By Ikem Okuhu
Nigerians all over social media have been ululating their disenchantment with Senator Asamu Aliero, a man who arguably one of the most experienced parliamentarian in the country. Aliero has been a governor for eight years between 1999 and 2007. He then moved to the senate and has been absent for only a few years between 2007 and the present.
People like him deserve a lot more respect than he is getting. Look, if Senator Aliero’s tenure in the Nigerian National Assembly were a human, May 29, 2024, would have been him or her 25th birthday. Many of our brilliant kids graduate and complete their Ph.Ds at 25. Those who didn’t follow the academic line would have completed their apprenticeship programmes and running businesses of their own at that age. The early birds would have been marrying an having children in creches and kindergartens. As a matter of cultural fact, if Aliero, as a Muslim, decides to add to his household, people like you who love to bleat about privileged men and minors wouldn’t criticise him for marrying someone born in 1999. That would be a well-matured woman at the prime of her life there!
This is why I feel personally disturbed about the manner Nigerians have been casting slurs of all despicable types on the distinguished senator for prescribing that our cows be granted their rights to freedom of movement across the country just as bona fide citizens of the country.
Every right-thinking Nigerian should deprecate this; Aliero remains not just one of our most experienced parliamentarians, he is also likely to be the most knowledgeable and there is no way his wealth of experience as a governor and now senator should not be allowed to rub off on the country, especially as we trudge along this renewed hope promenade of destiny.
Even the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio is not doing the Lord’s work in that Upper Chamber. How many years has he even spent in the Nigerian Senate to block a futuristic legislation championed by Senator Aliero so brazenly? Who is he? In 1999, when he was still in political wilderness, Aliero was a already a governor. In fact, by 2007, when he started doing political boi-boi commissioner for Governor Victor Attah in Akwa Ibom State, Aliero had moved up to the senate, honing his skills in national politics, an achievement that eventually made him a minister under the late President YarÁdua. Is it because we have no respect for experience in this country and elect all sorts of newbies to leadership positions? Who is Senator Akpabio to overrule Senator Aliero on such a matter of urgent national importance?
It’s bad enough that Nigeria is coming late into the room of global animal rights activism, throwing away Senator Aliero’s argument for the granting of the rights to freedom of movement to our cows has set Nigeria back by more than 50 years. Someone should please rouse our Senate President; he is giving the country a bad name and every right-thinking member of the Nigerian public should speak against his irresponsible actions.
Since animal rights movement started in the 1970s when moral philosopher, Peter Singer published his riveting book, Animal Liberation, nothing significant has been added from Nigeria to the body of works for enhanced animal rights that rivals what Senator Aliero attempted to do. How Senator Akpabio and the bunch of sleepers in the Senate failed to see his contribution as capable of leapfrogging Nigeria to the front-row seat of the global discourse on animal rights is hard to fathom.
The simple truth is that our cows and every cow, for that matter, are entitled to be granted their rights to freedom of movement as provided for in the global charter for animal rights. Infringing on their rights to this and other freedoms is inhuman and against global best animal rights practices.
I believe the time has come for a referendum on the adoption of the rights of cows. This referendum has to address the rights of our cows in such a manner as to guarantee their rights to freedom of movement to any part of the country. The present situation that has them passing through bushes and forests has to be stopped. Our government should build what I call COW-WAYS on all our highways to protect them from the nefarious activities of motorists.
I listened to how the discussion happened at the Senate. Even after making one of the most passionate, sensible, and thought-provoking presentations that have ever been made on the floor of the Nigerian Senate, Senator Aliero could not convince the perceivably prejudiced, jaundiced, and biased Senate President, who, rather than allow the motion to scale unchallenged, decided to cruelly put it up for debate. The real injustice happened when it was put to a voice vote because from what we heard, the “nays” were louder than the ”ayes” but Akpabio looked us straight in the eyes and overruled Aliero.
What injustice! When would we have real and true democracy in which the real voices and desires of the people would count in this country?
If what Akpabio did in the Senate was provocative, the reactions of Nigerians on social media were aggravatingly insensitive. How would any person with blood running in him or her not understand that cows deserve rights? The way and manner Nigerians criticised, excoriated and generally pilloried Senator Aliero exposed not just the depth of ignorance on the part of our people, but also highlighted the importance of proper animal rights education in the country. This is why I advocate that the Ministry of Education should convoke a National Education Summit at which the plans for the inclusion of the National Animal Rights Education (NARE) into the school curriculum would be the major topic of discourse. This will enable our children to imbibe the culture of respecting animals, especially cows, and seeing them as an integral part of our society. We need to teach this culture right from the cradle and ensure that each time our primary school pupils sing the new National Anthem during their morning assembly, they should also be made to recite the National Animal Rights Code (NARCode). It is a patriotic duty that every Nigerian must join in its propagation.
These days, many hypocritical Nigerians advertise their relationship with their dogs on social media. Many people treat their dogs better than they treat human beings. People spend hundreds of thousands of naira to buy food for their dogs. If you patronize beer palours and pepper soup joints, you encounter many people going round to collect left-over bones and meals very late in the night. They gather these for their dogs.
What purpose do dogs serve anyway? Some of these dogs cannot chase away a single armed robber. All they do is eat expensive foods. We even build small houses in the compound for them. When this world was still good, dogs were useful because they hunted. The value of a dog is measured by its ability to go into the bush and kill grass cutters, antelopes, and other bushmeat. They do not stay at home, eat food, and do nothing useful for their owners. And we cannot even convert them to pepper soup like our Akwa Ibom brothers without people looking at us as if we are cannibals.
But our cows are useful, yet we have refused to give them half the rights we give common dogs. Let me start from the olden days. Cows helped the farmer harrow his soil. They did this job along with donkeys and horses. Our cows provided (and still provide) us with milk, the most essential source of protein. Can you now see my point? Even the milk that the cow should use to nurture her offspring, we take and drink. And the poor animals have not complained.
To be able to feed, cows are exposed to the drudgery of trekking from Niger Republic to the grasslands below the River Niger just to find grasses green enough to pass for food. How many of us can undertake this journey on foot? How many of us can endure such suffering? And after these punishments, we still kill and eat them.
Nigerians are not sensible people, and until the cows in this country decide to either flee to other countries or just commit mass suicide (I do not know the word for animals killing themselves), we won’t appreciate the importance of cows and the need to listen to Senator Aliero and grant them rights to freedom of movement.
A few statistics would help the ignorant lot. Beef, the meat we make from cows constitutes approximately 62 percent of the animal proteins we eat for dinner in this country. Did you hear that? Sixty-two percent! This is not counting the cow-tail, cow-head, cow-leg, and intestine pepper-soup variants we eat in bars and joints every day.
Are you aware that Nigerians consume more than 360,000 tonnes of beef daily? Yes! 360,000. You need to respect cows more, my friends!
Those of you who earn community respect, win huge contracts and even get political appointments because you gave gifts of cows to people of influence, how do you even sleep peacefully at night, knowing that the animals that attracted such favours and respect for you are facing rights deprivations of such a vast scale? Think, Nigerians, THINK!!
We need to do something very urgently. First, I believe the time has come for a referendum on the adoption of the rights of cows. This referendum has to address the rights of our cows in such a manner as to guarantee their rights to freedom of movement to any part of the country. The present situation that has them passing through bushes and forests has to stop. Our government should build what I call COW-WAYS on all our highways to protect them from the nefarious activities of motorists.
Secondly, their right to forage has to be guaranteed by the constitution, and by this, I am saying that they should be granted the right to eat anything green that tickles their taste buds. It is an act of wickedness for human beings to prevent cows from eating anything, including the crops planted in farms. In the final analysis, those meals are merely preparing the proteinous beef that men and women will eat in the immediate or near future.
Again, there has to be a public hearing on how to cement the rights of our cows to vote and be voted for. We cannot continue to sit and casually make decisions that affect these important animals without allowing them to make inputs.
To this end, I will advocate that we reserve some seats for the cow segment of the Nigerian population in the two chambers of the national assembly, in all the state houses of assembly, and at the local government councils. They have to be there to participate in making laws for good governance and delivery of democratic dividends for all the animals of this country.In the Senate, there has to be a position of “Cow Whip” same way they have Majority Whips and Minority Whips. This would even help stop the production of that wicked weapon of intimidation called koboko that soldiers use to intimidate defenseless people. Going forward also, the Ministries of Agriculture at both the federal and state levels should be divided into two, with a cow heading the newly created Ministry of Cow Affairs. This ministry shall be headed by a cow that has trekked from the fringes of the Sahel to the coasts of the Atlantic in the south. None of those that were moved in trucks should be considered because they wouldn’t understand the feelings of all the cows across the country and would therefore not be properly oriented to solve their problems.
