Afenifere To Buhari: You Have Fulani Ethnic Agenda, Grazing Reserves Worse Than Cattle Colony, RUGA, Grazing Routes

Following President Buhari’s Thursday approval of annexing lands for Fulani herders in 25 states, Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere, has described the directive by President Muhammadu Buhari for review of 368 Grazing Reserves across 25 States as a plot to annex land for herders.

The group said it did not surprise Nigerians the President is still wasting tax- payers’ scare resources on a programme, which it noted lacked all conceivable growth capacity.

Afenifere described the policy on grazing reserves as the implementation of the script by the Fulani intelligentsia.

Secretary General of Afenifere, Sola Ebiseni, in a statement in Akure said the policy reeked of odiferous stench of ethnic agenda for settlement of the Fulanis in the ancestral lands of other ethnic nationalities.

The group said non-Fulani Nigerians were not stupid and aware that the concept of grazing reserve was a worse form of official dispossession of their ancestral lands for the inheritance and use of the Fulani than Cattle Colony, RUGA and Grazing Routes, which they have rejected.

According to the body: “We recall and support the Resolutions of the Nigerian Governors, particularly from the South of the country, banning all forms of open grazing and it does not matter to us that some elected governors, in a federation, would condescend so low to functioning as members of a Committee presided over by an appointed aide of the President, no matter the name in which his office is painted.

“The concept of Grazing Reserves, otherwise known as Hurumi, which was introduced during the colonial and immediately after independence failed in the north particularly in the Middle Belt provinces, notwithstanding a monolithic one North government and permissive land use regime.

“For the umpteenth time, let the President be told that the constitution which he reveres relentlessly and the Land Use Act which derives equal force there from, extol the majesty of the people over their land.

“Even the Governor who holds the land in his State in trust for the people cannot dispossess any citizen

thereof, except for proven overriding public interest through the due process of law.

“The current exercise is not only a waste of tax payers’ money, it is a sweet pipe dream in a fool’s paradise. Every herder has a State of origin.

“Let the governments of the respective states make arrangements for settled life for them in the territory where the culture is fully appreciated.”