INTERVIEW: Buhari’s Eight Years As Nigeria’s President Was Terrible For Us – Miyetti Allah

The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) is a partisan advocacy group centered on promoting the welfare of Fulani pastoralists in Nigeria.

In this interview with THE WHISTLER, MACBAN Secretary-General Ngelzarma Usman spoke on various issues affecting herders in the country and what the government must do to enable the country harness the huge potentials of livestock farming.

EXCERPTS

What is your take on President Bola Tinubu’s decision to establish a Presidential Committee to address herders/farmers clashes in the country?

I was part of the people that went to see the President and was involved in the conversation. it was led by Ganduje and headed by committee chairman who is the former INEC chairman, Mahmud Jega although he was absent. Ganduje established the committee and supported the activities of the committee up until the final report was presented to Mr. President.

Looking at the membership of the committee you will see that they are carefully selected. Some people have excelled in their fields of study and are mostly professors and doctors and have vast knowledge and experience. Also, they are experts in various areas concerning livestock.

The combination of the people who worked to produce the reports includes stakeholders like Miyatti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), All Farmers Association of Nigeria, NIRSAL and many other agencies that are either directly or indirectly related to livestock issues. They were all invited to make input in the committee. So, they spoke, and at the end of the day, the agreed decision was what we presented to Mr. President.

The document contained issues about the development of livestock in the country, issues like security, settlement, and modernization of livestock, and exploring the enormous potential of the livestock value chain in the country for the benefit of the government and every citizen of the country. If livestock is properly developed, it will produce enormous employment in the country while generating revenue.

The major part of it is for Mr. President to create a livestock ministry because all that is left of livestock, from security to settlement is just a department in the agric ministry. This to us is not enough because we need to explore the enormous potential relating to the livestock value chain in the country. We have given statistics from neighboring countries, where you see livestock contributing over 30 to 50 per cent to the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) of those countries. Those countries don’t have, the large number of livestock that Nigeria has while Nigeria has only 10 per cent GDP contribution from livestock.

So, if Nigeria can harness all the potential in livestock, I think the sky will be our limit. All these are captured in the report given to Mr. President.

Do you think this can bring lasting solution to the problem of farmers/herders clashes considering that previous administrations were unable to solve the problem?

What I find very happy about it is Mr. President’s readiness to receive that report, while making a lot of encouraging statements and commitment to study the report and come up with a more beneficial policy for the livestock sector. To us, it is a step in the right direction as the livestock sector has gone through a lot of neglect over the decade. The last eight years of former President Muhammadu Buhari have been terrible for the Livestock sector. Why we are talking of over N500 billion spent on agronomy for food production, nothing is spent on livestock issues.

So, we think they have to be a balance between agronomy and the livestock sector for one to have peace. So even the peace issue, insecurity, started from the farmer-herder conflicts that were not properly managed and metamorphosed into kidnapping and banditry.

When addressing security issues from my point of view, you just have to merge non-kinetic measures with the ongoing kinetic measures. So, let the two simultaneously go together and if it’s coexisting then there will be progress. The security agencies are trying, if not because of them one will wonder what the situation will be like. We thought having a full-grown ministry dedicated to the purpose of livestock would go a long way.

Do you anticipate any resistance to this plan?

Part of the insecurity issues in the country is related to livestock, considering what is going on in the north-western part of the country. Seeing how banditry, and kidnapping, are going on and spreading to other part of the country. It has become a national security concern, even to those critics who don’t want to see anything good happening to herdsmen. So I don’t think there’s going to be resistance to this new development. Moreover, livestock is not only related to cows. So it cuts across all animals. The fishermen, cow owners, and small ruminant owners, this is something that cuts across tribal issues. This is for everyone. Who are the beneficiaries of the livestock value chain in the country? In the northern part, live cows are beneficial to them, while the end users value chain benefits the Southern part of the country.

Imagine the employment benefit cow is generating in Lagos State alone, where they consume 600 cows on a daily basis. So, when we say livestock, we are not referring to a Fulani man or a pastoralist, but in general terms.

President Tinubu has admitted it is very hard for people to stay away from their traditional and old ways of doing things. Will your members be willing to fully switch from open grazing and adopt ranching as the method of raising their herds?

Well, the confusion is, that we as an association of pastoralists never opposed ranching or settlement. But we are always agitating for a settlement that can suit the peculiarities of the pastoralists that we have in the country. You cannot go and import an alien system of settlement and think the Nigerian pastoralist can embrace. We can’t embrace it because it is capital-intensive as 70 to 80 per cent of Nigerian pastoralists are small hunters and farmers who has not more than 50 to 100 cows belonging to the entire family? So, if you say somebody with 50 cows has to acquire land in Abuja, build his own ranch, and grow his own grasses. By the time he acquires that, the cows might finish, because he will have to sell the entire cows before he gets land to feed the cow.

Although a lot of them are small farmers, that does not mean they can’t be settled. They just must be settled as a matter of necessity because the population is growing and will continue to grow against a land that does not increase. So, there has to be a system of settlement that must be embraced by the natural pastoralist.

And what is that system of settlement?

Nothing other than involving the system that suit pastoralist peculiarity who are mostly small hounder bounds. Under the ranching, we have so many models, individual ranch where one acquire lands if he has the capacity. You will drill your borehole, grow your pasta and it becomes assets for individual with over a thousand cow. This will help in milk production in larger quantity as the cows are healthily tamed. This type is for the elite. But for those who have smaller numbers, a community ranch is best fit.

Get a land even if it’s a 1,000 hecatares, call it a community ranch. Keep them there and take money from them as maintenance for the ranch. Develop feedlot, where cow from one to seven years can be kept there. (A feedlots, sometimes referred to as feed yards, are large, fenced areas of land on which cattle are kept and fed a diet of grains until being sent to a slaughterhouse). Now, a pastoralist can say I have ten calves that I want to keep in the feedlots. the feedlots owner will agree while giving the pastoralist his terms. These terms varies. For instance, he can say we will feed them for you, when they are ready for slaughter, we will bring them for sale after which we subtract our feeding money, and ratio from the profit made from the sale. Then the rest of the money is given to the pastoralist.

So, we can convert all the grazing reserves we have in the country into community ranches. Where thousand of pastoralist will be kept. That community ranch has to be fenced. This will also limit encroachment. Even if it’s 50 kilometer let it be fenced by the use of local materials. This will ensure that those pastoralist are confined in the community ranch while also getting them registered. Know their number, provide schools for them, medical centers, and vertinary clinics within the ranch.

These services won’t be free, they will pay for it. Also, they should be trained on how to propagate their grasses during the rainy season. Let there be dams of water and boreholes and sprinklers.

Will the local herders be willing to accept paying doctors to treat and improve the quality of their cattle?

Currently, they have doctors and they are not getting vaccinated for free. They buy drugs and pay their doctors who fend for their cows. They are practicing it currently, and nothing goes for free for them. They pay for everything and that is why they don’t trust the city people.

Once they see you around them, they think you want to take money from them through different means. Even the old hospital card that is taken for N50, if a local pastoralist comes, his charges will be N5,000. Because his illiteracy is being exploited. An average Nigerian pastoralist does not benefit anything from the government. The only thing he is associated with in the government is the police activities. This is when he is arrested, exploited and pays money. This is because they are the entire producers of the country’s protein needs. So, he is most ready to pay for whatever services will be beneficial to them, most especially, vetting his cows and administering drugs. So they will pay and are open to accept it.