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Understanding the Fulani herdsmen impasse 05 Feb 2018

Mass funeral on Jan. 11, 2018 of victims of the fatal attacks of the Fulani herdsmen in Benue State.

The January 11th mass burial in Benue State was a rare occasion that victims of the Fulani herdsmen attacks got passable decent burials. The 73 bodies involved were buried in coffins and their graves were individualised. The elaborate funeral organised by the state government, attracted Benue leaders who appeared outraged by the killings.
    
Until then, victims of the massacres by itinerant herders were routinely dumped in communal graves, unceremoniously. The herdsmen also get the same meagre burials when killed in counter-attacks. Such mass graves now dot Kaduna, Zamfara, Adamawa, Taraba, Plateau and Benue communities. Instead of stopping the attacks, the Nigerian authorities have been functioning as disinterested undertakers.

A photograph of one of the graves before it was covered shows bodies that were not even straightened out. This and other similar gory images are all over the internet and on social media. They are sure to subject the families of the victims to life-long nightmares and heartaches.

But, really, who are the Nigerians being buried in this way? Unmistakably, they are Nigeria's poor. They are Nigerians who, in the 21st century, still practice subsistence farming. They also include some unfortunate Nigerians, whose employment as cattle herders, make them just about homeless. Although these groups of poor Nigerians are distinguished on the basis of ethnicity and religion, they have in common a country that produces mass poverty from resource abundance, as a result of the poverty of their rich leaders.

These poor Nigerians are ignored in life and dishonoured in death. The mass burial in Benue provided an opportunity for token recognition of the decedents. But for their families, this must be too little, too late.

It is the poor and the powerless that often meet gruesome ends and then given mass burials. Children who die soon after birth are often given mass burials. During the “Irish Holocaust,” many children of unmarried women in homes run by nuns died of malnutrition. Their bodies were stacked and piled in shrouds or coffins in septic tanks. Unmarked mass graves mostly contain the remains of victims of famine in the same 19th-century Ireland.

During the Franco-Prussian War, while most officers were buried in individual graves, rank-and-file soldiers on both sides were buried often in communal graves. But our memory is still fresh on how hundreds of Shiite Muslims were summarily executed in December 2015 by the Nigerian military in Kaduna state. With the connivance of the more powerful Sunni Muslim leaders, the victims were dumped in secret mass graves.

The foregoing is without prejudice to history, when communal graves were used to bury victims of the plaques. When the Bubonic plague or the “Black Death” ravaged Europe in the 14th century, and when the Great Plague of 1665 killed over 100,000 people in England, the conventional burial infrastructures and procedures were overwhelmed.

All manners of political and religious motives have been read into the killings by the Fulani herdsmen. Plausible as they may be, they speak to the symptoms and not the cause of the wanton killings. Although Nigerians are outraged by the common sights of the Fulani herdsmen carrying sophisticated weapons, but the herders themselves are part of the “expendables.” In most cases, they don't own the cattle they lead to find grazing. Rather than give the herders some education, the cattle owners, many of which belong to the rich and powerful northern oligarchy, would rather arm them. The herdsmen are, invariably, consigned to abject nomadic lifestyle, which their employers or oppressors insist is cultural.

A mercantile wing of the ignoble Fulani oligarchy, Miyetti Allah, has been blustering. Its leadership insists that it is too early in the Nigerian civilization to organise cattle-rearing as business. In the extant unstructured trade, the herders can kill or be killed. Like their Almajiri cousins, whose marginal existence serves the political agenda of the oligarchy as unthinking block-voters, the herders now operate somewhat as a political tool.

The leaders on the other side of the conflict have hardly fared better. They insist on the territorial integrity of their states. They say they don't have lands to allocate as “grazing colonies.” But while being protective of their land – which relates to their authority – they have done precious little to improve the lives of their poor people who live in the farming communities. For these leaders, it is also too early to transform rural agriculture into mechanised farming.

We must find solutions to this saga, not least because the victims are the weak among us. One of such solutions is to develop effective strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation around the Nigerian territory of the Lake Chad Basin. As the Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, told me last year in my interview of him, the lake has shrunk by 90 percent over the years. Apart from the security crisis this has caused in the northeast for years, the recession of the lake has been forcing southward internal migration, as the herders search for grass and water for their cattle. One hopes that the first international conference on the Lake Chad Basin, which comes up this February under the auspices of President Muhammadu Buhari, will produce implementable solutions that would be followed through.

Transformation of Nigeria's agriculture from subsistence to mechanised farming has been long overdue. Public farming-community partnership would be necessary, especially for the provision of capital investment in machineries. Farming at scale will see the expansion of agric insurance to the communities to cover risks.

In the meantime, the government must indemnify the farmers for financial losses caused by grazing encroachment on their farms, and pay compensations to the families of victims of the attacks and counter-attacks. This commitment would compel the government to take necessary security actions to reduce future payouts.

Similarly, open grazing of cattle is anachronistic and must transform to ranching. This will not only increase the productivity of the trade, it will support meaningful living for the herders and increase the feasibility of reaching some of them with educational programmes.

President Buhari must intervene in the conflict as a matter of his responsibility to safeguard the lives of Nigerians. He is in a good position to address both the political and security issues that fuel the crisis. It is unacceptable that the killings by the Fulani herdsmen is with impunity. Whatever the political support the herders enjoy now is definitely not sustainable, in a multi-ethnic Nigeria that Buhari himself believes must remain one united country.