On President Buhari’s diatribe in Dubai against Gov. Ortom (Opinion)

By: Bemgba Iortyom

On President Buhari’s diatribe in Dubai against Gov. Ortom:

PRESIDENCY PREFERS PAMPERING HERDSMEN TERRORISM BUT ORTOM WILL REMAIN UNWAVERING AGAINST IT IN DEFENCE OF BENUE PEOPLE

Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, is quoted in the media to have said that Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, parted ways with him and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), as a result of disagreements over the issue of Fulani herdsmen atrocities

President Buhari is reported to have addressed the Nigerian community yesterday, Tuesday, 9th April, 2019, at a town-hall meeting in Dubai and quoted to have absolved those herdsmen he tags as “Nigerian cattle rearers” of guilt in the killings of farmers in Benue and elsewhere, laying the blame on those ones he labels as “cattle rearers from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Cameroon and other cattle herders.”

Among other things the president is quoted as saying “……those of you who are neighbours to cattle rearers, Nigerian cattle rearers used to carry only sticks and their machetes to cut foliage for the cattles. But these are cattle rearers with weapons like AK47.

“But the problem is that you 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…”

President Buhari is then quoted to have said, referring to Gov. Ortom; “…..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 and at first republic, there were cattle routes, they put infrastructures and even veterinary…

“So, if you are a cattle rearer or you know about cattle like myself, the herders now pass through anybody land to find water for their cattles to drink. 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 of you here know the efforts we are making.”

On the first count this represents a shocking acceptance by a sitting president that he and his country’s security architecture are not only incapable of policing its borders effectively to stop criminal elements from breaching those borders, but at the same time, they are powerless to curb the criminal activities of those intruder elements in the country.

Such excuses by Mr. President even on the global stage reflect once again his known preference for pampering and acceding to the extremely unfair and humanly impossible demands of the herdsmen, and this he has repeatedly demonstrated previously.

Mr. President once on a visit to Benue at a high point in the wanton killings of farmers in the state by the herdsmen told the helpless victims to, as a panacea, learn to accommodate and live with the herdsmen whom he dressed in borrowed robes as “your neighbours”.

On another occasion the president had shockingly told Nigerians and the whole world that the solution to the herdsmen killings was to be found in farmers giving up their lands for the establishing of cattle colonies and grazing routes.

This option he said was better than the farmers losing their lives.

Concerning Ortom, President Buhari need not belabour himself trying to craft new narratives as to why the Benue State governor parted ways with him and APC.

Our memories aren’t that short that we could so easily forget the arm-twisting and open blackmail from the camp of Mr. President and APC against the governor leading to their parting of ways.

We remember well enough how Gov. Ortom became “Permanent Trouble” in the eyes of the Presidency, and how, despite having been praised to high heavens by APC, both in Benue and Abuja, as a jewel of the party and endorsed for its automatic ticket for his re-election bid, he became overnight the worst thing to have happened to the party.

All of these couldn’t have been just that the Benue State Governor lacked the capacity to understand the difference between Nigerian Fulani and their neighbouring West-African kith and kin, or that he didn’t appreciate the age of the conflict between Fulani and farmers in his state.

Rather the parting of ways between the Buhari Presidency and Gov. Ortom was and still is to be located in the fundamental divergence in the view of the president and his advisers, who are mainly of his Fulani ethnic stock background, on one hand, and on the other hand the governor and his Benue people who are the victims bearing the brunt of the brutal bloodletting and pillaging in their land.

For the Presidency, the deployment of an endless and inconsistent chain of narratives remains a convenient ploy in the conflict, regardless that this may be unconvincing and incapable of standing the administration in good light.

But for Gov. Samuel Ortom his choices in this conflict have always only been those available to the victim who must first fight to survive before anything else.

How then could he not have become a “Permanent Trouble” always asking for reprieve from the authorities for his people who were unendingly being so brutally massacred?

Could he have remained a good boy to Oshiomhole and the APC high council when in a desperate bid to survive together with his people, he had the temerity to see the solution to the killings as being in a prohibition of open grazing in the state, rather than in an ineffectual re-enactment of grazing routes and experimentation with cattle colonies and similar other such contraptions?

How else could the victim have remained good in the sight of his oppressor if not by accepting to be continually killed without seeking to remain alive?

If today, Gov. Ortom should be a target for condemnation by the president even in far away Dubai, it is simply an affirmation of the fact that the Benue State Governor has indeed stood valiantly for his people and fought a good fight in their defence.

Further proof of this is handily available in the massive electoral support the people of Benue gave to his re-election victory and other candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the 2019 polls.

Ortom and PDP’s victory against the massive armada of “federal might” deployed to the side of his opponents in the APC served to signature the resilience and avowal of the Benue man and woman that together with their governor, they will take refuge under the sanctity of the laws of Nigeria and the prevailing watch of the Supreme God.

In God Almighty will Gov. Samuel Ortom and Benue people continue to Trust.