Farmers/herders crisis: Tinubu asks FG to convene stakeholders’ meeting

The All Progressives Congress (APC) National Leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has called on the federal government to immediately convene a meeting of stakeholders over the raging farmer/herders crisis across the country.

Tinubu, who broke his silence on the crisis yesterday, called for a meeting of state governors, senior security officials, herders and farmers’ representatives, along with traditional rulers and religious leaders “to hammer out a set of working principles to resolve the crisis.”

In a statement, Tinubu said both the herders and the farmers deserved to be compensated.

He said, “What is happening has been terrible, but it is not due to any intrinsic evil in either the herder or the farmer. The calamity now being faced is borne out of situational exigencies. It is but the tragic outcome when often desperate, alienated people are left too long unattended and when their understanding of the modern socio-economic and environmental forces affecting the very terms of their existence is incomplete.

“An ethnically fueled response will be to vociferously defend the nomadic way, believing this tact will somehow protect the herder and cast the speaker as an ethnic champion.

“However, careless words cannot shield the herder from relentless reality. Such talk will only delude him into believing that he can somehow escape the inevitable. We do both herder and farmer grave injustice by allowing the herder to continue as he is - fighting a losing battle against modernity and climate change. In that fight, desperation causes him to flail and fight the farmer, who too is a victim of these impersonal forces.”

He added that, “In the medium to long-term, resources must be dedicated to establishing better irrigation and water catchment systems to further improve farm productivity and mitigate the dire impact of flood and drought cycles brought about by extreme climatic conditions.”

Tinubu also called for the establishment of a permanent panel in each state as a forum for farmers, herders, security officials and senior state officials to discuss their concerns, mitigate contention and identify trouble and douse it before it erupts.