You can’t kill a cow.
You can’t caution the herders.
The farmers, tired of crying and bellyaching, are fighting back.
Herders are killing farmers.
Farmers are killing herders.
Governors are paying condolence visits, addressing press conferences. Those who are not making statewide broadcasts are ‘raising the alarm’ or organising security summits.
Then ‘they’ are asking for Daddy. All the where-is-our-daddy noise would have been amusing if it wasn’t so predictable and annoying. Yes, it is good for Daddy to be home so we have someone to look up to. But this is a national issue and we are not kids.
Maybe President Bola Tinubu should not have gone to France – or England. Maybe then, the blood sucking demons of Plateau State would have settled for the blood of goats and chickens. Maybe if President Tinubu had returned immediately we started looking for him, the Inspector-General of Police would have caught the demons and caged them. Maybe the presence of Tinubu at the Villa would have encouraged and inspired the Chief of Army Staff to round up the demons of the blood suckers in Benue State.
Pray, apart from the regular we-commiserate-with-the-people of Plateau communities and the flat and familiar threats of the-culprits-will-be-brought-to-book, what else follows the visit of a Governor or President to scenes of communal clashes in Nigeria?
Unfortunately we are a people who ignore leprosy and scratch a goddamn itch. For everything that goes wrong, there’s always someone to blame. We just join forces and voices to castigate that one person while ignoring the real reasons for our pain or how we got to the pitch of the blame game. I think it’s some kind of national therapy for us. We find it easier to find one person to blame than to summon courage to find and fix our problem. What is even worse is that we act as if we talk constantly about any problem, the cacophony will blow them away. Or isn’t that the reason Benue State was organising a security summit in one breath and in another admitting (or alerting) that it could not guarantee the safety of VIPs. Only in Nigeria would you find people talking about their pain instead of taking ‘panadol’.
A few days ago, I traveled the stretch between Epe Resort and Molajoye in Lagos State. On both sides of the well-paved road are thick, very green endless hectares of palm trees. They must have been there for generations. Guess: What are we doing with all that natural wealth currently? No, we are not tapping palm wine or producing palm oil or even making brooms and baskets from all that ready goodness. No, that is too much hard work, I guess. We are parcelling them out to estate developers. Yes, we are felling thousands of palm trees to make room for three bedroom flats and luxury duplexes. These so-called ‘estate developers’ after building fancy gates and fences have gone home. Most of the estates and their fancy names have remained just fancy gates and white fences in the last six years that I have monitored them.
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My point? It is only in this country that you destroy natural wealth to build what you are not sure of. It is only in Nigeria that you will find grown, very educated and supposed civilised men looking for a president instead of facing the real reason why our land is flowing with the blood of children and dismembered parts of the aged.
My second sad point: The killings in Plateau, Benue will continue for many years to come. Maybe for another 100 years. Shocked? Shocking.
But I have a few thoughts on how we got to this land of death. There is a region where education, vocational or western is played down. There is a land where nomadic cattle rearing is a culture and proof of humanity, superiority or even manhood. Does that region still exist in 2025, the year of our Lord? Has that region improved its rating on out-of-school children board? No. Has that region agreed that there can be ranches for cattle where thousands of cows can graze and the ranchers can make real good money, including hard currency, from exports? No. Does that region have enough land and grass to feed its cattle? No. The cattle keep moving, foraging, grazing. They keep walking, straying into farmlands of honest, hardworking farmers, destroying full harvest, full-year of sweat and back breaking work. The farmers cry each time they wake up to heart wrenching devastation. Yet the cows who wreak them are sacred and their herders are sacred cows too.
For years now, each time a cow was killed, farmers were beheaded or disemboweled. Soon, farmers started fighting back, killing herders and their cows. Today, corpses are piling up and everywhere is dripping blood and gore.
Over the years, the government, federal and state, have failed to do what is needed. The educated governors have failed to educate the masses. They lack the political will to stare down the old uneducated clerics who profit from the almajiri system. The so-called political leaders pray five times a day but lack the fear of God to see the uneducated boys and young herders as anything more than voters, disposable tissues, and tools to further their selfish interests. Their children speak with Canadian and British accents. They tell the handsome young herders that trekking hundreds of miles in the forest is their lives, their heritage.
Neither the federal or state governments have built one single ranch since they started talking about it. For as long as we pretend that millions of uneducated herders and their living ancestors who tell them that walking in the forest is life, are not dangerous, blood will continue to flow. For as long as we have a people, millions of them, who believe in land boundaries, ancestral lands and fighting over parcels of land, for that long will we continue to have mass burials.
Meaningless meetings and five-minute broadcasts have not and will never solve this problem. We must be intentional about tackling this from its root. The federal government must double down and industrialise agriculture. It must build ranches. It must consciously invest everything in lifting the north. Children of the north must go to school. Nigeria’s north must produce more engineers, doctors, and nurses. All the governors and political elders and leaders from other regions must come together, work with the truly God-fearing leaders of the north to rescue the north from its captors, the ones who profit from the bloodshed.
This regular festival of human sacrifice cannot stop where about 5000 smooth-talking politicians talk about where power must be. Just a few people in the north enjoy a ‘northern presidency’. Only the children of those few school in Switzerland and live in New York. The voters and their children are socialised to mass produce children after mass weddings. They have been told that it is their destiny to serve and slave.
Just imagine the number of years a Northerner had led this country at different points and ask yourself why the North still has these high figures of polio victims and out-of-school children. Why are all the Okada riders at your bus stop from the north? Why are all the nice buildings, resorts and Nigeria’s remaining industries outside the north? Why is the north so poor while its leaders are rich?
A plot of land in Banana Island in Lagos is N1 billion. You do not see property owners there stabbing one another. Why? They are educated. Like some of my kinsmen in Osun whose land goes for just 500k per plot, the herdsmen and farmers are killing one another over land that money is not running after.
Until and unless the leaders of the cattle business and the proponents of indigenes and settlers nonsense are educated on how they can make real money the modern way, the killings won’t stop.
When Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan travelled during crises, the opposition and those ‘instructed’ to do so stridently condemned their trips. We blamed a lot of our problems on Yar’Adua’s sick leave. Why would Buhari travel so much, so often? As if our problems were or are afraid of the president’s presence. Laughable.
Do you see the federal government funding ranches? Do you see the northern leaders deemphasising age-old ways and hauling the almajiris to school or teaching them coding? Do you see young northerners in the cattle business quitting nomadic life? Do you see the farmlands of Benue and Plateau safe from cow and devastation they leave behind? Do you see farmers going to bed with their two eyes closed and returning home safely after every farm day?
Do you?
I don’t.
Why then do you think the killings will stop?
. egbemode3@gmail.com.
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