Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed says the violent clashes between farmers and herdsmen across the country date back to 1948.

He made the claim on Thursday when he played host to a delegation of Permanent Secretaries led by Winifred Oyo-Ita, the Head of Service of the Federation.

The minister maintained that although the clashes resulted from a misunderstanding of the environmental situation in the country, politicians and other ignorant people were trying to make gains out of it.

His words: “The farmers-herders clash is neither religious nor ethnic, I think politicians and other people who don’t understand it are trying to make it look like Christian-Muslim, North-South. It is simply an environmental situation and we must see it in that light.

“The farmland that belongs to one person will have to be shared by three or four persons. Today, Lake Chad has been shrunk by 2,500 kilometres. Before 1963, Lake Chad used to support 35 million lives from Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria-they were farming, fishing and doing irrigation on the same water. When that water lost 90 percent of its surface, people had to move south.\

“This is the whole issue of the farmers, herdsmen clashes. It is not Christian or Muslim. It has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with ethnicity. The earlier we realize that the better.

“The first herdsmen/ farmers clash was in 1948, it didn’t start yesterday so please let us change this narrative. Frankly we cannot repair the damage that has been done in over 60 years in three years.”

He added that the nation’s economy was able to come out of recession not because of the increase in oil prices but by the contributions made by the agricultural and mining sectors.