.
But while the blood and tears are yet to dry in Agatu and Nimbo, the murderous cattle-herders barely a week ago descended on Tarfi village, Binnev Ward, in Buruku Local Government Area of Benue State, reportedly killing no fewer than 12 persons, though the Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom, reportedly said a few days ago that death toll from the attack had risen to over 60.
Sources say the armed men, suspected to be the same group of herdsmen that have been terrorizing Tarka and Buruku LGAs in recent times, stormed the village in their numbers from neighbouring Tarka LGA at about 11pm. As they marched through the village, they shot sporadically and burnt down houses and huts, farmlands, food barns and any property belonging to the locals, leaving many villagers with varying degrees of injuries while several others were reported missing and unaccounted for. As the murderers approached, the locals, including women, children and the elderly, fled their homes, trekking long distances to seek a safe place to hide.
Also last Monday, suspected herdsmen reportedly attacked Tse Atue, a community in Guma LGA of the state, killing at least seven persons and burning down the entire community.
The story is much the same in many parts of Imo, Abia, Delta, Oyo and many other states of the federation. Just last week, a resident of Owerri, the Imo State capital, shared on social media pictures of devastations visited on people’s farms in the area by the marauding cattle-herders. He posted the following message: “The Hausa/Fulani herdsmen are at it again. They have cleared people’s cassava farms at Amakohia Pocket Layout at the back of Nworie River. The moment you take your eye out of your farm, they take their cows in. I don’t know why herdsmen protect their cows only to destroy other people’s property/farm, my own cassava farm inclusive. The state government, the SSS, the police, the military, ndi eze, ndi nze na ozo should rise and talk about it now. Further damage of our farms in that area will bring problem. Everybody knows how difficult it is to farm. Please people in authority should start now to talk about this incident of today 09 May, 2016.”
Besides the actual attacks, every now and then there are rumours of herdsmen sending letters to communities informing them of impending attacks, making hitherto peaceful communities to now live in perpetual fear of the gun-toting herdsman.
In the midst of all these, citizens are worried that there is as yet no concrete response by the Muhammadu Buhari-led government, saying the president’s apparent silence smacks of tacit support for, or complicity in, the bloody activities of the herdsmen. They insist that the buck stops on the president’s table, as the head of state and commander-in-chief of the Nigerian armed forces and, therefore, the chief security officer of the country. They urge the president to remember that he is the president of the whole Nigeria and not that of the Fulani ethnic group, saying he must be presidential enough, rise above ethnic consideration and nip the dangerous trend in the bud before victim communities resort to self-defence and the situation escalate into a full-blown civil war.
Fide Ozichukwu Chukwu, a former People’s Democratic Party national vice chairman, South-East, who spoke to BDSUNDAY on phone, condemned in strong terms the activities of the herdsmen, saying it was immoral, unjust and unethical for anyone to allow somebody, in the name of cattle- grazing, to go and destroy the farm of somebody else whose livelihood depends on the output from those farms.
He also wondered how the herdsmen, who are known to be poor, get the funding for the AK47 they now carry about and why the security agencies have left them to wander about with these lethal weapons harassing, destroying, maiming and raping innocent citizens.
“Even if they purchase them by themselves, are they allowed by law to carry them? If they are not allowed by law to carry them, why is it that the law enforcement agents all this while have allowed them to wantonly go about destroying people, destroying property, and destroying people’s livelihood? Is there nothing that can be done? Of course, something can be done and has to be done quickly and now,” he said.
“I’m sure the president will do something now that he has seen that it is becoming a nationwide problem and crisis and it is not taking this country anywhere. He shouldn’t just start a wildfire which he will not be able to quench. The only thing he should do is to be presidential enough, take responsibility and call this people to order, let them survive and let others also survive. Live and let live, I think that’s what everybody is asking for,” he said.
On the way out, he said that virtually every senatorial zone of the North now has a dam.
“With these dams they can grow grass through irrigation and do their grazing there. After they have done their grazing they go through the process of marketing as it was done before, put them in lorries and trailers and send them to areas of need, where, of course, there will be spaces established for them, and people will go there and buy to meet their various needs. These things have been there, I don’t know how this impunity started and how this man’s inhumanity to man has just come to be,” he said.
Chukwu emphasised that though the Fulani have been known to be nomadic, they cannot continue with nomadic lifestyle in the 21st century.
“Before they were riding on donkeys and camels, but today they are in jeeps and private jets. Why didn’t they continue with donkeys? Now if they have changed life at that level, they should also go ahead and change life at other levels and allow these young boys to go to school instead of branding them almajiri or talakawas. They should send them to school, after which they can go and help in these farms, and when the cows reach maturity, they take them and go and sell. That will be the first step in true development and the first step in better inter-community relations,” he said.
For his part, Governor Ortom of Benue State has said his state is under siege and that his government could not contain the activities of the herdsmen alone. He has therefore called on the Federal Government to act fast, adding that he had continually restrained his people from carrying out reprisal attacks on the marauders but that the people might resort to self-help if security agencies could not prevent the massacre of the innocent farmers.
But while the Northern Governors’ Forum and prominent voices in the North have continued to deny that these attacks are being perpetrated by Fulani herdsmen, Saleh Bayeri, the interim national secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association, an umbrella body of Fulani associations in Nigeria, reportedly told an online medium in an exclusive interview that the attack on Agatu was a reprisal attack by his people against the Agatus whom he alleged killed a prominent Fulani man, Shehu Abdullahi, in 2013 and carted away over 200 cows.
Meanwhile, a message on Facebook purportedly sent out by a certain Adamu Mohammed and titled “Your Land Or Your Blood” claims that the herdsmen attacks are all part of a grand plan by the Hausa-Fulani to overrun and dominate the rest of Nigeria.
“If you don’t want to give us your cursed land, we will rear our cattle not only on your farmlands but in your churches. And if you try to stop us, we would killed (sic) your chicken-hearted men like rabbits then turn your mothers, wives, sisters and daughters to our sex slaves like we have always done. It is either you give the whole of South to us to use as grazing reserve or we soak it with your blood,” the message said.
While BDSUNDAY has not been able to ascertain the authenticity of such claim, it ties in with the view expressed earlier by Opeyemi Agbaje, a Lagos-based public policy analyst, that “regarding the herdsmen, the strategy appears to resemble official blackmail and terrorism – ‘agree to provide grazing routes for the herdsmen through your areas, or they will continue to kill you!’”.
CHUKS OLUIGBO
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