03 March 2016•Update: 04 March 2016
LAGOS, Nigeria
Nigerian lawmakers have passed a motion directing the government to permanently address an intermittent violent crisis between farmers and herdsmen in the country's Middle Belt region.
The Senate unanimously passed the motion a day after hundreds of protesters marched to the parliament building, calling on the authorities to act.
Hundreds have been killed in central Nigeria’s Benue state in conflicts between the two sides in the past two weeks, prompting President Muhammadu Buhari to order an immediate probe.
"The Senate is persuaded that a consideration of strategies for settled cattle farming, as being proposed by various stakeholders, would be a better approach in addressing the issues associated with the rather outdated nomadic cattle rearing," according to the motion sponsored by Senator Chukwuka Utazi.
"The Senate urges the federal government to urgently establish ranches and grazing reserves across the country, and adopt other strategies to enable nomadic cattle handlers settle to modern system of livestock keeping," it added.
Parliament also urged the government to revive the river basin development areas created in 1979 to ensure that farmers are able to work round the year to halt the crisis of limited farmlands as well as help prevent food crisis.
Reports of the deadly clashes between some armed herdsmen and local farmers had been on the social media for the past weeks.
The region, known as Nigeria's food basket, has been bedeviled for years by a war of attrition on both sides, often centering around contending needs of the herdsmen to graze their animals and farmers' efforts to protect their crops.
