B
By Bassey Ubong
In the second decade of the 21st century, should Nigeria encourage open grazing as a way of life for youths? Can we consider human retooling to reposition young people born into cattle grazing families to get them into other sectors of the national economy where they demonstrate aptitude? Can the government and the super-rich consider investments in cattle ranching to absorb the youths at present without aptitudes outside the cattle production business?
Answers to these questions point to an urgent need to rethink and re-strategize on the issue of open grazing by way of planning towards an intensive approach. The current approach, which focuses on cattle grazing colonies across Nigeria, will keep the grazers in the past, while it has the potential to catalyze the break-up of Nigeria.
These two considerations are lose-lose situations, which all those who campaign for open grazing, should spend some hours to analyze, with emotions at the back burner.
Some Nigerians saw the plan by the immediate past Buhari Federal Government1 to go backwards in time to revive laws on grazing routes or the campaign for cattle reserves in every Southern state as activities aimed at territorial expansion. Little effort has been made by the Federal authorities at the time. It made little and in fact no effort to douse tension and reduce discomfort. Rather the forum of Northern Governors at a point spat fire and informed Southern Nigerians of the disinclination of Northerners to vote for a Southern candidate because of the efforts of Southern states to stop cattle reserves proposed by President Buhari. It begged the question – cattle production has been going on for decades after independence, why should grazing reserves mount the hot plate and cause such furore decades after independence?
I prefer to see the cattle reserves policy as a genuine concern by the Federal Government at the time to secure the future of cattle grazers in open fields because most of those involved cannot conceive of life without the cattle trade, with open grazing as the only viable option.
Several people in the sub-sector were born into cattle grazing families. As children they were taught the art and craft of cattle management in open space. What few people know relates to whether the child cattle grazers receive anything beyond food and enough clothes to keep cold away from their oft malnourished bodies. The children who appear to be outside the laws and policies on child labour dream of ownership of cattle and being big time cattle traders when they attain adulthood.
The first fallout here relates to circumscribed dreams which can be read to mean the worldview of the children circulates in the cattle business. They are denied the opportunities to attend schools and no activity or engagement in the world of today expands vision, dreams, and world view like education.
The plot in the drama of life of the children thickens and becomes complicated when religion joins the mix. The children appear to see life as predetermined by the Supreme Deity of which they have no right to question or challenge. Life for them begins and ends in the cattle world, and each person becomes made or broken within rather than outside it.
It appears those in the position to change such worldview suppress the internal tensions in the children and urge them to forge ahead in line with the dictates of tradition and religion. For whatever reason people avoid the obvious question of who the primary beneficiaries of such a situation are. The answer should be easy to establish – children of the elite enjoy the greatest benefits, because public resources are channelled into them to develop them to become rulers of the grazers when the two blocks attain adulthood.
This scenario in sociology of education can be found in the concept of conflict theory in which the elite design formal education with the determined purpose of assigning people to social strata. Children of the poor grow up to be poor children, while children from privileged families grow up to be privileged adults. A casual study of the North shows families which on a permanent basis produce persons who occupy high profile positions in the polity local and national. Certain names recur for appointments in every administration with breakthroughs by children without recognizable surnames being as few as the teeth in the mouth of persons close to the hundred-year bracket.
Somehow, somewhere, religion has given the elite cover to execute policies which tend to keep down child grazers and at the same time grant exemption to the children of the elite to acquire western education and grow to heights endowed by western education. To further cover their real intentions, the elite as politicians or high profile public servants dramatize the drive to acquire lands in the South for the grazers when lands up North beg for use.
Few child cattle grazers break the glass ceiling to become cattle magnates in adulthood. Privileged persons whose grandparents broke through the iron gates and granite walls enjoy palaces and control wealth and power. It remains their long term interest to ensure the cattle grazers and their families remain cattle grazers. This continues to be done through the instrumentality of religion, subtle coercion, indoctrination, and public policy such as the cattle grazing bill.
Nor can hope be seen in the horizon if the Student Loans Bill becomes reality. Which parent from a cattle rearing family will consider it worth their while to pay over one million Naira to sponsor their children in a public university? It will be a case of cost-benefit analysis when they consider how many cattle can be bought with the school fees equivalent and what they can make from such cattle vis-à-vis a graduate who has no hope for a good job and in fact, no job for years.
But there can be new thinking which would be a win-win situation all the more so the cattle sub-sector has high regards in Nigeria and the entire world.
In 2021 the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations wrote on the place of the cattle industry in Latin America. Livestock production in the opinion of FAO ranked as the only engagement with simultaneous impact on preservation of ecosystems, promotion of wildlife conservation, security for daily subsistence, as well as satisfaction of cultural and traditional values. Cattle, and to a lesser extent goats, sheep, and chickens are about economics as well as sociology or culture. This informs the need for deep thinking and comprehensive action for some Nigerian citizens who see cattle rearing as a way of life and sometimes life itself.
Dr Ubong, a writer and public policy analyst, lives in Uyo
