Tobi Adebayo
A Senior Advocate of Nigeria and human rights activist, Femi Falana has said the First Republic gazette on open grazing only applied to the Northern region of Nigeria.
Falana said this in response to a statement made by President Muhammadu Buhari on open grazing in the country.
Buhari, during an interview, had said that he instructed the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami to dig up a First Republic gazette that provided grazing routes for cattle rearers in the country, in order to put an end to the farmers-herders clash.
Reacting to the statement during an interview on Arise News monitored by THISNIGERIA, Falana said no such gazette existed in the Southern part of Nigeria.
He also stated that Buhari had no control over lands outside of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
“I think there was a lack of proper briefing here. He only said that without taking into cognisance, the development that has been made by some state governments on open grazing. The applicable law in Nigeria today is the Land Use Act which is entrenched in the constitution. It states that every land in a state is under the control of its governor. The President does not have control over any land outside of the Federal Capital Territory. The AGF cannot go around states looking for land to acquire without the consent of the governors. Buhari is not a lawyer. You cannot blame him. Whoever embarrassed the President by not telling him about the non-existence of a gazette that provided grazing routes in the South should be questioned and sanctioned.
“The last grazing reserves law was made in 1964 and was only applicable to the Northern region. It was not applicable to the Western, Mid-Western and Eastern regions. The Western region had ranches in Epe, Iseyin, Akungba, Oke-Ape in Ekiti, which were established in 1956 under the Obafemi Awolowo administration. The East also had the Obudu Cattle Ranch established in 1951. There was no uniform policy on Animal Husbandry. The regions were on their own and that was the beauty of Federalism. Nobody was moving cattle from the North to the South at that time because there was no basis. There are no grazing routes as claimed by Buhari. Even in the North, grazing routes have been seized by farmers and it is going to be a serious legal battle to recover them.
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“This matter has gone beyond the Southern Governors. It is now an issue of National Policy. The Northern Governors Forum has stood against open grazing and announced that they have adopted the National Livestock Transformation Plan of the Federal Government. There is a unanimity of purpose in this regard,” he said.
Falana further stressed the need for policy consistency by the Federal Government.
“In 2016, former Minister for Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh announced that the FG had acquired 55,000 hectares of land for cattle rearing. Later, the government came up with the idea of cattle colonies a.k.a RUGA which was opposed. After a whole lot of back and forth, in 2018, the FG announced the National Livestock Transformation Plan and earmarked N100bn for it. In 2019, the FG announced that the importation of milk will be banned because the country was spending $1.2m – $1.5m on it.
“The 36-state governors had also agreed to put an end to open grazing and embrace ranching. The Southern Governors should have simply announced that they were reiterating what was agreed upon by the National Governors Forum. Kano State Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje called upon all displaced herders to move to his state as it had more than enough facilities to cater to their herd. I will advise the AGF to bring the President up to speed on this development,” Falana stated.
