Poet-laureate, Professor Niyi Osundare, has called on the President Muhammadu Buhari, to quickly curb killer herdsmen’s menace in the South-West and other regions in the country.
The Ikere Ekiti born scholar said the country which President Buhari preside is burning in all its flanks: kidnapping on the highways, kidnapping on village roads, kidnapping on township streets, kidnapping in the homestead, kidnapping on the farmlands. Nigeria has never had it so bad.
In a letter titled, “The Nigeria and the cow problem: Another letter to President Buhari,’’ sent to our correspondent via email, the elder statesman said the letter was his second in five months to the President.
He said, “This letter, my second to you in five months, will begin with a very, very absurd question: Mr President, will Nigeria drift into another civil war under your watch simply because the ‘Giant of Africa’ does not know how to manage its cows? Yes, absurd: for, absurdity is the faithful cohort of the grotesque and irrational, the conspicuously invisible and falsely true.
“ No war has ever taken place without a potent dose of the absurd in its mix of causes. No calamity has ever happened without a touch of the irrational. The distance between travesty and tragedy is perilously short. This is why history’s capacious house is replete with the skeletons of nations which went to war, after leaving their brains behind.
“Mr President, the country over which you preside is burning in all its flanks: kidnapping on the highways, kidnapping on village roads, kidnapping on township streets, kidnapping in the homestead, kidnapping on the farmlands. Nigeria has never had it so bad.
“The notorious perpetrators of these crimes are widely called ‘bandits’ and/or ‘Fulani herdsmen’, depending upon the speaker’s degree of sensitivity or political correctness.
“The ethnic origination and/or attribution of these crimes is my object of worry – and should be to anyone who cares for the stability of Nigeria and its survival as a corporate entity.’’
Describing a cow as a four-legged, two-horned, long-tailed, absolutely innocent animal, Osundare said the animal had become “Nigeria’s casus belli, the moo-ing metaphor of a planless, dysfunctional country, waiting for another bout of absurdity to push her beyond the brink, and plunge all into avoidable catastrophe.”
He added, “Big wars are often caused by thoughtless little issues. Mr President, war drums are already sounding in some parts of the country, provoked by a question as dangerously absurd as this: when you and a herd of cows meet on the road, who/which should have the right of way? When you, a struggling farmer, get to your farm and find a herd of cows making a meal of the crops which are the lifeline for you and your family, should you take a bow as you shout bon appetite to the bovine bunch? When your only child is kidnapped and tortured and murdered, even after the payment of a hefty ransom, will you ask your neighbours to join you in the singing of the national anthem? Absurdity, dangerous absurdity.’’
