BY MARYAM ADAMU MUHAMMAD
There have been a lot of clarion calls from leaders and masses from Southern part of Nigeria to abolish the peripatetic grazing business due to the challenges and setbacks they perceived it brought from heders and farmers clashes and other serial attacks.
We can’t dispel the brio, verve and industry of an average Fulani herder. Their brinkmanship is totally awesome but the brigandage in the ruffians in their midst is worth the highest level of condemnation.
Herding livestocks is a pastime, trade and occupation to the Fulanis and they certainly ennoble their pastoral and bridge-and-tunnel lifestyle. Child abuse is a highly criticized notion and so allowing an underage children in herding job is both callous treatment and Brobdingnagian form of child abuse. Thus, call-out to abolish underage children from going places for grazing animals is a positive paradigm shift.
In performing this occupation, their safety and education is badly straitened and short-changed. Due to young children’s poor judgement, this also leads to the animals going into farmers’ farm and thereby causing damage to crops and leading to clashes between the herders and farmers.
Education is unarguably the bedrock of every nation’s progress and so a genius among the Fulani’s children who has the brainpower to be a matchless and world-ranking intellectual got reduced to herding in the bushes. The education of those young children is badly affected because they have none or a meagre time to attend school.The health of those children is affected too. Those children might end up dying from mysterious ailments due to harsh weather conditions, having acute malaria and yellow fever due to mosquitoes’ bites, they may even get bitten by fatal snakes.Those young children need to live happily and enjoyably and benefit from all creature comforts.
The world is making a meteoric progress into a highly advanced arena. Application of technology in our daily endeavours is now the trend. Technology help us do what we want to do with utmost ease and speed. There suppose to be a change in mindsets of the Fulani herders about their occupation. They need to change their bridge-and-tunnel life and peripatetic nature to a home breeding of their livestock and at least government seems willing to help out by coming out with the blueprints of “Ruga” settlements. The herders need to appreciate the dynamic perspective of our world today because things in this century of ours keep changing exponentially because it’s a technology-driven century.
The peripatetic herding tends to be an archaic trend with no substantial economic benefit considering the hardship they went through in return.An age has come when herders need to have a rethink about their spartan lifestyle so that they would come to enjoy a more better life to the point of relish. They need to appreciate modern methods of livestock keeping. They should employ silaging and acquire pasturages,homesteads for easier management of their livestocks and deadstocks. Silaging would give them a good avenue and alternative so that they can have the grass to feed their livestocks all year round without having to travel long distance in sometimes futile search of nutritive pastures. This system would give their children an ample opportunity to attend school. The home raising of livestock can also reduce rustling by appreciable percentage thereby reducing the fears of the herders of being intercepted by armed-robbers, marauders and rustlers and greatly reduce the chances of losing their life fortunes overnight.
Abolishment of underage children into grazing animals job is a very welcomed idea and would surely have a virtuous cycle. When those underage children attend school, the nation would benefit greatly because the policy of ensuring every child get educated is enshrined and would surely reduce the rate of illiteracy bedeviling Nigeria and would also surely reduce the perennial brawls between herders and farmers.
MARYAM ADAMU MUHAMMAD Writes from DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION Abubakar Tatari Ali Polytechnic Bauchi
