National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has said careless words cannot shield herdsmen from relentless reality.
Tinubu gave this warning in a statement he personally signed on Saturday while reacting to the herder-farmer crisis.
The former Lagos State governor said the herders are fighting a lost battle against modernity and climate change.
He added that ethical response has been to forcefully defend the nomadic way believing it will somehow protect the herders.
He also said the country is doing herder and farmer grave injustice by allowing the herders to continue in their old ways.
Tinubu said “The herder-farmer dispute has taken on acute and violent dimensions. It has cost too many innocent lives while destroying the property and livelihoods of many others. It has also aggravated ethnic sentiment and political tension.
“Despite the efforts of some of those in positions of high responsibility and public trust, the crisis has not significantly abated.
“The calamity now being faced is borne of situational exigencies. It is but the tragic outcome when often desperate, alienated people are left too long unattended and when their understanding of the modern socio-economic and environmental forces affecting the very terms of their existence is incomplete.
“An ethnically fuelled response will be to vociferously defend the nomadic way believing this tack will somehow protect the herder and cast the speaker as an ethnic champion.
“However, careless words cannot shield the herder from relentless reality. Such talk will only delude him into believing that he can somehow escape the inevitable.
“We do both herder and farmer grave injustice by allowing the herder to continue as he is – fighting a losing battle against modernity and climate change. In that fight, desperation causes him to flail and fight the farmer, who too is a victim of these impersonal forces.”