The Muhammadu Buhari administration is prone to shooting itself in the foot again and again, and validating the accusation that the president is incurably parochial and out of touch with reality. The administration’s poor policy formulation is a fall-out of his lack of sensitivity to the people’s anxieties and expectations.

What can be more insensitive than rolling out a program to create Fulani cattle settlements in places where they are not wanted, and the people there have been traumatized by incessant, vicious attacks by marauding herdsmen, who operate outside the law with absolute impunity? Overwhelmed by public disapproval its decision generated the government hurriedly announced it was suspending the scheme. But before the suspension, the government had confirmed that the scheme would kick off with 12 settlements on land either voluntarily donated by states that support it, or compulsorily acquired by the federal government.
Benue is one of the states designated to host the settlements. But the state government and the people have said clearly that they don’t want to host any cattle settlement. The state is one of the few that have anti-open grazing law to check the menace of herdsmen freeloading on other people’s land and farms. The law is designed to promote ranching, which the herdsmen don’t want and Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, MACBAN, the umbrella body of the cattle herding business, is totally opposed to.
He is starting his second term with a mandate that is indisputably dubious, by doubling down on his parochialism and advertising his sheer inability to be a leader.