-Blank NEWS Online (NIGERIA) –By Austen AKHAGBEME:

The man, Sunday Igboho before now, may not be popular outside his ancestral territory. But he’s such a daring rebel, loved by his people especially the youth of Ibarapa, in Oyo state of Nigeria.

The impunity of the criminal variant of the controversial Fulani herdsmen, criss-crossing the lenght and breath of our bushes and forest reserves, has brought Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho to national limelight for the right or wrong reason, depending on your prism.

In an environment where the rule becomes the exemption, anything goes and the multiplicity of impunity reigns supreme. I have said repeatedly here and in other fora that every society gets the heroes it deserves. When we choose to treat symptoms instead of the disease, what you get is vexation and frustration. This is the very reason we have to trend with caution in handling the already bad case of Sunday Igboho versus the Fulani herdsmen.

Those who are beating the drums of war should sheath their swords and blow the trumpet of truce and dialogue. In the same vein, those advocating for Peace should shout louder, the importance of Justice. Peaceful coexistence is predicated on natural Justice, fairness and communal understanding.

The crisis never started from Sunday Igboho. His likes were born out of an age long habit of playing the ostrich with a matter as serious as life and death. To pounce on him, therefore, is to treat the symptom of a deadly disease while ignoring the root cause.

Igboho’s emergence and adventure was made possible as a result of a yawning void created by the failure of leadership and the resultant consequence of a dangerous exposure to a reign of terror and mayhem perpetrated on our roads, bushes and forests by a rogue variant of the Fulani herdsmen.

Let the government of the day address this problem of the Fulani herdsmen for once and come up with a fair judgement that will pacify both the perpetrators and their victims. Let animal husbandry progress or mutate to a more scientific best practice instead of the present dangerous, atavistic and nomadic method with its accompanying crisis.

Or else, we will keep triumphing in error and will one day, raise a generation that will brazenly question the status quo and may flagrantly interrogate injustice unjustly; just as the likes of the Akoni Oodua of Yoruba land, Sunday Igboho, has done.

• Austen AKHAGBEME is a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online