Profiling the Fulani

A 15-minute audio recording trending the social media is making a most worrisome contribution to the rising concern that Fulani people have shot themselves into the position of the most frightful and ruthless group in the nation today. The persuasive recording captures exchanges between a Fulani leader of a kidnapping gang and another Fulani kidnapper […]

A 15-minute audio recording trending the social media is making a most worrisome contribution to the rising concern that Fulani people have shot themselves into the position of the most frightful and ruthless group in the nation today. The persuasive recording captures exchanges between a Fulani leader of a kidnapping gang and another Fulani kidnapper whose gang had kidnapped the former’s pregnant wife. Moving from threats to appeals and back, the exchanges revealed that the kidnapping industry now knows no boundaries. A chilling, cold-blooded confidence was palpable from both sides of the exchange, which ended with mutual threats in fluent Fulani after revelations regarding the width and depth of the kidnapping industry. The Fulani have joined the ranks of the Ijaw (violence in the Niger Delta) and the Kanuri (Boko Haram) as ethnic groups that have come to be associated with violent threats and campaigns. It is a very dangerous place for any group to be, particularly if the will and the ability to extricate it is missing. There is a major turning point for the Fulani and the nation that must not be missed by the political leadership, and, if it has any, credible Fulani leadership.

A few years ago, it was Fulani herdsmen and (mostly) non-Muslim communities, and the popular villain was a fighting Fulani who had exchanged his stick and herding skills for an AK47 and a single-minded desire to obliterate communities whose goodwill and land he needed to survive. Before then, it was endemic but low-level and isolated seasonal conflicts between herders and farmers, conflicts that were inevitable as human and herd populations grew, urbanization affected settlement patterns, leadership failed to read the signs and engineer relations and ancient systems that gave the Savannah its unique character. Crippling parochial politics built walls around communities instead of building bridges to link them. The villain was the Fulani pastoralist, stubbornly holding on to the only way he could survive and becoming increasingly irrelevant in a new political order that saw value only in organization, education and representation. Before then, there was a colonial and immediate post-colonial order that saw the Fulani and his herd as a great national economic asset which required detailed management and support. One hundred years before colonial rule, the Fulani evoked power, learning and itinerant wealth.

Across the entire Savannah, over the course of the last century, the Fulani fragmented into two basic strands, although bonded by common language and strong cultural traits. One strand settled in towns and cities as rulers, great scholars, marginal appendages to newer economies, or fused with local non-Fulani populations and lost much of its identity. The other strand  roamed on, transversing the length and breadth of West and Central Africa herding great assets  and liabilities even as history and the challenges of the modern state began to close down its many freedoms and rights. Most of this mobile element avoided changes that could have strengthened its capacity to acquire relevance and influence in modern states, such as education (Islamic and Western) or adapting to more modern methods of protecting its assets and lifestyle. In Nigeria, political engineering favoured balkanization and creation of political spaces that had little room or sympathy for the Fulani herder. Without political clout, new roles and identities were designed for the Fulani herder, principally as an aggressive irritant and a mobile threat to peace.

In the last decade, a series of related developments radically altered the disposition and role of the Fulani herder. Large-scale rustling pauperized many Fulani communities and emptied large ranches owned by wealthy non-Fulani in the North. Fulani who lost herds tagged on to successful rustlers and raiders of mostly small peasant communities. As herders met physical barriers and negative image across many old paths, they helped themselves to the deluge of arms available to virtually all West and North African communities, to fight their ways through hostile territories, or sack small communities, creating higher levels of hostility. A strong sense of injustice was emerging among the Fulani that felt injured, victimized and demonized by a state that has no sympathy for them.

The Fulani had lost routes, old allies in peasants who had co-habited productively with them, and an entire lifestyle that made no sense without cattle. Much of the Middle Belt was becoming hostile territory. Hausa peasants who had suffered in the hands of Fulani rustlers and bandits began to fight back. Every Fulani was fair game. The demonized Fulani fought back with higher levels of viciousness. The state had no answer to an escalating war pitching the Fulani against every community and spreading sophistication of a hitherto rustic community into crimes on kidnapping, banditry and large-scale terrorism against rural communities. A particularly favourable terrain in extensive forests gave the burgeoning Fulani bandits and kidnappers the perfect setting to flourish. Rustling and kidnapping make huge wealth easy to acquire. Small arms and weapons, drugs and weak policing capacities of the state made it very easy for huge numbers of predominantly Fulani to join kidnapping gangs. Bandits on two wheels have the run of much of the rural North West, creating huge displacement of the peasantry and the prospects of hunger very real as farmlands are abandoned. Today the North West is growing its own IDP community, not on the same scale as the North East, but the audacious foraging of rural communities by mostly Fulani bandits is certain to keep the numbers growing.

The Fulani now pays the price of being profiled as a criminal in and by most communities. A hard-pressed police fuels the image problem by splashing photos and stories of arrests of Fulani kidnappers and bandits. Many law-abiding Fulani cannot go to markets or lead normal lives anymore. They are as vulnerable to being kidnapped as everyone else, and very few people trust any Fulani. There are millions of Fulani in Nigeria, most with distinct features screaming their identities. They will be praying that a major turning point is not ignored or avoided. In the Niger Delta, the issue regarding justice to a community’s rights to resources and a living environment provided the setting for the prolonged and expensive militancy in the region. In the case of Boko Haram, the cold-blooded murder of Muhammed Yusuf and the failure of the state to understand and respond to the initial challenges of an uprising created an insurgency the nation is still fighting. At all cost, the Nigerian state must find a way to bring to an end, the emerging criminal activities in which Fulani are principally engaged before it acquires a political mission by default.

Jamila Abubakar wrote this piece from Abuja