And when are we going to stop using the 1965 Northern Nigeria grazing reserve law as a reference? This was a law enacted by the ruling NPC government, which had very little support in the Middle Belt, a part of Northern Nigeria with loyalties to other minority parties and thus with little or no consequential say in the legislative and executive branches of the regional government--and a part of Northern Nigeria with the best and thus most coveted pastures.
-- The grazing reserve law clearly failed to consider centuries old notions of ancestral lands and instead deployed the loose, fluid relationship to land in the caliphate areas of the North.
Did the law not lapse when Northern Nigeria, along with other regional governments, cease to exist as sub-national governmental units with the creation of states?
Even if such a law is a point of departure for the postcolonial period, why should we continue to invoke a law that, in light of population growth, expansion of towns and villages, and other factors is no longer tenable, realistic, or implementable?
And some people like to talk about grazing reserves that no longer exist in law or practice but pay the merest attention, if at all, to herders' invasion of communities and farmlands, including those not even on their much-vaunted grazing routes. Talk about cherry-picking.
It seems like some people have a nostalgic attachment to and a craving for the hegemonic arrangements of a colonial and post-colonial past when their ethnic forebears, aided by the British and by their control of the North's commonwealth, enacted self-serving laws and emplaced arrangements that subordinated the interests of minorities to majoritarian interests deemed more important. This is 2018. Self determination and the rights of indigenous people are protected rights in international law. It is time for some people to drop their obsession with hegemonic, one-sided impositions of the past.
On Sat, May 5, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jumoyin@gmail.com> wrote:
Prof Jibrin, thanks for spotlighting and using the word "epidemic" to describe the drug problem in Nigeria today which cuts across all ethnic, religious, regional, class, gender, whatever other lines exist. This epidemic, in the long run, will take far more lives and futures than all Nigeria's previously fought wars— if government does not go beyond the recent ban and put in place a comprehensive action plan that is well thought out, well funded, and carefully implemented.
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