By Mahmud Jega
*Photo: US President, Donald Trump *
A bill now before the United States Congress that proposes US visa restrictions and asset freezes on members of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria [MACBAN] and Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore would have been laughable if it were not so silly. Introduced on Tuesday by U.S. Congressman Christopher Smith, it says it seeks sanctions against individuals and groups “responsible for or complicit in severe violations of religious freedom” under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).
Miyetti Allah, a group launched in Nigeria in recent decades in direct response to growing conflict between nomadic cattle rearers of Fulani ethnic extraction and farmers in various parts of the country, is essentially a group of town-based Fulani persons with a tenuous, if any, connection to the rural herdsmen.
Please ask the US Embassy in Abuja and its Lagos Consulate: how many visa applications have they received from herdsmen in the last thirty years? A cattle rearer going to America, to do what? A man who walks every year from one end of the country and back, on foot, driving cattle from one pasture and water pond to another, who has no house, no car, motorcycle or bicycle, who treads along bush paths, who drinks water from rivers, sips unsaturated cow milk and eats grain in rural markets, who has cattle herds but hardly ever eats meat, what is his own with visa?
The only foreign country that herdsmen ever go to is Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage, once in a lifetime because it costs them six big cows per trip.
Freeze their assets? The herdsman’s only assets are his cattle. He never opens a bank account, doesn’t use a POS, has never visited a bureau d’change, has never received a bank alert. Pray, how does the US Federal Reserve seize his assets? Or does the CIA have a way of ferrying cows to Texas, there to mingle with Texas longhorns? Just remember, unlike the placid long horns, our cattle here are highly temperamental and will gore Donald Trump at the earliest opportunity.