Cattle Colony

Now that’s a new one in our Nigerian lexicon. The cows have taken over the national discourse. Hardly an hour goes by without these latest national heroes not being featured on television. While humans are seeking affordable housing, the raw material for the meat we eat is being given a priority in the scheme of things. The cows, the agitators argue, must be given preferential treatment. They must be allowed to go wherever their herders will; they can trek, graze, and ravage the farms and feed on the produce being cultivated including those that have been harvested and stored in the barns. After all, the cows deserve a good meal to replenish the energy being expended as they trudge on through the grazing routes that have been designated for their progress to the cattle markets and abattoirs in the various cities and villages where meat is eaten, notwithstanding whose ox is gored (pun intended).
The journey from Gusau to Ikom, Sokoto to Agege, or even Daura to Abuja is a tedious one and how else are the herders expected to feed the thousands of cows in their care? Now that is where the problem lies: how does the farmer who has worked hard to plant his crops, and having tended them over several months begin to accept the stark reality that all he has worked for has become fodder for the future meat that is meant to complement his dinner or the meals of hundreds of others (meals that would have been made from these same crops)? The herders will have none of the protests or even tolerate any form of objection to their obnoxious practice.
Then comes the search for a solution. Various suggestions have been made in a bid to put an end to this ugly trend. States have enacted anti-grazing laws, but this has met with stiff opposition and has in fact exacerbated the situation resulting in more killings in Benue State particularly. The cattle breeders associations have threatened fire and brimstone if the law is not repealed, they would have none of it. The cows deserve their free movement and un-fettered access to any farm they choose, afterall the grazing reserves which used to be their ancestral homes have been colonized by humans through urbanization and now how dare the government deny them their right!
So what next? The answers lie in the establishment of ranches and cattle colonies, some have proposed. The latter has been explained by the Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh to mean a collection of several ranches.
The search for a solution continues but what is paramount at this time is that the menace of killings must end, and those who value cows more than humans must be rounded up and given psychiatric therapy, and all the perpetrators of the killings must be hunted down and prosecuted. The unsightly parade of cattle in our urban centres must also be stopped. The government, federal and states have the apparatus to deal with these unsavoury trends. The areas of conflicts must be addressed; farmlands must not be allowed to be invaded any more by those sub-human creatures. Sambisa Forest, we are told, is very vast and can adequately serve as the ultimate Cattle Colony with the capacity to accommodate cattle in excess of the demand of the whole country. Cows can be transported directly from there to the various abattoirs across the country every day by rail where available.
Or we could even stop eating beef, if cows have become such a problem to warrant loss of human lives?