Arms haul in kaduna controversial village

In the morning of last Monday, troops from One Division, Nigerian Army, Kaduna, landed at Ladduga village, the only settlement of Fulani in southern Kaduna. They cordoned off the place and carried out a house-to–house search. According to the Army, it recovered a haul of weaponry and arrested 18 suspects. Ladduga is a controversial reserve located on large pristine woodland served by perennial streams and rich fodder for grazing in the heart of Ikulu land, about 100 kilometers south of Kaduna metropolis. *Cattle Some natives of southern Kaduna alleged that the village is a safe haven for Fulani militants suspected to be involved in the bloody raids of their communities since the 2011 post-election violence, a charge rebutted by the Fulani of Ladduga. But, after the Monday search, the spokesman for One Division, Nigerian Army, Kaduna, Col. Usman Abdul, said that several weapons were discovered in Ladduga and that 18 persons were arrested in connection with the arms. That claim by the Army set the tone for a bitter controversy about the real ownership of Ladduga, and the propriety of the search. ‘Ancestral land of Fulani’ In a press statement by the Mobgal Fulbe Development Association, Kaduna State branch, signed by its Secretary, Ahmad Yandeh, the search by the Army was an infringement on the liberty and right of the Fulani on their ancestral homes of Ladduga. “This association wishes to condemn in totality the attitude of the security operatives who invaded Ladduga this morning without recourse to the law. . . in the end they arrested over 20 people without giving any reason for their arrest and without informing their family members where they were taking them. . .”, the association stated. “It is noteworthy that the Fulani of southern part of Kaduna State are bonafide indigenes of southern Kaduna and not settlers and have been living there from time immemorial pre-dating all other tribes claiming indigeneship. Our people cannot and will not leave and abandon their ancestral home (Ladduga). Anybody or group of persons thinking otherwise is only day-dreaming and deceiving himself”. ‘Absolute, arrant arrogance’ On his part, Dr. Zwahu Bonnat, a former history lecturer with the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, and Chairman, Southern Kaduna Peoples’ Union (SOKAPU) Development Forum, alleged that the Fulani were lying about Ladduga. Zwahu, now Principal Research Consultant, Centre for Population and Development, Kaduna, said the Fulani came down from the Futa Djallon mountains of Guinea and Senegal to southern Kaduna only after the Othman Dan Fodio jihad of the 19th century. Said Bonnat to Sunday Vanguard in his office in Kaduna: “That is a lie, that claim by the Fulbe, or Fulani. An average Nigerian knows that the Fulani left Guinea and Senegal, their ancestral homes, between the 17th and 18th century. The Fulani were a formidable part of the ancient Songhai Empire, and were never anywhere in the present Nigeria state. We in the Middle Belt started our contact with them around the 19th century. Even during the Dan Fodiio jihad, most of our communities had never seen the Fulani before. “And it must be stated that every Fulani who had a straw hut to live with his family and herded his cows was always given that piece of land by a particular family under the consent of the community”. The SOKAPU leader explained that no Fulani just came, found a place and started living on it. “Since they are nomadic in nature, they migrate between the rainy and dry season. Yes, some of them do settle to the extent that they built mud houses, and even modern houses in southern Kaduna today. But, every Fulani person in southern Kaduna is a settler and has no right to claim it as his ancestral land. That would be absolute arrant arrogance”, he stressed. Bonnat pointed out that the claim by the Mobgal Fulbe Development Association that Laduga is their ancestral home, including the entire southern Kaduna, would not surprise him as it is a measurement of their education, and also the extent they will go to lie in other to grab people’s land. ‘Land owned by Ikulus’ “The Ladduga cattle grazing reserve is in Kachia Local Government Area of Kaduna State. It is on Ikulu land. What happened was that the Fulani specifically requested for it, and they were granted 30,000 hectares of the land covering mainly Ikulu villages, though other tribes also ceded their land”, the SOKAPU leader stated. He went on: Villagers were displaced, but never paid any form of compensation. And according to grazing reserve law, as long as no compensation is paid to the owners of the acquired land, the land still belongs to the original owners. Ladduga was created in 1988. The Fulani moved in there in 1991. It was in 1996 that Kaduna State government gazetted Ladduga. “Majority of the people in Ladduga came there in 2011 after the post-election violence. And since the Ikulu natives have not been compensated by government, they have been insisting that the expansion of the reserve from 30,000 hectares to 70,000 hectares is official stealing of their land. They have written several petitions to government about this. And correspondence between them and government shows that government is begging them to be patient. If the Ikulu people did not return to their land, it could at best be said that Ladduga belongs to Kaduna State government, not Fulani. Because even some of the terms in the grazing reserve law makes it clear that the owners of the land, not Fulani, were to harvest all the cash trees there. So, in what way did Ladduga become an ancestral land of the Fulani? “Ladduga has become a dangerous place not only to southern Kaduna but to all travellers along Kachia – Kaduna axis because of the robbery there. “The discovery of weapons by soldiers in Fulani homes and the arrest of the suspects just confirmed what the people of southern Kaduna have been saying about Ladduga. “There was this obituary of a Fulani man in his 80s in Ladduga. In the announcement, it was said that the man was buried in Ladduga ‘the land of his birth’. So you can see the ruse displayed by these people. This is a wild, and false claim that can easily be rubbished even by our youths in their 30s. ‘We’ll resist action on cattle grazing reserve’ “Government does know what it is doing; if not, how can they contemplate creating grazing reserve for nomadic pastoralists like the Fulani in the 21st century? “Look at it this way – the Fulani, not the Hausa, are all over the Middle Belt killing and destroying villages with feeble attempt by the Federal Government at stopping them. It does indeed look like it is a deliberate attempt to reward them with Middle Belt land as a way of appeasing them. “I want to say that every community in the Middle Belt will resist to the last the grabbing of their land to be allocated to violent people. The reward for mass murder of people cannot be grazing reserve for the Fulani. The Fulani know where they come from, and should go back, if they would not respect the right of their hosts to live in peace. “If not, government should find ways of helping them in modern ranching at other places, not nomadic pastoralism, which is an index of backwardness world wide. No group of humans do that these days”