Lalong: National livestock plan will curb farmer-herder crisis — but FG not implementing it

Simon Lalong, governor of Plateau state, says the National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) will curb the farmer-herder crisis but the federal government has failed to implement it.

Lalong spoke on Thursday in Abuja during an event organised by the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) to launch the peace and inclusive security initiative (PISI).

He noted that there had been a gap in the the implementation of the NLTP.

NLTP was put in place by the national economic council (NEC) led by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo. The plan was to run for a period of 10 years — between 2019 and 2028.

Lalong said: “I was deeply involved with the NLTP. The same NGOs that produced the document for me in Plateau, they helped in producing the NLTP document.

“Many of these issues we are seeing today are addressed by the NLTP. In implementation, there has been a lot of communication gap, each time we move forward, we go back. You can have beautiful policies but implementation will be a problem.

“On the side of the federal government I also blame them. Part of the blame is on you, if you initiated this programme to address this problem that we are talking about, go ahead and start implementation.

“The pilot scheme we were part of, but it took us almost six years [to implement] and we are still talking about the pilot scheme.”

The governor said Plateau has enjoyed relative peace because his administration has been able to develop a successful model in collaboration with non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“We established the peace agency and we established it by law and we appointed the members of the peace agency,” he said.

“In that document [developed by some NGOs], we laid down the reason for the conflict, laid down how to approach these conflicts and how to find solutions were given back to the communities.”

Lalong lamented that other states, apart from Kaduna, have failed to adopt the model used in his state.

Kayode Fayemi, chairman of the NGF, said there should be a sense of urgency about the country’s future.

Fayemi said the governors are looking at developing a robust response to the country’s security challenges, hence the initiative.

“Security goes beyond armed protection, food security, cyber security have come to the fore,” he said

“We seek to have an urgent country-wide response to the security challenges we are facing.”

The Ekiti governor said although the federal government has made efforts to tackle insecurity, more needs to be done.