Publisher of Ovation Magazine, Dele Momodu has weighed in on the herdsmen and farmers crises, asking why cows have become so important that they now form a topic for national discourse.
Momodu using social media platform Instagram, lamented how marauding herdsmen are returning Nigeria to the stone age and antiquity with their nefarious activities.
“We are discussing cows everyday. A cow business is supposed to be a personal and private business. If you want to sell your cows, you want to breed your cows, set it up as a business. Your business stops where mine begins. You cannot bring your cows on my farmland and say I have no right to complain. If you must do any business, do it according to the dictates of running a business. We are not the largest cow producing or breeding country in the world. We are not even among the top 20.” The real cow breeding and meat producing nations are not even making noise, Momodu said in the eight minutes video
He continued: “How come we want to continue to practice archaism? We want to remain in the stone age. We want to remain in antiquity. People carrying cows up and down inside the forest, and then you endanger the lives of people. A man who studied abroad, got his Ph.D then came back, one illiterate will just kidnap him, take his money and kill him inside the bush. Is that how to run a country? When you say that they will reply that you don’t like government. No! I have brilliant Fulani friends. Why do we want to reduce an entire race to cows? It’s wrong. It’s even unfair on the hardworking Fulanis. It’s unfair on the brilliant Fulanis who went to school.
“It’s sad that we have reduced the nation to a nation of cows. What’s so special about beef? The Yorubas have a saying that ‘we cannot start calling the cow uncle because we want to eat beef. And then we are told that these cattle rearers are not even Nigerians but they have freedom to come into Nigeria while we are shutting borders against people in Seme and all those places. We are shutting our borders against those who want to do even their legitimate business. We are shutting borders and complicating life for our children who are going to school in Cotonou, Lome and Accra. We make life difficult but cattle rearers can stroll in and out anywhere and we say they have every right.”
He advised affected governors to demand and enforce a ban on cattle wanderers in their forest.