ABUJA (Sundiata Post) It makes one dizzy trying to keep up with President Buhari’s shifting, contradictory rhetoric on herdsmen killings. His security services vacillate between describing the killers as Boko Haram and Libya-trained gunmen. He has settled on this Libya angle lately, describing the killers alternately as a new breed of herdsmen who carry AK-47, unlike previous ones who carried sticks.
Here is what he said in London a couple of weeks ago: “Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons.”
Here, he seems to confirm what people in the theater of the killings have been saying, that there is a new clan of herdsmen who are walking around with AK-47 or being shadowed by marauding, AK-47-wielding militia kinsmen. At that time, he invoked the Libya angle.
Yesterday, in America, he fleshed out his Libya angle, but in a confusing way. He said herdsmen carry sticks and machetes but that the killers are Gaddafi-trained militants with sophisticated weapons.
So, are the killers herdsmen or not? Are they a new breed of killer herdsmen trained by Gaddafi?
Are they Nigerians who traveled to Libya to be trained by Gaddafi, or foreigners as el-Rufai and the DSS have said, foreigners who invaded our territories with sophisticated weapons?
Anyway, the president’s Gaddafi explanation is problematic for these reasons.
1) Herdsmen violence predated the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011, which Buhari claims was the event that dispersed his trained killers across West Africa. In fact, killings on the Plateau began much earlier and even caused former president Obasanjo to declare a six month state of emergency there.
2. Miyatti Allah is always claiming many of the massacres (although lately they’ve been quiet), warning of future massacres that then occur, and justifying the massacres as vengeance for the theft or killing of cattle. Unless Miyatti is working with these Gaddafi-trained killers, the president’s theory is not plausible.
3. Everywhere in the Middle Belt (Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, and Nasarawa) where the militia have struck, the deserted villages are promptly taken over by herdsmen grazing their cattle. In fact in some cases, the AK-47-totting militiamen stay around to ward off attempts by residents to return to the land or by security forces to uproot them so that displaced survivors can return to their ancestral villages. Maybe the herdsmen have abandoned their sticks for AK-47s. Maybe they’ve decided to hire the services of the killers to forcefully carve out grazing areas for themselves by removing indigenous farmers. The least likely possibility is that the herders are just fortuitous and lucky beneficiaries of the devastation caused by the mass murderers–that they just happen to, perversely speaking in this case, be at the right place at the right time when farming communities are being razed down and their inhabitants killed or displaced. The President wants us to separate the “stick-carrying” herdsmen from the killers. Perhaps some herdsmen are indeed separate from the mass murderers. However, to believe in a separation between ALL stick-carrying herdsmen and the killers one would have to believe that the herdsmen always happen to be grazing nearby or lurking around the areas where the killers operate. Such repeated coincidence is highly unlikely.
The president is going to have to make up his mind. Perhaps he should listen to victims of the violence, who have repeatedly and consistently said that there are indeed two groups of herdsmen, both of them indigenous and produced by internal and not external training or forces. One group owns cattle and is desperate for grazing land and does not want to be accountable to farming communities restricting its cattle from their farms. This group, previously peaceful and willing to obey the rules set by host farming communities, may have made common cause with criminal, well-armed Fulani militia kinsmen, who carry out the killings on their behalf while they move with their cattle into deserted villages and farmlands. Some of the same groups of Fulani bandits are responsible for cattle rustling, killings, and banditry in the Zamfara-Birnin Gwari axis, and armed robbery and kidnapping in the Kaduna-Abuja, Minna axis.
We need to understand why these former herders or young people born into a herding culture have taken to a life of banditry and mass murder instead of externalizing the problem and blaming a dead man.
Source: Facebook