The Pan Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, says President Muhammadu Buhari is acting out the script of Fulani intelligentsia with the planned review of 368 grazing reserves in the country.
President Buhari had on Thursday approved the review of the grazing reserves in 25 states of the federation in a bid to determine the level of encroachment on the sites.
But in a statement issued by its Secretary-General, Chief Sola Ebiseni, Afenifere branded the President’s move as a “sweet pipe dream in a fool’s paradise.”
The group which described the planned move as being worse than RUGA and cattle colonies earlier rejected by governors of the 36 states in the country noted that Nigeria has 417 grazing reserves out of which only 113 had been gazetted.
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The statement read: “The approval by President Muhammadu Buhari to review, with dispatch, 368 Grazing Reserves across allegedly 25 states in the country to determine the levels of encroachment did not surprise Nigerians.
“It does not also matter that having felt the pulse of the nation in his interview with the Arise Television in June, the President is still wasting taxpayers’ scarce resources on a programme whose conception lacks all conceivable growth capacity.
“It is instructive that the recommendation and implementation committee is headed by Prof. Ibrahim Gambari, the Chief of Staff to the President who, in conjunction with Prof. Attahiru Jega, during the first term of Buhari, presented a ‘Memorandum On Pastoralist-Farmers’ Conflicts And the search for peaceful Resolution’ published in January 2018, which contained the same recommendations now being foisted on the nation.
“They have submitted, among other recommendations, that ‘it is clear that Nigeria and indeed Africa have to plan towards the transformation of pastoralism into settled forms of animal husbandry.
“The establishment of grazing reserves provides the opportunity for practicing a more limited form of pastoralism and is, therefore, a pathway towards a more settled form of animal husbandry. Grazing reserves are areas of land demarcated, set aside, and reserved for exclusive or semi-exclusive use by pastoralists.
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“The recommendations which pander to deceptive national solutions to orchestrated farmers/herders clash, nonetheless reek of the odiferous stench of ethnic agenda for settlement of the Fulani in the ancestral lands of other ethnic nationalities.
“The non-Fulani Nigerians are not stupid, as the Federal Government; probably imagine, not knowing that the concept of Grazing Reserve, by the Gambari and Jega definitions above, is a worse form of official dispossession of their ancestral lands for the inheritance and use of the Fulani than Cattle Colony, RUGA and Grazing Routes which they have roundly rejected.
“For the umpteenth time, let the President be told that the constitution which he reveres relentlessly and the Land Use Act which derives equal force extols the majesty of the people over their land