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Ortom Calls for Arrest of Miyetti Allah Leaders

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From Abraham Uwuasom, Makurdi

 

Following the statement released by the leaders of the Miyetti Allah, Kautal Hore in some national dailies, the Benue State Governor, Dr Samuel Ortom has directed the arrest of the leaders of the group, saying that the statement is an open declaration of war on the peace loving people of Benue State. This is contained in a statement signed by the Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Terver Akase.

 

According to the statement: “ We find the latest statements credited to leaders of Miyetti Allah, Kautal Hore in national dailies and other media platforms as open declaration of war on the peace loving people of Benue State and we wish to reiterate our call for their arrest.”

 

It added that, “It is not the first time that National President of the group, Alhaji Abdullahi Bello Bodejo and its National Secretary, Saleh Alhassan have made inflammatory statements against the implementation of the anti-open grazing law of Benue State.

 

“Since the law came into being, the said officials of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore have embarked on legal action as well as all other forms of threats and smear campaign against Governor Samuel Ortom in a desperate bid to scuttle the implementation of the law which will commence on November 1 this year.”

 

Governor Ortom pointed out that the law is not against any individual or group. It is neither aimed at sending herdsmen out of Benue State. He added.

 

He said, “The anti-open grazing law specifically permits grazing of livestock only within ranches and prohibits the movement of animals from one destination to another in the State except by rail, trucks and other vehicles as a permanent solution to the incessant clashes between farmers and herders with the attendant destruction of lives and property.

 

“Interestingly, the law also protects livestock and ranches as it stipulates severe punishment for any person convicted for rustling cattle or any other animals kept in ranches.”

 

Going by the misplaced outbursts of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, it is clear that the group has not bothered to read the law which has been published in national dailies or deliberately refused to understand the provisions of the law even after it was published. The statement alleged.

 

It maintained that, the mention of Terwase Akwaza, alias Ghana, as an ally of Governor Ortom in the recent statements is also an indication that Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore officials are not familiar with the security situation in Benue State. If they were, they would have known that Ghana is not an ally of the Governor as the man has since been declared wanted by security agencies over murder, cattle rustling and other criminal activities. Ortom quarried.

 

The statement further said, “Governor believes in the capacity of security agencies of this country. The group’s allegation that the Governor has created six detention centres is therefore not only laughable but also betrays the ignorance of its officials. We expect the group to embrace the idea of pilot ranches being considered by the Benue State Government as a way of consolidating on the prevailing peace in the state.

 

“The Governor wishes to once more draw the attention of security agencies to the repeated threats and inciting statements by Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore and demands for the arrest of officials of the group to prevent them from breaching the existing peace in the state. The call by the group that herdsmen should converge on Benue come November clearly reveals their ulterior motive to invade Benue and inflict greater pain on innocent people.

 

“Security agencies need no further proof to effect the arrest than the group’s public declaration of war against the people of the state.”

 

According to him, “No individual or group is above the law of the land. The anti-open grazing law initiated by the Benue State Government has been hailed by both local and international peace stakeholders as the best solution to the frequent crisis between herdsmen and farmers. Governor Ortom has often challenged those who oppose the law to put forward an alternative better than ranching but none seems forthcoming.”

 

“We wish to make it abundantly clear to Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore that the Benue State Open Grazing Prohibition and Establishment of Ranches Law has come to stay and no amount of intimidation or name calling can stop its implementation.” It concluded.

 

 

   

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The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

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  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
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