Ranching is the best way to avoid herdsmen/farmers conflicts
A herdsman with his cattle in Enugu
Sunday Aborisade, Abuja
The Federal Government declared on Tuesday that the gun-wielding herdsmen, attacking and killing residents of communities in various part of the country, were members of a terror group based outside the country.

The Minister of State for Agriculture, Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, stated this while addressing a public hearing on the attacks on farmers by herdsmen across the country, organised by the Joint Senate Committees on Agriculture and Rural Development and that of National Security and Intelligence.
Lokpobiri told the committee that the herdsmen they arrested could not speak any Nigerian languages, which had further established their claims of being foreigners.The minister explained that most of the herdsmen, arrested by security agents for launching bloody attacks on Nigerians, had confessed that they were citizens of some countries that bordered the northern part of Nigeria.
He said, “We have discovered that the herdsmen, attacking Nigerians across the country, are not Fulani but another gang of Boko Haram insurgents from other countries.
“Those arrested cannot speak Fulani or any other Nigerian language. Fulani herdsmen are going about with their legitimate business, looking for something to take care of their family.”
He attributed the uncontrollable mass movement of the herdsmen from the northern part of the country to the South to drought, which is currently ravaging the North and the unfortunate activities of the Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East geopolitical zone.
Lokpobiri said government had concluded plans to establish ranches across the country as currently being done in advanced countries such as the United States and Saudi Arabia, which produced high quality milk and beef.
He added that cattle in Nigeria could not produce the required quantity of milk because of the mobile nature of rearing them.
He explained that nine states had already volunteered to donate at least 5,000 hectares of land to be used as ranches, saying only 144, out of the 415 ranches established in the past, were currently functional.
The minister said since the government knew that ranches without grasses were useless, the Federal Government was considering importing seed grass into the country to enhance their protein intake.
He explained that in order to increase the number of 19 million cows in the country, the Federal Government also planned to import semen from Europe to be injected into female cows so that they could produce many calves at a time.
Stakeholders, in their various submissions, supported the establishment of ranches but expressed divergent views on the creation of grazing reserve routes as currently being proposed by some people through a bill in the House of Representatives.
While Fulani herdsmen, under the aegis of the Miyetti Allah, expressed support for the creation of special grazing routes for their cattle across some states from the North to the South, farmers in the various states disagreed with them.
The National Legal Adviser of Miyetti Allah, Mr. Bello Tukur, said the cattle breeders supported the creation of grazing reserve routes and the establishment of a federal ministry for livestock development.
The representative of the Tiv ethnic nationality, Mr. Edward Ujege; representative of the Igbo farmers, Mr. Paddy Njoku; and the representatives of the Plateau State Government, among others, vehemently opposed the creation of grazing routes to avoid clashes.
They also suggested adequate sensitisation on the proposed bill on grazing reserve currently before the federal parliament to avoid any form of misconception.
The Chairman of the joint Senate panel, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, however, caused a stir when he told the stakeholders, who were opposed to the idea of grazing reserve routes, that the nation’s constitution guarantees freedom of movement and rights of Nigerians to live in any part of the country.
He said, “Nobody can stop government from acquiring land anywhere in Nigeria. Government is government. If anybody thinks he is violent, government has monopoly of violence.”