At an intersection seven miles from the presidential villa, frustrated drivers honk as a herd of cattle feeds on the grass beautifying the median strip and slowly marches across the road, their hooves clattering against the asphalt. For the teenage herder guiding them, Ismail Abubakar, it is just another day, and for most drivers stuck in the traffic, it’s a familiar scene unfolding in Nigeria’s capital Abuja.
Abubakar and his cattle’s presence in the city center is not out of choice but of necessity. His family are originally from Katsina State in northern Nigeria, where a changing climate turned grazing lands into barren desert. He moved to Idu — a rural, bushy and less developed part of Abuja — many years ago. But it now hosts housing estates, a vast railway complex and various industries.
Fulani herders like Abubakar are traditionally nomadic and dominate West Africa’s cattle industry. They normally rely on wild countryside to graze their cattle with free pasture, but the pressures of modernization, the need for land for housing and crop farming and human-caused climate change are challenging their way of life. To keep cattle off of Abuja’s major roads and gardens, some suggest that herders need to start acquiring private land and operating like other businesses. But to do that, they’d need money and government incentives.
some suggest that herders need to start acquiring private land and operating like other businesses
Yes, why don’t these poor farmers who have nowhere else to go simply BUY large plots of land?
Let them eat cake.
The original tragedy of the commons, now with climate change!
In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out.
Dunno how you can call it a myth when we’ve been watching it play out in real time for decades.
While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
It’s a myth because it’s not inevitable.
Lmao; scrolling past the title, I read ‘capital’ as money, not city…
‘Who the hell gave all the cows control of the countries funds!?!’
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