By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

1. BIBLE PASSAGE:

EXODUS 22:5

Good News Bible

“If someone lets his animals graze in a field or a vineyard and they stray away and eat up the crops growing in someone else’s field, he must make good the loss with the crops from his own fields or vineyards.”

New King James Version

“If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed, and lets loose his animal, and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make restitution from the best of his own field and the best.”

New International Version

“If anyone grazes their livestock in a field or vineyard and lets them stray and they graze in someone else’s field, the offender must make restitution from the best of their own field or vineyard.”

2. SERMON:

So it is clear that God does not approve of open grazing and neither should you as Christians. Yet Christians must also resist all attempts to establish cattle colonies or ranches in their areas for such colonies or ranches will only serve as a springboard from which the children of the herdsmen will uproot your own children from your ancestral lands tomorrow. As such, not only should you resist any attempts, overt or covert, by government or non-state actors to take your lands and handover to the herdsmen but you must not sell them lands or you will only be endangering your children and their descendants.

Let the herdsmen go back to their own ancestral lands to engage in open grazing or ranching or whatever else that catches their fancy. The truth is that but for their shameful insistence on remaining in the Dark Ages and conducting their affairs on embarrassingly primitive terms, the perambulating cattlemen could quite easily farm their cattle in their own areas.

herdsmen

With irrigation and the deployment of modern approaches to animal husbandry, cattle rearing is even possible in semi-arid regions. Already the Governor of Kano has asked the herdsmen to come to him in Kano and that he would accommodate them close to their own ancestral places. The only reason they have refused to return there is because their ulterior motive is actually to supplant us and to take over our regions.

In any case, if the herdsmen can no longer breed their cattle in their own areas, that is their lookout and is incontrovertibly a clear sign that they now lack comparative advantage in animal rearing and that the time has come for them to look for other means of survival, ideally by engaging in other forms of modern economic activity rather than vagabonding from place to place at the expense of farming communities across the country.

That Lake Chad, or anywhere else for that matter, has completely evaporated into thing air is quite unfortunate but it does not at all entitle anyone to then insist that it is now his entitlement to invade the regions of other people and seek to plant himself in the ancestral lands of other tribes upon the ridiculous excuse that we all belong to the same country.

These are ancestral lands that predate the founding of any country in the world much less a forced marriage like Nigeria that is barely a hundred years old.

Christians should realise that land is given to us by God through our ancestors. If your own ancestors had been so foolish as to yield or sell the land to those with an irredentist approach to interacting with their fellowmen to the extent that their ultimate goal is to “deep the Koran in the sea”, you would not have met any land to inherit.

Ancestral land is a trust for generations yet unborn and it is a grievous sin and woeful transgression, indeed a most heinous abomination against God, to give it up or sell it to those whose hidden agenda is to perpetrate ethnic cleansing and to engage in the displacement of indigenous people from their aboriginal homes.

We Southerners and Middle Beltans must earnestly start farming our own animal protein. It is highly ungodly to be lazy, to be unimaginative, to be unresourceful or to otherwise display any of the signs of the deadly sin of sloth which is an affront to the Holy Spirit, Himself. It is completely pagan to capitulate and throw up one’s hands that one cannot survive without another for in the final analysis, no one but God is indispensable.

We can actually do without herdsmen for cattle farming are actually a straight forward business undertaking that does not require rocket science. In fact, with the compliment of our modernist bias, we should be able to do it far better than those who stubbornly insist on continuing to do things in accordance with a medieval approach to life.

I am not joking at all; on the contrary, I am actually talking from experience as my own father, the late B.E. Onokpasa, took to large scale mixed farming after his school was closed down by the Yakubu Gowon dictatorship when he resisted its ill-advised takeover of schools back in the 70s. Apart from food and commercial crops, my father also had a large poultry farm in which he farmed chickens, turkeys and ducks. But, he also engaged in ranching and apart from sheep, my father ranched cattle. Our cattle were not the emaciated Fulani cattle that are roamed across the country but very healthy red-brown cattle which my father bought from Koko. These cattle were from the stock that Nana of Itsekiri had earlier brought with him when he returned from exile in Ghana.

In the meantime, and while we are building up our own animal protein industry, we can import meat from America, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Europe or indeed Botswana. American beef is not only healthier and tastier but also cheaper than Fulani cattle.

We should henceforth start boycotting herdsmen cattle for it does not make any sense to keep patronizing those who delight in slaughtering their fellowmen like the cattle they breed, an animalistic disposition that has become the hallmark of killer Fulani herdsmen.

When President Muhammadu Buhari imperiously commanded us to “go and live with your neighbours” he forgot that the herdsmen are a belligerent group of people extremely difficult to live in peace with. These are people who, thanks to their ‘born-to-rule’ mentality, invariably see themselves as a nation destined to lord it over others. You give them even as much as a micro-inch and they self-entitledly take a hundred miles in your face, claiming the homesteads of your forefathers in the process!

Christians must righteously reject cattle colonies and oppose ranching in their regions by killer herdsmen. If there is going to be any ranching in your areas, be the one to do it yourself. As for open grazing, if the Bible itself can be against it, surely only a pagan would condone it.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, wrote from Warri.