Re: El-Rufai’s hypocritical xenophobia and Obadiah Mailafia’s Fulaniphobia

I invoke my Right of Reply to Farooq Kperogi’s article, “El-Rufai’s Hypocritical Xenophobia and Obadiah Mailafia’s Fulaniphobia”, which appeared in Daily Trust of Saturday 2nd June. He was writing in response to my BusinessDay piece of Friday 11 May, “Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria”. For one thing, I was not amused that my name […]

I invoke my Right of Reply to Farooq Kperogi’s article, “El-Rufai’s Hypocritical Xenophobia and Obadiah Mailafia’s Fulaniphobia”, which appeared in Daily Trust of Saturday 2nd June. He was writing in response to my BusinessDay piece of Friday 11 May, “Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria”. For one thing, I was not amused that my name was juxtaposed with that of Governor Nassir El-Rufai and his rabid, mad-dog politics in Kaduna State. We are far from being birds of the same feather.

Kperogi’s diatribes notwithstanding, let me set the records straight: I am not, and have never been, a “hater” of anybody, Fulani or otherwise. My piece arose out of an intellectual need to understand why Fulani militias are on a genocidal war against my people in the Middle Belt. In my article I reeled out statistics showing that, even though the Pullo are the ethnic majority in their original homeland of Guinea, the other ethnic groups have always ganged up to deny them access to power. I speculated that this frustration may have encouraged them to look to Nigeria as a place where they could actualise their quest for power. After all, they would have remembered Usman Danfodio’s exploits in Hausa land. There is also the fact that at least 3 of our leaders since independence have been ethnic Fulani. 

One of the puzzles I sought to explain is why there are significant Fulani populations in Gambia, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon and Niger but none of those countries have experienced the murderous mayhem we are we are experiencing in Nigeria  by herdsmen militias. My effort to explain the phenomenon may not have been adequate, but no so-called “othering” malice was intended on my part, as Kperogi implies. I am a much travelled development economist and international civil servant. I have lived in the Arab world and have a smattering of Arabic. I have drunk deep from the springs of Arab-Muslim intellectual culture and civilisation. The allegations of hate Kperogi  has levelled against me say more about him than about me.

He accuses me of setting up the Fulani as a “universally hated group”. I have visited Guinea and have some friends in Conakry, most of them Peules. I have also met prominent political figures such as opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo, who happens to be the most prominent Peule in Guinea. Kperogi has raised a fictitious straw man with the sole purpose of shooting him down in the full knowledge that those who might not have read my original article will in all likelihood be inclined to believe him. Such is the nature of intellectual dishonesty in our age. 

I cannot pretend that I am not deeply angered by the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle Belt; a crisis in which I have lost close relations. I am equally appalled by the slaughters in Zamfara and Birnin Gwari. The government seems paralysed both by lack of will and capacity  to act, despite the fact that an international organisation has classified the Fulani militias as the second most deadly terrorist group on earth. Our communities have reason to believe that the armed forces are not neutral arbiters in this macabre drama. I have read too much classical political theory not to know that the first duty of civil government since Aristotle, Kautilya and Thomas Jefferson is to keep the common peace. What is happening in our country is scandalous, shocking and  incomprehensible. Our leaders seem too ignorant to understand that when you allow other vortices of power to control the use of violence you are eroding the authority and legitimacy of government. Before long, the entire house of cards would come crashing down with a bang. 

President Buhari disclosed during the recent Commonwealth Summit that the killer-militias were mostly from neighbouring countries. If this is true, then there can be no obfuscation about who the enemy is. Under international law, when armed bandits invade your country, killing and maiming defenceless citizens with sophisticated weapons, it amounts to a declaration of war. They must of necessity be treated as enemy combatants — existential enemies in the full sense understood by the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt. 

The least the victim communities can do is defend themselves. Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, a general of generals, said as much. He was answered with mindless howls from the pits of hell. Danjuma is not a blabbering idiot. He is perhaps the greatest strategist this nation has been blessed with. And lest we forget: He has sacrificed more for Arewa than they could ever repay him. Those little men who dared to raise issues with him for defending the rights of the victim communities are labouring under a curse.

Kperogi goes on to assert: “Mailafia’s ethnic essentialist arguments are also perched on a thin thread of evidence.” If he disagrees so profoundly with my central thesis I would have expected him, as a scholar, to come up with his own alternative theory. Instead, he goes into inane, hair-splitting scholasticism about the paternity of Murtala et. al. I am prepared to concede that my conclusions may have been inadequate. But, at least, I tried to draw inference based on empirical analysis, observation, a close reading of the literature in French and English; and from conversations with intellectuals, journalists and ordinary people in the streets of Conakry. I am afraid, it is Kperogi’s own idle peregrinations that are patently “fictional”, not mine.

Farooq Kperogi, I understand, is a professor of mass communication. I once joked that mass communication is precisely what it says it is – for the masses. We can therefore excuse him for really not understanding the genealogy – echoing Michel Foucault — of identity politics. In case he is not aware, the pioneer authorities on that subject are Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, with their seminal work, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press 1983). It was my good fortune to have sat at the feet of Terence Ranger as a graduate student in England. A lowly scribbler like Kperogi would be well advised to stick to what he knows. 

His conclusions leave me quite mystified: “My own attitude to identity is that people are who they say- and believe- they are, even if that’s not necessarily who they are”. What he is really saying, in plain English, is this: If a madman from Damaturu wakes up one morning and solemnly declares and earnestly believes himself, to be the long-awaited “Mahdi”, we are, ipso facto, bound to believe him, “even if that’s not necessarily who they are”. Our friend has clearly read too much postmodernist  trash for his own good. I would counsel him to dust up his copies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer and the linguistic Chomsky. From my own experience, these authors provide a strong antidote against the tendency to woolly reasoning.

But these are not the worst of his crimes. Kperogi acknowledges – merely in passing — “the unchecked murderous fury of herders in the part of Nigeria Mailafia identifies with”. While he is prepared to accept that  my outrage might be “legitimate and defensible”, he ticks me off for “over-the-top emotional reaction”. I am compelled to ask: If we are not “emotional” about mass killings of innocent poor people, what could one conceivably be emotional about?

Our professor seems to suffer from a form of schizophrenia that induces a Ying and Yang morality. He acknowledges in one breadth that killings are taking place, only to declaim in the same breadth that my reactions are “over-the-top”. Like many among our northern intelligentsia, he finds my lamentations more outrageous than the  “murderous fury” of the militias. I must be a hater of Fulani because I seem to be crying too loudly that they are killing my people. Clearly, we do not inhabit the same moral universe. 

In all this unedifying conversation, I have received expressions of solidarity from several quarters. From Borno, Ramat Shettima wrote: “Kanem Borno resisted the evil plans of the Fulani to Islamise Kanuri people as already Muslims….We the Kanuri will not accept this evil.”  

A young Northern Muslim woman also wrote: “I must say you spoke the truth. Your knowledge of history should really put professional historians to shame. The Jihad of Usman Danfodio was a religious cum political ideology executed to entrench a political/ethnic hegemony…The Pullo themselves are making the situation worse. If you follow the news, you may have heard of the uncomplimentary comments made by some notable Fulanis reasserting their Fulaniness as the purest form of mankind. These comments are infuriating the Hausa…”

Mailafia wrote this piece from Abuja.