By Sanya Oni
There you have it. Two television interviews in quick succession followed by a broadcast all in a space of 72 hours, supporters of our media-averse president can now sit back and relax in confidence that the First Citizen not only ‘killed it” but has finally put paid to the wild speculations about whether or not their principal was in firm grasp of his environment and matters of governance.
With no prior announcement of the Arise TV interview, it certainly came off as a ‘coup’ of sorts – timely and artfully packaged. The interview was vintage Buhari: languid for the most part in style, and convoluted in delivery; he neither dispelled any ‘myths’ or about his government nor offered any clarity on policy. In street lingo, it would be described as nothing spoil.
Over all, you get the impression that the man spoke from the heart – simplistic, disagreeable but at least honest. A case of – since you want it; here it is. I am here referring to the Arise TV interview. As for the other one on the NTA, it was simply drab – what you see is what you get.
I know many out there who are disappointed that the president did not utilize the opportunity to engage or if you like, to re-connect with the people after his rather long absence and his discomfiting silence in the last few months. But then, I also know no less out there who aver that the citizens ought to be grateful that the president has at least responded to our quest to talk to us – something that his aides have been doing all of these while on his behalf. Now, we must thank God for little mercies.
Let me add to the two, a third group – many in this category wonder, whether silence, wouldn’t have been more ‘golden’ in the light of those antediluvian views canvassed by the president during those interviews. I dare say that yours truly belong in this latter category.
Let’s take some of the issues the president spoke about. Starting with perhaps the most contentious one – open grazing. Amazingly, the president somehow still believes that the Fulani pastoralist nomadic culture could still be preserved. Indeed, he verily believes that the solution resides – not in the coming to terms with current realities of population explosion with its correlates of pressures on land use and criminality – but in a romanticized past of freewheeling pastoralism.
More than that, our president, sworn to the 1999 Constitution (as amended), thinks pretty little of exhuming a carryover colonial law – the Grazing Reserves Act 1964 – apparently without the encumbrances of the Land Use Act and other ancillary legislations that have long rendered that archaic law not only inoperable but a nullity – to push that through.
I quote here, verbatim, what the president said of his directive to the attorney-general of the federation.
“What I did was ask him to go and dig the gazette of the First Republic when people were obeying laws. There were cattle routes and grazing areas. Cattle routes were for when they (herdsmen) are moving up country, north to south or east to west, they had to go through there.
“If you allow your cattle to stray into any farm, you are arrested. The farmer is invited to submit his claims. The Khadi or the judge will say pay this amount and if you can’t the cattle is sold. And if there is any benefit, you are given and people were behaving themselves and in the grazing areas, they built dams, put windmills in some places there were even veterinary departments so that the herders are limited. Their route is known, their grazing area is known. So, I asked for the gazette to make sure that those who encroached on these cattle routes and grazing areas will be dispossessed in law and try to bring some order back into the cattle grazing.”
Talk of presidency caught in time warp; the whole thing reminds me of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle classic– a book of wonder in which a farmer wanders into a certain mountain, comes upon a group of dwarfs playing games, accepts their offer of a drink of liquor and promptly falls asleep only to wake up 20 years later, an old man with a long white beard.
Here by the way is a presidency that has spoken variously of RUGA, National Livestock Transformation Plan and other shades of pastoral modernisation. Now, the revelation is that the chief marketer of those programmes is himself, yet to be cured of his preference for those ancient practices that has arguably no redeeming features. Call it dissonance at its best; here at once is a perceptible clash between the personal preferences of the leader and the posturing of the government that he leads; a classic instance of the unending muddle of inchoate ideas packaged as policy by officials at the highest levels of government.
We wait for AGF Abubakar Malami. Trust me, he knows the law – in and out; or better still, he thinks he – not the courts – can make pronouncement on what the law is. Don’t be surprised therefore should the gazette and the accompanying executive order acquire the force of law or if it comes to that, made to be superior to the Land Use Act.
While the administration is at it, permit me to state upfront that the job will not be nearly half done with the retrieval of those grazing routes/reserves; there’s also a bounden duty on the government to retrieve those high calibre weapons from the nomads – a sine qua non – at least for equity. That way, the farmers could reasonably be assured of living for another day even as our revered Khadis and judges would have something to adjudicate upon.
Of course, the president addressed other issues. Like his threat to IPOB and other unruly youths on the Southeast. To those who expected the president to walk back on that threat – ‘to speak to those people in the language they understand’, what he did was to double down. Now, he says, it is fire for fire. The terrorists, kidnappers and bandits troubling the country from the Northeast, to Northwest and north-central, he said, can expect the same treatment under his equal opportunity onslaught.
Don’t ask me why the fire couldn’t have been put out before things got out hand. Like the imagery of the soldier in Samuel Finer’s Man on the Horseback, our dear president, long thought to be on AWOL, wants to convince that he’s back and smoking.
Finally, the president touched on Lagos, the EndSARS and all that. Nothing of word of comfort for the people on the carnage and destruction wrought by rioters; deemed guilty for not preventing the arson on those high capacity buses, the president would have the good people of Lagos condemned to walk.
The Nation
