Governors of states in the southern flank of the country have warned Malam Shehu Garba, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, to stop insulting Southern governors, saying his pronouncement on the recent ban on open grazing in the region indicated he lacked understanding between licentious criminality and the constitutional rights of citizens.
While insisting that the ban on open grazing in the southern part of the country was irrevocable, the governors described Shehu as “an agent provocateur, working assiduously for extraneous interests whose game plan stands at variance with the expectations of genuine lovers of peaceful coexistence among all peoples whose ethnic extractions are indigenous to Nigeria”.
The Southern governors were reacting to a statement by Malam Garba Shehu, in which he said the ban on open grazing by the Southern Governors Forum, SGF is of questionable legality.
However, in a swift reaction, the Chairman of the South West Governors Forum and Governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu, berated the presidential spokesperson, accusing him of creating confusion in the polity by his utterances.
Akeredolu, who spoke on behalf of the SGF, in a statement signed by his Senior Special Adviser on Special Duties and Strategy, Dr Doyin Odebowale, noted that Shehu had yet to disclose the “real motive (s) of those he serves, definitely not the President.
“Mr. Garba contends that their announcement is of questionable legality, referring to the 17 Governors of Southern States, but the decision of certain elements to take the ancestral lands of other people to settle their kinsmen, including the “gun-wielding killer herdsmen” and their families, and provide “veterinary clinics, water points for animals, and facilities for herders and their families including schooling through these rehabilitated reserves” for which “the Federal Government is making far-reaching and practical changes allowing for different communities to co-exist side-by-side”, does not appear to him as a comprehensive plan for land grabbing, a precursor to internal colonialism.
“He wants to “revive forest reserves” 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….
“It is our duty to continually nudge him off his current state of cognitive dissonance. His pronouncement betrays dubiety and mischief”.
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