Herdsmen paid N100m fines in Benue in 3 months - Miyetti Allah

The Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore yesterday said some arrested herders in Benue State had paid over N100m as penalties over the state’s anti-grazing law.

Its national president, Alhaji Bello Abdullahi Bodejo and secretary, Saleh Alhassan, disclosed this to newsmen in Abuja.

“Between January and March this year, Benue State

Government has collected over N100m as fines and penalties from innocent Fulani pastoralists, especially in the Benue-Taraba and Benue-Nasarawa borders.

Bodejo said the major problems facing Fulani pastoralists were the injustices ranging from killings by tribal gangs, negative anti-grazing laws that had emasculated their means of economic livelihood and outright expulsions by some state governors who issued quit notices.

He also alleged there were organised killings by vigilantes, supported by some state governors, “who carry out extra-judicial killings of their members without recourse to due process of the law.”

“What our people are facing is a kind of organised state terrorism our people are facing in parts of the country and you have governors enacting laws to destroy their means of economic livelihood without alternatives being put in place. We’re really being treated as if we’re not citizens of this country and is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise us and at the end radicalized our youths.”

“What Governor Ortom has succeeded in doing with the anti-grazing law is to create a legal monster that he is using to extort our people, through the livestock guard perpetrating all manners of injustices. We are still in court and urging President

Muhammadu Buhari to call Governor Ortom to order.”

When contacted to react to the allegations, Ortom’s spokesman, Terver Akase, said: "I don’t know about the figures they’re bandying around, but what I know is that as long as herders continue to violate the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law of Benue State, they’ll certainly pay fines. In fact, the state government will soon review the law to introduce stiffer penalty.”