Stop being agent provocateur, Akeredolu’s aide tells Garba Shehu

Odebowale noted that comments from Shehu could plunge the country into anarchy

He said the utterances of Shehu and other persons in the presidency were “self-deluding, mendacious but potentially dangerous itinerary to anarchy.”

Odebowale who spoke in a statement issued in Akure said no inch of the space delineated as South West, and indeed the whole South, would be ceded to those he termed “band of invaders masquerading as herdsmen under any guise.”

He stated that some elements in the presidency were making moves to grab the southerners land for their kinsmen from the north.

Odebowale said Southern Governors were duly elected to direct the affairs of the people.

He stated that moves to provide “veterinary clinics, water points for animals, and facilities for herders and their families including schooling through rehabilitated reserves was a comprehensive plan for land grabbing and a precursor to internal colonialism.

According to him, “He works, assiduously, for extraneous interests whose game plan stands at variance with the expectations of genuine lovers of peaceful coexistence among all the peoples whose ethnic extractions are indigenous to Nigeria.

“Mr. Garba must disclose, this day, the real motive(s) of those he serves, definitely not the President. He cannot continue to hide under some opaque, omnibus and dubious directives to create confusion in the polity.

“The easy recourse to mendacious uppity in pushing a barely disguised pernicious agendum is well understood.

“The declaration that the recommendations of the Minister of Agriculture, Alhaji Sabo Nanono, a mere political appointee like Garba Shehu, are now the “lasting solutions” which eluded all the elected representatives of the people of the Southern part of the country, exposes this man as a pitiable messenger who does not seem to understand the limits of his relevance and charge.

“Mr Garba contends that ‘their announcement is of questionable legality,’ referring to the 17 governors of the southern states, but the decision of certain elements to take the ancestral lands of other people to settle their kinsmen, including the “gun-wielding ‘killer herdsmen’ and their families.

“He wants to ‘revive forest reserves’ but seems particularly uninterested in the current position of the same law, which he and his cohorts often misinterpret to serve parochialism and greed. Governors no longer have powers over the lands in their territories. They must take instructions from appointees of the Federal Government on such matters.

“It is clear that Mr Garba seems to have issues understanding the difference between licentious criminality and qualified rights under our law. It is our duty to continually nudge him off his current state of cognitive dissonance. His pronouncement betrays dubiety and mischief.

“Most traditional families in Nigeria have occupations. Pastoralism is not an exception. Any ethnic group still trapped in anachronism may be assisted to embrace modernity.

“Dispossessing communities of their ancestral lands, encouraging denizens of the forests to overrun lands belonging to other people and forcing alien bands of migrants on the local populace to live “side-by-side” with other communities cannot be for the purpose of animal husbandry.

“It raises suspicion on a grand, deliberate, persistent and insidious design to use naked force to subjugate the real owners of the land. Mr. Garba Shehu is a major supporter of the current pervasive anarchy in the land.”