President Bola Tinubu has taken some firm steps to signal his readiness to address head-on the problems challenging the livestock sector, as well as the headaches the sector poses to the rest of the population.
He is prepared to create a separate ministry for it from the current Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development that livestock is domiciled in. He has also set up a livestock reform committee of which he is the Chairman, with the former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, as the “co-chairman”.
We feel very reassured that Tinubu, who has a strong business background as well as being grounded in politics, is spearheading the reforms, the full package of which are yet to be unfolded to the public. We urge him and his committee to eschew every iota of politics of ethnicity, religion and other primordialities and see this reform as strictly a means of bringing the livestock sector into the mainstream of the Nigerian economy. The crop sector of our agriculture is a mainstay of the economy, with clear contributions to our annual gross domestic product, GDP.
Livestock used to play a big role in hides and skin production apart from providing food. It can do a lot more if its value chains are professionally developed, and this is what we expect the Tinubu/Jega committee to do, in collaboration with critical stakeholders.
For the livestock reform to work, nomadism must end. Animals must be restricted to ranches. Herdsmen militias must be disbanded and disarmed, and non-Nigerian herders must be deported to their own countries. These are the steps that will remove the security threat posed by herdsmen against farmers and other law-abiding citizens.
Moreover, it must be understood that livestock business is not the preserve of any ethnic group any less than fishing and farm cultivation are. It is a business and occupational effort that anybody can choose to embrace or invest in. Therefore, favourable conditions should be created for anyone, including state governments, who want to exploit the incentives that will be created to freely do so.
We must do away with the old mindset that livestock agriculture is for a particular ethnic group. The herders also deserve good education and settlement in their home states or legitimately acquired properties in any part of the country to thrive as peaceful and law-abiding citizens.
For as long as herdsmen continue to roam from one end of the country to the other with their animals, the insecurity we suffer will never end. Also, efforts to forcibly settle them on properties that already belong to other Nigerians will continue to be resisted. Livestock farming should never be an instrument for “empire building”. That is unconstitutional.
This committee must get it right.
