Ondo State Governor and a legal scholar, Rotimi Akeredolu, earlier today Tuesday, May 25, 2021 responded to the statement from the Buhari presidency, which attacked the recent resolutions and recommendations of the 17 Southern Governors of Nigeria to ban open grazing by cattle in the region, their call for Nigeria’s president, retired major general Mohammadu Buhari to hold a national dialogue and seek effective solutions to the escalating issues of insecurity across the country..
In the statement by Garba Shehu, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, the resolutions and suggestions issued by the Governors were described as “acts of politicking intended by its signatories to demonstrate power.” Shehu added that it was an attempt to violate the rights of some Nigerians.
Akeredolu dismissed Shehu’s claims as reflecting a lack of knowledge of the laws of the land in a news release issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Special Duties and Strategy, Dr. Doyin Odebowale, titled, ‘Mr Garba Shehu: On the trail of an agent provocateur’. The news release which has since gone viral said that “Mr. Garba must disclose, this day, the real motive(s) of those he serves, definitely not the President. He can’t continue to hide under some opaque, omnibus, and dubious directives to create confusion in the polity.”
“Mr. Garba contends that ‘their announcement is of questionable legality’, referring to the 17 Governors of the 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.”
“Governors no longer have powers over the lands in their territories. They must take instructions from appointees of the Federal Government on such matters.”
“It is clear that Mr. Garba seems to have issues understanding the difference between licentious criminality and qualified rights under our law. It’s our duty to continually nudge him off his current state of cognitive dissonance. His pronouncement betrays dubiety and mischief.”
“It raises suspicion on a grand, deliberate, persistent, and insidious design to use naked force to subjugate the real owners of the land. Mr Garba Shehu is a major supporter of the current pervasive anarchy in the land.”
