By Polycarp Onwubiko
In a smart and clever way to turn the minds of Nigerians away from decentralized security architecture known as "State Police," some petty-minded Senators who could be described as covert puppets of the supposed "Fulani Feudal Oligarchy" who could be said that they have nothing meaningful to contribute to the socioeconomic transformation of Nigeria came up with what they tagged: "National Animal Husbandry And Ranches Committee."
This committee is a deftly fabricated potential money-guzzling bureaucracy to fill the pockets of people from a section of the country.
Instead of urging the Senators
to dump the harebrained initiative, the Senate president, Godswill Akpabio gave
his nod for the debate. It is astonishing that some people would want cattle
business which, like other private businesses of other ethnic groups in the
country to be the responsibility of the Federal Government. Of course, it is a
sponsored Bill sequel to the "sense of entitlement" of a section of
the country who would want the federal government to be doing virtually
everything for them at the expense and detriment of the ethnic nationalities in
the country.
It bears restating the fact
that cattle rearing is purely a private business and has to be accepted as such
by the federal government. Cattle owners have the wherewithal to purchase vast
expanse of land to establish ranches because other people of other ethnic
nationalities doing business that require purchase of lands purchase lands and
never prodded federal or state governments to negotiate lands for them and even
provide the basic amenities and infrastructures that enhance their businesses.
It is not the ragtag cattle
drivers who live like wild animals in the forest and jungles that own the
cattle; they are just victims of apartheid cultural practice based on class
distinction. While the children of the cattle owners are being educated and
even sent overseas for studies, these cattle drivers are sentenced to a
lifestyle akin to untamed and wild animals hence their ready resort to
mindlessly slaughter people who prevent their herds from entering farms and
eating up farm products while the supposed Nigerian security agents pretend to
be waiting order from Aso Villa for action to drive away the obviously Islamic
invaders who are sponsored for ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion in
Nigeria. Who is fooling whom?
Fact remains that the
nonsensical Bill should be thrown into the shrivel machine in the Red Chamber
and president Tinubu should fast tract
measures to convoke Constituent Assembly to reinvent the principles of federal
system of government and a People's Constitution to align with the deep
yearnings and aspirations of the ethnic nationalities that have been bearing
the brunt of sectional policies, programmes and projects at their expense and
detriment hence the endless cries of marginalization and suppression by a
section of the country which believe that they would be dictating how Nigeria
should be governed. Time for this self-calculating mindset has gone.
Polycarp Onwubiko JP, a veteran
journalist, author and public policy analyst writes from Awka, Anambra State.
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