Edo State Government on Thursday announced that it had keyed into the Federal Government initiated National Animal Identification and Traceable System (NAITS), to stem the tide of herders farmers clash in the state.
NAITS is a scheme under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture developed to enumerate cattle across the country with a view to checking the incessant herdsmen-farmers clash and other vices that have led to cases of killings, kidnapping, destruction of farms and others.
Speaking at a stakeholder’s engagement in Benin City, the Edo State capital on Animal Identification Processes and Inherent Benefits, the Edo State Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Security, Stephen Idehenre, said the Governor Godwin Obaseki’s administration keyed into the scheme because it would boost his Make Edo Great Again (MEGA), matra to re-launch the state into national reckoning.
Idehenre, who was represented by the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Dr Peter Osagie, expressed hope that the scheme “will help an end to incessant clashes and dignify our livestock system, boost our productivity and acceptance outside the shores of the country.”
Speaking earlier during the stakeholder’s engagement, the Group Company Secretary and Legal Adviser of Mega Corp Nigeria Limited and Gamla Group, Elonna Ezulu, said that the scheme would reform the sector in line with global practices.
“For a long time now, Nigeria has been inundated with a lot of incidents of clashes between both herders and agriculturists and the farmers and also, the issue of stealing of cows. This is mostly because there is no data; there is no means of identification.
“People steal other people’s cows, go and sell in the market, the slaughter and the cases close there. And in the global village, we are in today, there are a lot of issues. Borders are no longer a limit to interrelationships between nations. We see a lot of diseases, infections and other things, that move from one jurisdiction into the other.
“So until we are able to develop this sector and make sure that we have proper data for planning, it is a difficult thing. So that is why at the federal level, the company and the Ministry of Agriculture were able to come together to agree on a means of animal enumeration. It is not going to be limited to only cattle, it is meant to cover most animals.” Ezulu disclosed.
On checking seemingly perennial herders farmers clashes, Ezulu added that with the identification marks on the cows, anyone that strayed into farms could easily be detected and the routes through which they came, identified.
In his remarks, the Chief Operating Officer (CEO), of Ranch ID, the NAITS operations management centre, Uchenna Ononye, took the participants on the merits of the scheme and the processes for registering and tagging of the animals.
The process, Ononye added would be followed through the life cycle of each animal so identified so that no two animals would be able to use the same tag due to the synchronisation of the data.
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