By Gbenga Omotosho
Nobody saw it coming. Not the army of necromancers parading themselves as guardians of human destiny. Nor the soothsayers predicting all that lies in the belly of this interesting year. Nor the men of God who have issued predictions to guide the faithful. Nor the village fortune tellers on whose doors many knock before making any major move. Nor the elders who are the custodians of our collective wisdom. None.
In fact, if anybody had predicted that this day would come, he would have been scorned and derided as a fool seeking attention. He would have been dusnissed as a drunken motor park tout stricken by a strange fever.
After years of a bloody campaign – broken heads, devastated farms and shattered home (on both sides) – the trophy is here. Colonies for cows.
When Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbeh broke the news the other day, he attracted an avalanche of verbal assaults.
Suddenly, a cow’s life has become the envy of many, among them those who claim to have cried when the Federal Government missed its much-trumpeted goal of housing for all by the year 2000.
Ogbeh says the colonies for which no fewer than 16 governors have provided land will have all the facilities that herdsmen will need for their cattle – “water, grass, training for herdsmen, cattle breeding and insemination”. No more will these prized animals be forced to walk several kilometers on sometimes unfriendly terrain in search of green, lush pasture.
No more canes to whip them into line whenever their minders feel it is time to move on. No more broken hooves as a result of the long trekking everywhere and nowhere in particular. No more rage from farmers whose farmlands have been destroyed. No more rustling by desperate thieves who disappear with cows in hundreds as if they are some pins or needles.
It is a new life completely. A better life.
Now there will be an army of vet doctors and nurses to ensure that no calf gets sick. Cleaners will keep the environment spick and span. Gardeners will ensure that luxuriant fresh grasses are never in short supply. There will be no mad cow disease and other ailments that trouble this sacred animal.
No drinking from streams and dark, dirty and murky ponds with the attendant danger of contracting water-borne diseases. It is now clean, cold, fresh, pipe-borne water straight from the reservoir. Cow dung will no longer be scattered all over the place; instead, it will be gathered for some waste-to-wealth materials, such as manure.
Also likely on the cards is a subsidy for the cow as it is done in Europe, according to the honourable minister. Talk about the deification of cows. And the herdsman, who will no longer be a mere “daran daran” (herdsman) living in huts, but the proud owner of a colony, the envy of farmers who detest his movements as ruinous seasonal exercises.
Where are our animal rights activists? Where are those who claim – without any proof whatsoever – that we lack thinkers in government? Won’t they, for once, swallow their pride and hail this magical move?
The Yoruba who say contemptuously that a o le tori wipe a fe je’ran ka pe malu ni bu’oda (we can’t say just because we want beef we should revere the cow as an elder brother) may have to do some reframing of that common saying. By state policy, the cow’s status has changed – just like that.
Suddenly, cows have become the envy of all. A reliable source has just told me that grass cutter breeders have formed an association, which they hope will team up with piggery farmers, to demand their own colonies with all the appurtenances that go with such privileged facilities. They have hired an Abuja human rights lawyer, I am told, who is to file a writ at the high court to compel the Federal Government, its agents, privies, officers, servants, appointees, etc., etc., to accord them and their animals full recognition.
The breeders, according to a legal source, will be relying on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights to which Nigeria is, thankfully, a signatory.
Members of the Poultry Association, I have just learnt, are also contemplating a legal action to compel the government to give them colonies so as to be free from unruly neighbours who claim that the smell from their poultries poses some health hazards even as breakfast tables are never complete without their products. They are demanding equity and justice for themselves and their trade.
Rabbit and snail farmers, claiming that “all animals are equal”, are said to be waiting and watching how the courts will handle some of the matters that have been filed before launching their own legal battle. What’s good for the goose is sauce for the gander, they insist.
An intelligence source has told my friend’s cousin’s mum of a long meeting of security chiefs held somewhere in Isale Igangan in the heart of the great city of Lagos. Top on the agenda, he swore, was how to pacify dog breeders who have suddenly formed an association, which will fight for their right to colonies of theirs after so many years of neglect. The source, who pleaded not to be named because of the security implication of the matter, said the breeders thought it was time to call the bluff of neighbours who claim to have been disturbed by the barking of dogs.
Should the government turn a deaf ear to their demand, the source went on, the dog breeders will issue a seven-day ultimatum after which they will sack their vets and compound the unemployment we are all battling. Should the government remain adamant, they will then fix a date on which they will unleash their ferocious pets on our cities and towns. Should the government fail to act, they will then mount a national protest day. Their members will hit the street in their thousands. Their battle cry: “Colony-for-one, colony-for-all”.
Even before the cattle colonies open, those armchair critics who have no knowledge of the workings of a government or how such lofty policies are formulated have started raising eyebrows. Where will the land for the colonies come from? Will the owners pay tax? Why should a man come from Gorom-Gorom or Ngaoundere to Abafakyai or Apeinumbu to set up a colony in Yakoyo or Gumel or Ikot Abasi or Patani or Abudu?
How will the resulting clash of cultures be contained? Hasn’t nature put everybody in his own place? Is it not man’s disruption of natural arrangements that has landed us all in many troubles?
There seems to be so much ignorance of the ABC of a cattle colony. Benue State Governor Samuel Loraer Ortom has confessed that he doesn’t understand it. He insists that ranching is the antidote to the crises that have claimed many lives. “Does it mean that herdsmen will colonise Nigeria as Britain once did?” one fellow was quoted as saying at a newsstand.
Those who are ignorant of what a cattle colony means should not panic. The government is said to be planning a seminar to be addressed by renowned pastoralists. But it is not yet clear if there are plans to bring back nomadic education – the highly successful Gen. Ibrahim Babangida era’s scheme under which herders were to get western education.
After consuming billions of Naira, the programme collapsed under the weight of its many contradictions and sheer envy. Itinerant drummers were also yearning for their own schools. So were itinerant shoe makers, tailors, sugar cane vendors, water vendors, “suya” hawkers and all sorts of hustlers.
Is there no end to their envy?
