Mr. President, welcome back home from your working leave. I hope investors are heeding your call to come and invest in our blessed country. Today, my subject is a familiar issue and I have broached it several times. It is the question of establishing ranches across the country. I am aware of the Professor Attahiru Jega Committee report, a committee set up by you, which underlined the enormous potential in the livestock business.

The idea of establishing ranches across the country is a controversial issue and is politically-laden than what I see as your mere business perspective. But I think your intention is not to hand over our country to a tiny group that has perpetually sought to maintain hegemony over the rest of the country which other nationalities have continually resisted. Mr President, shine your eyes, as we say in our local lingo.

Interestingly, the man you put in charge of the Livestock Ministry, Mukhtar Maiha, has realised the futility of building ranches across the country, in other words, he has come to terms with the unwisdom in trying, by hook or crook, insert cattle colony into states of the federation. The minister reportedly canvassed a business model designed to eliminate, as it were, open grazing through the creation of a commercial market for grass and fodder that would keep herders in the northern region.

The design will allow entrepreneurs in the southern part of the country to harness grass and sell to cattle owners. In his words:  “There is so much grass and fodder in the southern part of the country where they go for ranching (grazing). Why can’t we come up with a business model that people can cut those grasses, bale them, and bring them up north to sell?…Just like you take rice and beans and other food stuff from northern part of Nigeria to market basins in the southern part of this country. It’s a symbiotic relationship. So, this is the thinking that we need to change, and this is what we’re trying to address”. 

There is nothing original in this thinking. It is, in reality, coming to terms with the pathway, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the sage, had articulated as back as April 7, 1960, as opposition leader in the Federal Parliament. He had addressed the parliament on the need to focus on agriculture, health and education by the regions and the central authorities to also focus on agriculture which then was the mainstay of the national economy.

Papa Awo said inter alia: “For example, there is nothing to stop the Federal Government from engaging in industry and in agriculture ventures—there is nothing to stop them from establishing large-scale ranches in the Northern Region. There is nothing to stop them from providing refrigerated trains to transport slaughtered cattle from certain parts of the Northern Region. The advantages of this, both to producers and to consumers, are obvious. The producers will be able to get more for their cattle than they do now, and the consumers will be able to get really good meat to eat, particularly those who live in Lagos”.  

While the above seems reasonable, the road is clogged with policy disarticulation. The same minister has just turned around to unveil a plan to convert the so-called 417 grazing reserves across  the country into what they have called “Renewed Hope Livestock Villages (RHLVS). In its conception, the villages will have stable electricity, schools, healthcare facilities, markets, abattoir, veterinary clinics, irrigation systems, good roads network, portable water and security infrastructure.

In a manner of fast-tracking the projects, the ministry has entered into an agreement with the Rural Electrification Agency. As usual, piloting would be done in places such as Wwazangi Reserve in Gombe State, Wasem, Plateau State, Gongoshin in Adamawa, Kau and  Bwari Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory. Folks, how is this different from the RUGA model, otherwise known as the National Livestock.

Transformation Plan (NLTP) that was resisted by many ethnic nationalities in Nigeria under the Buhari administration? NLTP had aimed to build ranches, provide social amenities and ostensibly foster peace between herders and farmers and modernised livestock management in the country. 

I recall the words of wisdom of Dan Agbese on this controversial issue a few years ago. In his piece titled, “Ruga: The steps not taken”, in The Guardian 12 July 2019, he advised that “A sensitive leader must learn to walk the middle path by ensuring that he is not captive to either side. Not the easiest thing to do in a country where the craving for applause quite often trumps hard-headed thinking and the grave demand of leadership”.

Mr President, do not railroad a multinational entity into an internal colony of a tiny group that seeks to dominate the country and has retarded development in this country since its incursion into this part of Africa in the mid-seventeenth century culminating in the JIhad of 1804. Please don’t be blinded into this toxic policy direction in the name of the second term. As we say in my part of Nigeria, Osayande (God owns the day). 
Professor Akhaine is of the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University.