The Pan Yoruba Socio-Political Group, Afenifere has described the approval given by President Muhammadu Buhari to review grazing reserves in some states as a waste of tax payers money.
Its General Secretary, Sola Ebiseni in a recent statement in Akure, Ondo state, lamented that Buhari was ‘wasting tax payers scare resources on a programme which conception lacks all conceivable growth capacity’.
The statement reads: “The approval by President Muhammadu Buhari to review, with dispatch, 368 Grazing Reserves across allegedly 25 states in the country to determine the levels of encroachment did not surprise Nigerians.
“It does not also matter that having felt the pulse of the nation in his interview with the Arise television in June, the President is still wasting tax payers scare resources on a programme which conception lacks all conceivable growth capacity.
“It is instructive that the recommendation and implementation committee is headed by Professor Ibrahim Gambari, the Chief of Staff to the President who, in conjunction with Professor Attahiru Jega, during the first term of Buhari, presented a ‘Memorandum On Pastoralist-Farmers’ Conflicts And the search for peaceful Resolution’ published in January 2018, which contained the same recommendations now being foisted on the nation.”
Ebiseni noted that currently, Nigeria has a total of 417 grazing reserves all over the country, out of which only about 113 have been gazetted.
He argued that the present policy of the Buhari administration on Grazing Reserves “is the implementation of the script by the Fulani intelligentsia.”
“The recommendations which pandered to deceptive national solutions to orchestrated farmers/herders clash, nonetheless reek of the odiferous stench of ethnic agenda for settlement of the Fulani in the ancestral lands of other ethnic nationalities,” he said.
