President Muhmmadu Buhari has directed the minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbe to look at the gazette of the first republic to get the cattle routes and get the grazing routes and re-establish them as a way of resolving the incessant clashes between farmers and herdsmen in some parts of the country.
The President, in an interactive session today, Tuesday with Nigerians that are residence in Dubai as part of his official engagement in that country said: I told Audu Ogbeh, the minister of agriculture to look at the gazette of the first republic to get the cattle routes and get the grazing routes and re-establish them so that we can reduce this incidence some you here know the efforts we are making.
Buhari, who said that his government next level is to consolidate whatever it had done, stressed that to be able to do so, his government had to secure the country first.
He recalled that original Nigerian cattle rearers used to carry only sticks and machetes to cut foliage for the cattle.
He insisted that those cattle rearers with weapons like AK47 are strange to Nigeria, even as he admitted that one can hardly identify the difference between cattle rearers from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria Chad, Cameroon and other cattle herders.
“They look the same but I was accused of not doing anything about those operating locally. I took the governor on this and this is one of the reasons he left our party for another party. “Because I told him the cattle rearers and settlers problem in Nigeria is older than myself not to talk of him.”