By Prince Feyisayo Ijifusi ( Apálará)
A Legislative Ban on Open Grazing and Unregulated Scavenging as a Prerequisite for National Security and Agricultural Productivity
Your Excellency Sir,
The polity stands at a juncture where symbolic gestures must yield to decisive policy if the state is to reclaim its monopoly on legitimate violence and restore public confidence in the social contract of securing lives and properties.
For too long, the persistence of open grazing and the proliferation of unregulated scavenging have functioned as vectors for insecurity, intercommunal friction, and criminal espionage. These practices, while historically rooted in subsistence livelihoods, have been co-opted by criminal enterprises and now constitute structural impediments to the enforcement of security protocols across the federation.
I write to implore your administration to enact and enforce a comprehensive, nationwide ban on both practices as an immediate step toward sanitizing the polity and safeguarding the nation’s agricultural base.
Open grazing, in its contemporary manifestation, has ceased to be a pastoral tradition and has become a pretext for the movement of armed actors across state lines with impunity. The unregulated ingress of herds into farmlands has devastated both subsistence and commercial agriculture. For smallholder farmers, the destruction of crops by grazing cattle erases seasonal income, undermines food security, and perpetuates rural poverty.
For investors and cooperatives attempting large-scale farming, the risk of herd intrusion, equipment damage, and violent confrontation makes mechanized agriculture economically untenable. By maintaining this system, the state inadvertently subsidizes a security vacuum that non-state actors exploit to conduct reconnaissance, smuggle arms, and establish footholds for kidnapping and banditry.
The agricultural consequences are systemic. Subsistence farmers, who constitute the majority of Nigeria’s food producers, lack the capital to fence large holdings or absorb repeated losses. Their dispossession reduces domestic food supply and inflates rural-urban migration.
Simultaneously, the prospect of large-scale, export-oriented farming is stifled because investors cannot secure land tenure against unpredictable encroachment. This dual erosion of small and large-scale productivity entrenches food inflation, weakens rural economies, and contradicts the government’s stated goals of agricultural self-sufficiency and job creation. A legislative ban, with provisions for ranching transition and livestock modernization, would close this vector and restore predictability to land use.
Unregulated scavenging presents a parallel threat that is often underestimated. The movement of itinerant scavengers across urban and peri-urban corridors provides cover for casing operations, the illicit trade in stolen infrastructure, and the mapping of critical installations by criminal syndicates. In the absence of a national registry and operational constraints, scavenging networks operate as shadow logistics chains for stolen cables, metals, and vehicular components.
The economic loss is substantial, but the security implication is graver: these networks erode the integrity of public infrastructure and furnish adversaries with intelligence on vulnerable points within the state’s grid, telecommunications, and transport systems.
The ban of both practices is not merely a law-and-order measure; it is a doctrine of preemption. By eliminating the ambient mobility that facilitates criminal espionage and rural insecurity, your government would create the operational clarity required for security agencies and regional security outfits to function effectively. Amotekun, Ebubeagu, Hisbah, and other sub-national formations have repeatedly cited the difficulty of distinguishing legitimate pastoral or scavenging activity from hostile movement. A clear legal proscription removes that ambiguity, enabling kinetic and non-kinetic responses to be calibrated against definable violations rather than contested norms.
Such a policy would also strengthen the resolve of federal and state security agencies by aligning political authority with operational mandate. When the state legislates what is prohibited and provides the resources for enforcement, it signals to the Nigeria Police Force, the Department of State Services, the Armed Forces, and civilian task forces that they are operating with constitutional backing and executive resolve. This alignment reduces the friction of inter-agency coordination and curtails the political interference that often neutralizes arrests and prosecutions. A sanitized polity requires that no economic interest, however entrenched, be placed above the imperative of public safety and food sovereignty.
Your Excellency, history will not judge this administration by the number of memoranda issued, but by the decisive actions taken when the polity’s integrity and food security were at stake. A nationwide ban on open grazing and unregulated scavenging is a low-cost, high-leverage intervention that strengthens internal security, protects farmlands for both subsistence and industrial agriculture, restores deterrence, and affirms that the Nigerian state is capable of enforcing its own laws. I urge you to act with the urgency this moment demands, to consult with governors and regional bodies for coordinated implementation, and to provide the political cover necessary for security agencies to execute without equivocation. The sanitation of our polity and the revitalization of our farms begin with the closure of the avenues through which disorder enters.
Respectfully,
SIGNED
Prince Feyisayo Ijifusi ( Apálará)