Recently, while speaking on the Plateau State massacre after a closed-door meeting with the President at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Governor Inuwa Yahaya of Gombe State said, “Some of the major issues that seem to allow the problem to persist include issues like farmer-herder clashes, the clamour for indigenes versus settlers. But the world over, if any society or country doesn’t welcome visitors, such a nation will not progress.”  

The same Governor Yahaya was also said to have recently issued an ultimatum to farmers in the state to harvest their produce before the end of January to enable herders graze their cattle on farmlands. This is not a pathway to peace.

Yes, culturally diverse people can live together, but only if they are guided by the principles of peace and equity. Our humanity should be, and it is indeed, the common denominator, not tongue, not tribe or religion, which are all products of the influences arising from the variables in our environment.

Today, the United States of America, USA, is considered by some people as the hope of humanity on the grounds that she is constituted by a wide range of peoples from diverse cultures and nations of the world – the English, German, French, Indian, Jew, African, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese, just name it, they are all parts of the modern mega-nation called the USA.

The USA is the result of an experiment in what diverse human beings are capable of achieving when they come to live together on the bases of peace and justice. If it was possible for such a widely diverse people as USA to constitute a nation, it beats the imagination that some Africans whom the British brought together find it difficult to live in peace. We believe it is a function of lack of justice.  

In every society where some people, or a group of them, are perceived to aspire to dominate some parts, or the whole, there are bound to be violent conflicts. For there is something in the untrammeled spirit of man that abhors oppression and injustice. Men and women have been known throughout history to sacrifice their lives for freedom through resistance against oppression.

To couch the massacre of Middle Belt people and other Nigerians by herdsmen as “farmer-herder” clashes, and explain it away as one of the impacts of climate change, is mischievous. Northern Nigeria is not the only place in the world with environmental problems. Other parts of Nigeria also have environmental problems. The truth is that herders want to completely take over the lands of the indigenes.

The South-East of Nigeria, for instance, has even a bigger environmental problem. As of 2018, environmentalists put the number of active erosion sites in the South-East of Nigeria at over 2,800. Erosions wash away farmlands and peoples’ homes in this region. Yet, there has never been any news of South-East people invading other peoples’ lands, as herders do in the North and Middle Belt, mischievously blaming environmental problems.

If we – the federal government, the legislators, the armed forces and all the ethnic nationalities that make up Nigeria – are sincere in our search for peace, we can forge a sustainable nation based on justice.