Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka has come out with an alarming prediction if the increasingly deadly conflict between cattle herders and others does not cool down.
“If we’re not careful… we’re going to have a famine when farmers cannot go to their farms,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme.
“This is serious… right on my doorstep we’re having food producers being thrown out of their livelihood.”
He alleged that farmers were being kidnapped and killed.
Soyinka himself said he had got into a row with some herders after some cattle had been driven into his compound.
He said that better community policing could help solve the problem.
The government has proposed the establishment of large ranches for the herders to prevent them from the cattle straying onto farms.
But some governors in south-western states have rejected the proposal. They have set up their own security unit
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