Insecurity: Kaduna residents opt for street-side gardens as bandits overrun farmlands

BY IDIBIA GABRIEL

As the country is besieged with escalated terrorism and banditry, farmers, nationwide have turned to full scale domestic farming activities for the survival if their families.

In Kaduna, most homes, streets and roadsides have been taken over and converted to farmlands as farmers have turned to domestic farming, using spaces to cultivate crops as a means of survival for their families.

In some cases, even entrances into the personal residences and flat houses have been cultivated by the landlords to produce foods to meet family needs not minding the resultant effects.

Federal roadsides and highways are not spared of this development as farmers, fearing that they may be kidnapped by bandits from their original farm lands in bushes, stay back at home and continue to expand on their domestic farming activities against their wishes.

Sunday Times gathered that this method of farming is also seeing many farmers cultivating crops in bags and containers akin to what people constrained by availability of farmlands do. Speaking to journalists, Philip Dauda Ladan, a farmer and politician said the fear of people going into the bushes to farm and being kidnapped by terrorists is quite high in the state, and has bred this method of farming.

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“It’s true because people are afraid to go inside the bushes to farm. I remembered my uncle working Kaduna Vigilante Service (KADVIS), I was looking for a place to farm.

“And I asked him, can you please get me a space to farm? He said yes, but the problem is that if I go there they’ll carry me. I said why. He said the truth is that, he too wants to farm but he cannot go there because even the community within the area where he has about 3 to 5 hectares of land, he cannot go there in Chikun LGA because of the bandits.

“That, he doesn’t want anything to happen to me. So he’ll not allow me to go and farm there. So I’ve found an easy place to now farm close to my house by the roadside.

“Now I’m farming in NNPP quarters, even though we are a lot of challenges there. The people managing the area sometimes come and stop us, saying that they’re afraid one day somebody may come and claim the land.”