Pogrom, ranching and colony

RANCOLONITIS is a new word you will understand as you read along.  Sometimes some experiences come to pass which we lack words to describe but which we love to give a name in order to record for posterity.  The solution to such a problem as suggested by George Orwell in an article on ‘new words’ in ‘My Country Right or Left’, is to invent new words as deliberately as we would invent new parts for a motor car engine’.

Farmers in the food basket state are under siege.  Not much of farming activities are taking place anymore because of atrocities of herdsmen who supervise the eating up of crops and destruction of farms by their rampaging cattle.  Farmers complained and the herders responded by alleging the killing of their members and of rustling their cows as being the reason for attacking the farmers.  In fact as at the last count over seventy farmers including husbands, wives, pregnant women and children were mercilessly massacred and for which the state government mournfully gave a mass burial. Of course that had been preceded by a similar incident of gruesome massacres perpetrated in Agatu Local Government Area through the victims never had the opportunity or comfort of State burial.

The State government through the Benue State House of Assembly earlier enacted the anti-open grazing law. The herders Association known as Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore responded by rejecting the law, insisting that the state either abrogates the law or the herders will continue with their war of genocide.  The natives began to wonder whether it was the same Fulani herdsmen they had co-habited peacefully with before now or invaders/conquest mongers from other countries.

In the midst of these, the Federal Government contrives a solution which proposes the establishment of cattle colonies in each of the States.  The Federal Government has a good explanation for what it sees as the panacea for farmers/herdsmen conflicts.  But the food basket state that had already enacted the anti-open grazing law as the best solution feels otherwise and vows to continue with the full implementation of the law.

Other states are equally kicking against the establishment of cattle colonies which they view as neo-colonialism by the Fulanis using herdsmen and cows.

Even when the Chief of Army Staff went to show to the Minister of Agriculture the Army’s progress in cattle rearing business, it was cattle ‘ranch’ and not ‘colony’ that was beamed to the whole world as the best practice.  In other words, it is ‘ranching’ and not ‘colony’ that is in vogue in cattle rearing.

Professor Jerry Agada,

Makurdi