In our piece last week entitled Four Groups of Trouble Makers in the Village, we related to you a wise counsel which a wise elder gave to me four years ago to help me navigate my stay in the village and be able to find my feet in the place. In it, he had told me that women, unruly youth, corrupt and conscienceless village chiefs and elders and livestock are four groups of people, or more appropriately, four groups of ‘animals’ that cause trouble in the village. Otherwise, he said, the village is a fit and proper setting for a retiree who decides to retire to it and live the rest of his life in that habitation.
If singly women and livestock constitute the ‘original’ animals that are among two others that are ‘original’ trouble makers in the village on their own good selves, what happens if by chance they unite or one of them is employed by the other as is the case in the incident I am narrating here, to deal with a person, a people or a community? Well, the outcome will be nightmarish for the victim.
And this is what a young man who is a tenant in my house in one of the villages near Abuochiche, the headquarters of our LGA, can confess to that he is facing in the hands of a woman and her goats. A widow lady lives in a gated house opposite my own building. In my own house, which is unfenced, this young man has a groundnut farm that is lush green now with the good June rains. In the early hours of the day when most people leave for their farms and other of their engagements, this lady will deliberately open her gate, releasing her young goats to feast themselves on this young man’s groundnuts while their mothers are tied inside her house. In the late hours of the evening, she will repeat the ritual so the goatlings can have their evening meal on this young man’s flourishing field now being steadily ravished by her goats.
This deliberate act of economic sabotage and the sowing of ill-will confirm what the wise elder said about women and their capacity for trouble making in the villages. But this woman is not alone. Men and other women are involved in this particular crime that makes life uneasy for many in the villages. Rearing livestock by unleashing them on neighbours’ farms in a largely agrarian environment is a crime that should attract the stiffest of penalties. But in a terrain where chiefs are corrupt and crooked, laws made to check this trend end up serving the interests of chiefs, elders and unruly youth who the chiefs constitute into a task force each farming year to check the atrocities visited on poor farmers. The task force arrests truck loads of errant goats and sheep and deposit them in the palaces of chiefs of units who collect hefty fines from their usually unrepentant owners. Some years, some chiefs of certain units decree instant slaughter for goats and sheep ‘’arrested’’ and a feast is declared for the ruling elite of the place.
This is no big relief for farmers at all. There are some years when some very unfortunate farmers lose their entire crops to livestock ravaging. There is no insurance cover against any such loses. No government grants or loans to assist them recover from their loses. No help from their self help initiatives as the economy is not healthy any more. And the farmers’ poverty continues.
Livestock rearing is a very lucrative business. An average goat sells for about N60, 000. What crop harvest can sell for that much even now that prices of food crops are sky high?
The issue of livestock waging economic war against farmers requires the attention of a responsible modern government. But the states and LGCs do not have leaders who particularly care about matters like the one we are talking about here. Their eyes are firmly fixed on ‘’Federal Allocation’’ and how they can get their private shares from it. Nigeria is suffering from a severe crisis of ungovernance. Areas where governments need to pay particular attention to they do not.
Hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Nigerians have died or suffered severe injuries from conflicts arising from the ill-management of livestock but no government, whether at the federal, state or LGCs, has seen it fit to treat as a matter of priority. And the country continues to be a bleeding field for scavengers some of whom it has as leaders. It is not in the villages that livestock is a trouble maker. They have become a national affair. How unfortunate.
