Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, MACBAN, which is the umbrella body for herdsmen in Nigeria, has stated reasons it cannot be proscribed like the Federal Government did to the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB.
In an interview with the Sun, the Spokesman of MACBAN, Ismaila Ibrahim Ribeji, said unlike IPOB, that was proscribed and declared a terrorist organisation for trying to create a separate country from Nigeria, which was a constitutional breach, the herdsmen have not done anything to warrant branding them, terrorists.
Ribeji, who first claimed that they don’t know why the IPOB was declared terrorist group by Buhari, later explained that the Biafra group breached the constitution by trying to create another country.
According to him, “I don’t know why Buhari declared IPOB terrorist, but I want everybody to understand that herdsmen are not terrorists.
“It is not all of them that are committing crimes. I’m not blind to say that some of the herdsmen are not involved in the killings, just like other tribes are also involved in the killings.
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“It has to do with the constitution of the country. The Fulani are scattered not only in Nigeria, but also in Africa and other parts of the world, but if you consider the Nigerian state, I don’t think there is any state where the Fulani organised themselves and say they were going to fight the government and declare their own country.
“But in some states, IPOB has said they were marginalised and they have organised themselves and said they were going to declare their own country.
“So the Biafra people were trying to declare for themselves an independent nation, why the Fulani people have not declared themselves an independent nation, not even a local government. If you look at the Nigeria constitution, anybody who tries to organise a coup plot or people looking for
another country from the Nigeria state, there is a punishment.
“I don’t think that there is any part of the country that the Fulani have declared as their own state, but those people have carved their states, and said it is their own nation, and the government saw that it was a breach of the law of the nation and no group was supposed to behave in that way. The Fulani are not doing that.”
