Violence is understood to have broken out in Agatu in Benue State between persons suspected to be herders and locals. Unconfirmed reports said there have been sporadic shooting across river Ochekwu (Ogbeyi G’okpa G’echo) by a set of combatants advancing towards Okokolo main town. The gun attacks have reportedly led to complete desertion of the areas by women and children.
About this same time in 2016, the same violence occurred along the same pattern, developing basically into a full cale war by the standard definition of war in terms of number of persons killed. Although Intervention has no idea what might have triggered this round of violence, Agatu is served by a large stretch of land that is wet all – year round and attractive to both herders and farmers.
Some groups are appealing to the Benue State governor, Rev. Fr. Hyacinth Alia the military, the police and other security agencies to swing into action. How far the appeal will go remains to be seen.
Key players in the global food chain call Nigerian beef ‘stick’ because the cows move on foot from one extreme of the country to the other in contrast to Australia, South Africa, Namibia and even Chad and, yet, Nigeria expects to have a positive national image
Violence in Agatu which falls into the rubric of communal violence is already a difficult set of discord to handle. In Nigeria, managing communal violence is made more complicated by the discourses around it. Both the Nigerian State and the citizens do not normally have anything to say than naming the ethno-cultural identity of the culprits instead of naming the crime. As such, they end up putting the ethnic identity of the conflict parties on trial. As the Nigerian State, like most national governments, is intimidated by mention of ethnicity, nobody is punished at the end of the day till the violence erupts again. So, the cycle goes on.
It is further compounded by a woolly policy on who owns the land. The Nigerian State says all lands are vested in it but, constitutionally, it says only someone who is indigenous to a particular state of the federation can be appointed to represent such a state. Trying to eat its bread and still have it.
Without a clear policy on who has final authority over land, the state itself is lost between “settlers” and indigenes which is the claim animating much of the violence across the country. It is compounded by a unique level of material underdevelopment of Nigeria whereby herding is still a nomadic process instead of ranches. Nomadism is even argued to be part of the culture of Fulani herders when it is actually class punishment for that category of farmers about which Fulani elite ought to be embarrassed.
Nigeria is today not listed as a global source of quality beef. In fact, the global food chain call Nigerian cows derogatory names because they are carried on foot from the extreme North to the extreme South when their counterparts in Europe and North America are well fed, in fact, better fed than human beings in much of Africa because Europeans do not want beef or animals that could transit diseases, especially pandemic. It is a crucial part of European Union foreign and security policy.
The tragedy in Nigeria is that nobody in successive administrations bother about this except perhaps Vice-Admiral Murtala Nyako on the one (he, like Audu Ogbeh, is very knowledgeable on this) hand and former governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom whose advocacy for ranching echoed well but substantially lost in the conflict between him and former president, Muhammadu Buhari.
Against the above background, it may be no more than an act of foolhardiness to expect any serious analysis of the current wave of this set of violence across the country. The Nigerian State is hoping it will just go away. The security agencies are overstretched and outflanked in terms of the sophistication of the outlaws challenging the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence that defines the state.
The Police do end up arresting perpetrators of some of the banditry or kidnapping that humiliates the Nigerian State but that comes mostly after the state has been made a laughing stock. Everyone chuckles, public officials appeal for calm, assuring they are on top of it while the citizens go and clap hands along with their pastors in the churches while their Muslim counterparts go to pray in the mosques and life goes on.
What a country!
