Bola Tinubu, National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, on Saturday cautioned herdsmen against using “careless words.”

Tinubu warned that such words would not shield herdsmen from what he termed “relentless reality.”

In a statement he signed personally, the former Lagos State governor said careless talk would do both herders and farmers grave injustice.

According to Tinubu: “The herder-farmer dispute has taken on acute and violent dimensions. It has cost too many innocent lives while destroying the property and livelihoods of many others. It has also aggravated ethnic sentiment and political tension.

“Despite the efforts of some of those in positions of high responsibility and public trust, the crisis has not significantly abated.

“The calamity now being faced is borne of situational exigencies. It is but the tragic outcome when often desperate, alienated people are left too long unattended and when their understanding of the modern socio-economic and environmental forces affecting the very terms of their existence is incomplete.

“An ethnically fuelled response will be to vociferously defend the nomadic way believing this tack will somehow protect the herder and cast the speaker as an ethnic champion.

“However, careless words cannot shield the herder from relentless reality. Such talk will only delude him into believing that he can somehow escape the inevitable.

“We do both herder and farmer grave injustice by allowing the herder to continue as he is – fighting a losing battle against modernity and climate change. In that fight, desperation causes him to flail and fight the farmer, who too is a victim of these impersonal forces.”