The Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, has offered clarification on his comments that Fulani herdsmen carry arms to protect themselves. He said he would never support criminality by Fulani herdsmen.
Mohammed’s media aide, Mukhtar Gidado, in a statement, said Mohammed’s reference to AK47 was simply to explain the precarious situation of the average law-abiding Fulani herdsmen who are being attacked, maimed and killed by cattle rustlers and were forced to resort to self-help.
Recall that the governor, during last Thursday’s Press Week Celebration of the Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union Journalists (NUJ), had said herders bore firearms ”for self-defence” against cattle rustlers. Read it here.
Gidado said the governor’s speech was to avert the dangerous prospect of nationwide backlash as tempers were flaring up.
He said the governor did not set out to justify criminality by anyone, no matter the person’s ethnic nationality.
“Rather, he admonished us, in the interest of national unity, to avoid wholesale branding of any ethnic group as it is inconceivable that anyone group can be made up of only criminals. By extension, the Governor made it abundantly clear that it will be inappropriate to label anyone tribe based on the crimes of a few members of the ethnic group.
He described the Fulani herdsmen as “people who, in the absence of any protection from the security agencies, are forced to resort to self-help, to defend both their means of livelihood and their lives”.
Gidado described Governor Mohammed as a constitutionalist who would be the last person to advocate a subversion of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
“Third, Governor Bala Mohammed’s description of forests, as “no man’s land”, (please read as gift of nature), is a carry-over from his geopolitical environment where a pastoralist could set up camp, in any forest, for a few weeks without causing any uproar or opposition. To interpret such a temporary stay as a form of ‘land grab’ by the Fulani herdsmen is completely incorrect.
“Neither does such temporary habitation of the forest inconvenience anyone nor does the itinerant Fulani sojourner bother anyone about his plight in the forest characterised by life without access to electricity, pipe-borne water, good roads or hospitals.”
“Rather than vilify Governor Bala Mohammed, it is incumbent on all those criticising him to admonish those governors whose lack of restraint is responsible for the escalation of this crisis,” he said.
