Before Ogbeh imports ox semen

The plan announced by Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Chief Audu Ogbeh last week, that government is going to import ox semen in order to impregnate Nigerian cows was tantamount to passing a vote of no confidence on millions of Nigerian oxen. It has also spurred them to anger. On the day the announcement […]

The plan announced by Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Chief Audu Ogbeh last week, that government is going to import ox semen in order to impregnate Nigerian cows was tantamount to passing a vote of no confidence on millions of Nigerian oxen. It has also spurred them to anger. On the day the announcement was made, I parked by the roadside to buy oranges and a huge ox that was leading a cattle herd to cross the highway veered off its path and made for me. I dived into the car to avoid being gored. It was only later, when I read about the semen import plan, that I suspected the ox tried to gore me because my cap resembled Audu Ogbeh’s trademark cap.

A vote of no confidence on millions of Nigerian oxen is not fair because for decades they have kept pots boiling, steaming and sizzling in this country. They sustained family pots, suya spots, dried kilishi ovens, pepper soup and ponmo joints. Nigerian marriage, naming, turbanning, coronation, thanksgiving and funeral ceremonies would have been incomplete without their meat. They also kept grasses, weeds and bushes in check through diligent grazing. They stirred up enough grasshoppers to feed our egrets and were content to drink from muddy ponds. They still found time to fertilise the cows so that they produced millions of calves. This activated the milk glands in their udders. Cows produce milk in order to feed their calves but humans began to drink it in tons. Ingrates that we are, we now accuse the cows of not producing enough milk and we want to import foreign semen in order to artificially inseminate local cows.

Oga Audu Ogbeh mentioned Brazil and Europe as the intended sources of his semen import. I suspect that the minister was impressed by a picture of the Holstein Friesian cow that adorns every tin of imported Dutch milk, its udder brimming with milk. The accusation is that our cows produce an average half a litre of milk a day whereas cows in Scotland and Holland produce up to 15 litres each. I however have a question for the redoubtable Agriculture Minister. We say our cows are under producing milk. The little quantity they are producing, have we consumed all of it?

Any day when I am travelling on the highways, I see Fulani women trekking to local markets, adorned calabashes of sour milk artfully balanced on their heads. Sour milk, which the milkmaids call kindirmo, is the economic mainstay of millions of pastoral families. They sell the sour milk and they use the proceeds to buy grain and soup ingredients to take back to the rugga. When we were growing up, Fulani women only sold sour milk and butter [i.e. man shanu] but they did not sell the balls of mashed millet or dawo, as Sokoto people call it. The two are mixed together to make fura, a staple food for millions of Northerners. It is a sign of changing times that in the urban areas these days Fulani women also sell dawo. 

Trouble is, the market for sour milk is no longer lucrative. It could be either because people don’t have money or because there are too many milkmaids. Whenever I go to the bank in Abuja these days, a young milkmaid will plead with me to buy up the whole calabash because, she says, she sold only a little of it and would have to throw the rest away when she goes back home. I could not tell her that eight years ago, a doctor stopped me from drinking full cream milk and relegated me to skimmed milk. Whenever I am returning to Abuja from Kaduna and I make a stopover at Jere’s popular filling station, the same thing happens. A dozen milkmaids will plead with me to pay for the sour milk so they will give it to the dozens of almajirai who are hovering nearby. With that kind of market situation Oga Audu, why do you want to produce 30 times more milk?

Two years ago or so, the Agriculture Minister announced a plan to give each Nigerian schoolchild a pint of milk a day in order to boost kids’ nutritional status and boost school attendance. I have four children in school right now and none of them ever told me that he received even a spoonful of milk. Maybe the school they attend is not qualified to get the milk, but I have not heard of any school that gets it either. Okay, assuming this milk for schoolkids plan takes off anytime soon and we need more milk, I agree with Oga Audu that we should not import it. What I am not sure of is the need to import foreign ox semen.

The Scots and Dutch did not wake up one night and found their cows producing gallons of milk a day. Nor did those cows come from the sky. Rather, they did selective breeding which is based on the biological law that for each biological trait in an animal population, there is variation around the mean. That is, if our cows produce an average half a litre of milk a day each, some will produce less than that while others will produce more than that. All we have to do is to keep selecting the highest producers and keep breeding them to get higher and higher averages.

The trouble with importing foreign ox semen is that it could come with more milk but a lot of other undesirable things as well. Semen contains thousands of genes, not only those for milk quantity. It is not only milk that we want from our cattle; we want juicy meat; fine hides; resistance to tropical diseases especially tse-tse fly; and the ability to walk for hundreds of miles. We also want good temperament; one expert said the cattle we have in Nigeria today are not good for ranching because they are highly temperamental and they gore people for no reason, as I nearly found out last week. Artificially inseminating our cows while the oxen stand idly by could aggravate their temper. My grandfather used to rear one huge ox which was very dangerous to approach, unlike Texas longhorn cattle that are said to be docile. Maybe our herdsmen do not want docile cattle; they want to use them as battering rams [sorry, battering oxen] in the states that have enacted anti-open grazing laws.

What about the food? My grandfather’s prized ox was daily fed with guinea corn, leftover millet flour [dusa], selected grasses and a lot of soaked leftover millet flour called kasari. It also drank a lot of clean water. That’s a much better diet than what herdsmen’s cattle eat all around. Now, Friesian cows’ diet is much more nutritious than that. It is one thing to breed cows with imported semen but you may have to follow up with imported animal feed as well. We got an idea of what European animals eat from the song in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “Riches more than mind can picture/Wheat and barley, oats and hay/Clover, beans and mangel-wurzels…”

Thinking about it all, maybe Nigerian oxen should not worry about this latest slight on their bovine pride. This is because Chief Ogbeh, who reels out exotic programs with the regularity of Big Ben, has promised many other things which are yet to bear fruit. These include establishing 94 pilot ranches, 90 pasture lands and seven breeding ranches; establishing cattle colonies; planting 20 million banana trees for export to Europe; exporting 120,000 goats to Arabia every week; establishing stainless steel palm oil processing mills; establishing a Milk River Project and exporting 2 million tons of soya beans to Asia. So far, none of these promises has seen the light of day so I urge Nigerian oxen to breathe easily. No one is going to take away their enjoyable duty of impregnating the cows.