You Lack The Authority To Make Policy Statements For FG, Akeredolu Carpets Garba Sheu
Governor Rotimi Akeredolu has faulted the reaction of Senior Special Assistant, Media and Publicity to President Muhammadu Buhari on the open grazing by the southern Governorsโ forum.
The Governor in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Special Duties, Doyin Odebowale warned Mr Garba Shehu and his cohorts to desist from hurling insults at the elected representatives of the people.
He added that the Presidentโs aide lacks the authority to make policy statements for the Federal Government, unless directed, expressly.
The statement reads,โMr. Garba Shehu just released a press statement purporting to represent the position of President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, on the farmer-herder โclashesโ and what he termed as โDeep Rooted Solutions to the herdsmen attacks.
โHe also attributed a unilateral decision to the President who โclears way for ranching and revival of forest reservesโ as part of the โpermanent solution to the frequent clashes between them, as well as the associated problem of the gun-wielding โkiller-herdsmenโ.
โAnyone who has been following the utterances of this man, as well as his fellow travelers on the self-deluding, mendacious but potentially dangerous itinerary to anarchy cannot but conclude that he works, assiduously, for extraneous interests whose game plan stands at variance with the expectations of genuine lovers of peaceful coexistence among all the peoples whose ethnic extractions are indigenous to Nigeria.
โMr Garba must disclose, this day, the real motive(s) of those he serves, definitely not the President. He cannot continue to hide under some opaque, omnibus and dubious directives to create confusion in the polity. The easy recourse to mendacious uppity in pushing a barely disguised pernicious agendum is well understood.
โThe declaration that the recommendations of the Minister of Agriculture, Alhaji Sabo Nanono, a mere political appointee like Garba Shehu, are now the โlasting solutionsโ which eluded all the elected representatives of the people of the Southern part of the country, exposes this man as a pitiable messenger who does not seem to understand the limits of his relevance and charge.
โMr Garba contends that โtheir announcement is of questionable legalityโ, referring to the 17 Governors of the Southern States, but the decision of certain elements to take the ancestral lands of other people to settle their kinsmen, including the โgun-wielding killer herdsmenโ and their families, and provide โveterinary clinics, water points for animals, and facilities for herders and their families including schooling through these rehabilitated reservesโ for which โthe Federal Government is making far-reaching and practical changes allowing for different communities to co-exist side-by-sideโ, does not appear to him as a comprehensive plan for land grabbing, a precursor to internal colonialism.
โHe wants to โrevive forest reservesโ but seems particularly uninterested in the current position of the same law, that he and his cohorts often misinterpret to serve parochialism and greed. Governors no longer have powers over the lands in their territories. They must take instructions from appointees of the Federal Government on such matters.
โIt is superfluous, and that is being charitable, for anyone to remind us of the constitutional right of bona fide citizens โto enjoy rights and freedoms within every one of our 36 States (and FCT)-regardless of their state of birth and residenceโ.
โThere has never been any contention on this provision. It is clear that Mr Garba seems to have issues understanding the difference between licentious criminality and qualified rights under our law. It is our duty to continually nudge him off his current state of cognitive dissonance. His pronouncement betrays dubiety and mischief.
โMost traditional families in Nigeria have occupations. Pastoralism is not an exception. Any ethnic group still trapped in anachronism may be assisted to embrace modernity. Dispossessing communities of their ancestral lands, encouraging denizens of the forests to overrun lands belonging to other people and forcing alien bands of migrants on the local populace to live โside-by-sideโ with other communities cannot be for the purpose of animal husbandry. It raises suspicion on a grand, deliberate, persistent and insidious design to use naked force to subjugate the real owners of the land. Mr Garba Shehu is a major supporter of the current pervasive anarchy in the land.
โHis acts are clearly those of an agent provocateur. Other closet dreamers, aspirers to colonial fantasies, must be weaned off their delusion.
โNo inch of the space delineated and known, currently, as South West, and indeed the whole South, will be ceded to a band of invaders masquerading as herdsmen under any guise.โ
