This is the season of press conferences, and since all of them are being driven by 2023 fears or hopes, I had no difficulty getting a topic for this edition of the column.
And for me, Benue 2023 is a familiar topic. In fact, in April this year, I wrote a widely circulated and well-received article entitled: Ortom, Benue 2023 and the Open Grazing Prohibition Law. This is one of the links https://www.thecable.ng/ortom-open-grazing-prohibition-law-and-benue-2023/amp.
And as I readied to write this column, I saw this Facebook post by the inimitable Revd Peters Ichull. “2023 is a different election season. Don’t jump in because you want power. Benue must be your passion. If you can’t say ‘no’ to the killings, withdraw NOW!”
For some of us who believe in signs, this was validation: that I was on the right path.
Whether it’s my opinion-piece in April, the emergency APC press conferences or Peters Ichull’s post, the common denominator is the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law enacted by the Benue State Government in 2017.
And whereas it’s a season of press conferences in Benue and about Benue, it’s been a season of enacting open grazing prohibition laws in Nigeria’s South.
The law, under different nomenclatures, is now operational in: the South-South (Rivers, Bayelsa and Akwa Ibom states); the South-East (Enugu state); the South-West (Ondo, Lagos and Ogun states); and in the North-East (Taraba state).
And even in the North-West, where, like other parts of the Core-North, stakeholders continue to equate cows with human beings or even value them higher,the President’s governor, Aminu Masari, is being persuaded by the failure of appeasement to move along with Nigeria.
And he did something remarkable. Even though Nigerians have been seduced or cowed into calling murderous Fulani-herdsmen “Bandits,” he called them by name: “Fulani people.” And, a thoroughly exasperated Masari spared Nigerians that hackneyed line about the killer-herdsmen being “foreigners!”
Did I forget Plateau, in the North-Central? No. I was only saving her for our desserts. The Governor, Rt. Hon. Simon Lalong, has, indeed, come a long. He seems to be a changed person from the insensitive Lalong, who, following the Jan. 1, 2018 massacre of 73 Benue people, told State House Correspondents, after seeing the President: “I warned Ortom!” (How do you warn the victim; and not the invader?).
You may want to gasp or faint, but, please, don’t: Just take it that Lalong has finally had his rude awakening: that terrorists have no friends!
The foregoing tells us that ranching is not only the international best practice as far as animal husbandry is concerned, it shouts to the heavens that it’s an idea whose time has come, and inevitably so.
Small people, with colonised minds or big men, with kidnapped consciences, may not want it mentioned as they gorge themselves ravenously on Esauesque delicacies, but ranching is unquestionably the biggest issue of the moment, deserving of robust discourse. And it will remain so till 2023 and even beyond.
And yes, the simple-minded, perhaps congenitally so, may remain here, trapped or immobilized in their crumbling universes of petty obsessions, traditional hate, primitive jealousies and political arthritis, but Nigeria is now awake and moving!
Anyone in doubt can look at the flurry of activities in the legislatures of most of the Southern States and even at Plateau and Katsina!
So, something is happening in Nigeria, and it’s bigger than the rash of emergency, bombastic press conferences. And this is why the Abuja press conference of Benue-APC on August 30th or its derivatives: the Makurdi rally in support of Akume/President Muhammadu Buhari on September 6th as well as the subsequent Ihyarev Elders Press Conference are really juvenile. It’s like the case of retarded children, trying to catch or bring down an air balloon by matching its shadow!
As Benue affirmed loudly during the 2019 general elections, the law banning open grazing in the state is the People’s Law, and not the governor’s law.
At this point, let me get a few quotes from my April piece.
“Elsewhere, 2023 may be just another election year or another chance at power-grab, but for Benue state, 2023 will be a revalidation of our right to life, our right to live on our ancestral land and our right to human dignity.
I explained: “In other words, Benue 2023 will be squarely and categorically about checking the hydra-headed menace of herdsmen, and the regime of insecurity it has spawned by way of murderous bandits and criminal gangs across the state. And the principal instrument of achieving this will be the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law.”
Then, I hit the hammer on the nail: “Aspirants/candidates with grammatical sophistications, eminent preparations, vaunting ambitions, academic pedigrees, cognate experiences, stakeholder endorsements, godfather anointings and zonal arithmetic – whether individually or collectively – will be mere jokers if they detach themselves from this all-important law.
“Let the truth be told, and it is hereby told, the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law is not merely about agriculture or its value-chain economics – the law is further about the identity, the dignity and the survival of the Benue man beyond the decade.”
And that is where we are today. I state, without ambiguity or equivocation, that a hundred press conferences by the politically-castrated in Abuja or Abidjan, a thousand congregations of the walking-wounded, a million screams by the electorally-impotent and a billion alliances with foreign constituencies cannot and will not repeal the Benue People’s Law.
As the People’s Governor, Inyam-Ikyume Samuel Ortom, has reiterated, again and again, this law is cast in marble. This is not sentiments or propaganda; and there is nothing political about it: All the law seeks is to provide security for all Benue indigenes or residents – be they in APC, SDP, APGA or PDP or even the apolitical farmers, who just want to cultivate their ancestral lands in peace.
It appears Benue-APC has not yet recovered from the wrenching hangover of its wholesale rejection by the Benue voters in 2019. Furthermore, the party is badly heamorhaging. This is partly due to the massive evacuation of its rank and file into the PDP and partly due to its morbid insensitivity to the continuous killings of Benue people by killer-herdsmen. As it is, 2023 is looking increasingly grim for the party, and all hopes of a return to power are investments in costly illusions.
So, every discerning watcher of Benue politics knows that the APC has been in worsening pains. And every alert person also knows that the party could not, hitherto, openly wail about its woes without attracting to itself the inglorious tag of a “Cry-cry party” and its faithful, “Cry, cry babies.”
So, what did the Benue APC do? It ate its bread of sorrows quietly, softening its anguish with philosophical proverbs, and bidding its time for a moment of catharsis. That moment came when Ortom, grief-striken with the unending killings of his people, appeared on Channels Television, and charged the Buhari presidency with failing to protect Benue people.
Predictably, the presidential spokesman, Malam Garba Shehu, left the major issues that Ortom raised, and began to dwell, strangely, on minor issues such as Ortom changing parties five times or having no political principles! (As if those with principles don’t suffer pain)!
But unconcerned with such questions, the Benue-APC, with its festering wounds, saw the presidential opening as a good opportunity to openly vent its frustrations without drawing tearful attention to itself. Put another way, Garba Shehu provided Benue-APC – its juggernauts and minions all – a cathartic moment to vent its bottled up anger since its 2019 debacle; a convenient reason to let loose its impotent rage against those it holds guilty of architecting that humiliating debacle.
And this is why, like the presidency, Benue-APC artfully dodged the issues Ortom raised, and, rather, chose to, at best, major in minors or, to, at worse, obscure the issues.
First, on the day of the Abuja press conference (30th August), Benue-APC shunned a scheduled Benue Stakeholders Meeting at the People’s House, Makurdi, to which it, like all stakeholders, had been invited.
Their leader, this distinguished, Ex-Gov. George Akume (a serving minister), gathered his henchmen for the press conference in faraway Abuja! Was the choice of Abuja, which is, incidentally, the seat of Federal power, a strategic move to enhance their visibility to Aso Rock, thereby enlisting Federal support for their faltering Project 2023? Or given their crude distortions, their scandalous evasions, their deliberate obfuscations, their shameful euphemisms, the half-truths, their outright lies against Benue people …in fact, given the whole lot of their terminological inexactitudes – was the choice of Abuja a cowardly move to shield themselves from popular anger while their festival of shame lasted?
Whatever the reason for the Abuja-venue, the perspiring leaders of Benue-APC, advertently or inadvertently, loudly told Nigeria how disconnected they are from Benue people whom they desperately want to, once again, hypnotize and lord over.
This column doesn’t have the space to reply to every inanity of that Akume Press Conference or the one from “Ihyarev APC Elders” that followed – that is not even an objective. There have been enough objective and factual counters which have effectively demolished that inverted pyramid of lies erected by Benue-APC partisans.
This column only seeks to expose the Benue-APC outing in Abuja for what it really was to every critical mind: A Festival of Shame, actuated by Treachery, decked in the garish colours of Opportunism and hosted by a desperate grouping of the Walking Wounded.
(To be continued)