140 Gazetted Grazing Routes, Non In Southern Nigeria, Except Oyo State – S.A. Ingawa, et Al wrote.
Fellow Nigerians, following President Buhari’s decision to reclaim all officially gazetted grazing reserves/routes, I decided to conduct my findings as to where exactly these gazetted cattle routes are located. What I found was rather interesting and I will present it here to enlighten the public.
My research focused only on the gazetted cattle routes as that was what PMB said he would reclaim.
Do you know that in the entire south, it is only Oyo state that has 2 gazetted cattle routes/reserves? The rest don’t have. See below the breakdown of the officially gazetted cattle routes in Nigeria;
There are 140 gazetted grazing reserves (Adamawa—31; Bauchi—27; Borno—15; Gombe—4; Jigawa—2; Kaduna—2; Kebbi—1; Kogi—1; Kwara—1; Nasarawa— 7; Niger— 2; Plateau— 1; Sokoto— 8; Taraba—9; Yobe— 17; Zamfara— 6, FCT— 4 and Oyo— 2.
I am not very sure PMB is aware of this distribution. He may be aware that there are gazetted grazing reserves, but if he now discovers that what is officially gazetted does not even include almost the entire south, I am not sure he will still pursue the agenda of reclaiming these reserves.
I also found out that as far back as the time these reserves were created, the committee recommended the adoption of a more sedentary method of cattle rearing or ranching. In a paper written by S.A. Ingawa, C. Tarawali and R. von Kaufmann, ILCA Subhumid Research Site(1989), the authors listed some of the problems with open grazing of cattle and the need to implement a solution that is both beneficial to the pastoralists and the farmers.
The research is an eye-opener and also a deep revelation as to how government can indeed resolve any problem if they intend to, with honesty and fairness.
As for the gazetted grazing reserves in question, there are only 140 which I have listed. Although some were never officially gazetted, I have excluded them from this post because the focus is on the officially gazetted ones.
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