Simon Lalong, Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, has said the recurrent herders-farmers clash can be resolved if the National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) is well implemented.
Lalong, who is Governor of Plateau State, said this in an interview on Tuesday.
The NLTP was proposed by the former minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, in 2018 and was adopted by the National Economic Council (NEC) headed by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.
The plan allows state governments to implement whichever aspect they feel comfortable with.
According to Governor Lalong, the Buhari administration had tried to implement the NLTP but some states rejected it on the grounds that they do not have the land for it.
He stated that the country would not be facing the current farmer-herder crisis if the plan was implemented.
“When we came and we realised that what was really very prevalent was the Boko Haram issue and farmers-herdsmen issue, that was why the national livestock policy was introduced. But when we got to the period of implementation, there were a lot of problems here and there, even from some regions of the nation. Some who said they don’t want the national livestock plan or anything related to ranching because they don’t have the land,” Lalong said on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
“At that time, if the policy was well implemented, today we would not have been talking about the farmers-herdsmen crisis because that policy was well-drafted.”
Governor Lalong said some people do not care about reading the plan because they believe it is for a particular ethnic group.
“Now people don’t even care about reading it. By the time ranching and grazing is mentioned, people believe it belongs to a particular ethnic group. So we don’t even want to read what is contained in the policy to even talk about accepting it to be implemented in our various states. Now you can see the menace everywhere,” he said.
He added that he was part of those who worked on the policy and it has been useful in addressing the issue of farmers-herdsmen crisis even in Plateau State.
