Nigeria’s poorest citizens are locked in a silent contest of survival against two very different but equally destructive forces. On one side stand the unregulated pastoralists whose cattle roam freely into farmlands. On the other side stand the political elites: governors, commissioners, and agencies, who bulldoze homes and seize ancestral lands in the name of industrialization, road expansion, and “development.” One group carries sticks and machetes: the other carries constitutions, bulldozers, and state power. Yet the outcome for the poor is strikingly similar: dispossession, hunger, and despair. The Pastoralist Problem: When Cattle Become Weapons Across many rural communities, herders release their cattle into farmlands as though the crops were planted for the animals. Maize, cassava, rice, yam leaves, legumes, everything becomes fodder. These are not just crops; they are the lifeline of families who depend on them for food, school fees, and survival. Humans eat crops. Human...
Introduction History is humanity’s compass. It points to the present, warns of danger, and protects the future. Every society that has risen from chaos to stability has done so by remembering, by holding its past close enough to learn from it, yet far enough to transcend it. But what happens when a nation forgets? When memory is not merely lost but buried? When the past is not a teacher but a corpse? The present becomes hollow, and the future becomes a casualty. Nigeria today is a living example of what it means for a people to exist without memory. It is a nation where remembrance has been wiped out, where collective experience has been cleansed, where lessons once learned are now discarded like waste. Nigeria’s absurdity is not accidental; it is the predictable outcome of a society that refuses to be informed by its own history. The Paradox of a People Who Kill the Past and Bury the Future The title of this essay carries a deliberate paradox: Nigeria’s present buries the past...