The criminalisation of the Fulani

Tempers are flaring from all corners. Some believe that another war is looming. Others think it’s a storm in a teacup. In a country as diverse as Nigeria, when leadership is lacking and there is no blueprint for the management of diversity, anything is possible. And that is what is happening. At the centre of […]

Tempers are flaring from all corners. Some believe that another war is looming. Others think it’s a storm in a teacup. In a country as diverse as Nigeria, when leadership is lacking and there is no blueprint for the management of diversity, anything is possible. And that is what is happening.

At the centre of the brouhaha since Buhari became president are the Fulani. They are just one of the nearly 400 ethnic nationalities that make up the entity called Nigeria. Estimated to be around 15 million in a country of nearly 300 million, they should not pose a significant threat to anyone. But they are unique specie, with cousins in  17  countries some bordering Nigeria and spread as far as the Sudan. Here is one good reason why anything affecting the Fulani should be well managed before it blows in our faces. Those issuing ultimatum and those countering them have their reasons, but war is not a game of chess.

• No quit notice to Fulani in South West – Governors
• Prove my complicity in Oyo kidnappings – Sarkin Fulani

In an article penned for another medium two weeks ago, I suggested that there might be no Nigeria by the time President Muhammadu Buhari is done with his second and hopefully final term. The signs are ominously evident although Buharideens cannot see it. They see the APC regime as the best and excuse every infraction by comparing it with the errors of the regimes they were voted in to replace.

The latest kerfuffle over grazing in federal reserves and the heat it is generating shows what could happen where there are leadership vacuum at any level. Ordinarily, Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu should not be issuing ultimatums. He is a lawyer, supposedly versed in constitutional and legal matters. If he has read Nigerian laws, he would have understood the limits of his own executive powers and orders. No Nigerian has the right to expel another Nigerian from any part of the country where they live in peace and pursue a legitimate business. But Akeredolu is not the only one to issue an ultimatum, in our recent history, we have seen people deported from Lagos, Kaduna and Kano to mention a few.

Akeredolu is a member of the ruining class, a two-term governor under the APC, the party at the centre. In a normal situation, he should have the ear of his party leader, who happens to be the president of the Federal Republic. But nothing is normal about Nigeria under the APC. Buhari, the de-facto party leader here happens to be a grand patron of the Miyeti Allah Kautal Hore, the umbrella association of all herdsmen in the country.

Normally, if there was trouble between one nationality and the other, the state should have called all parties to order, work with the security apparatchik to nip trouble in the bud internally. In the natural order of things, a president may be partisan in politics; he is expected to be the father of all.

However, things don’t work that way in Nigeria under Buhari. Checking the barometer of the government’s reaction to issues of national importance, it becomes apparent that this regime has no idea how to manage diversity. The way it has handled the explosive issue of diversity lends credence to those who believe that in Buhari’s Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others.

Check – the Fulani have always lived and reared their cattle as nomads for ages. The upsurge in skirmishes with other ethnic nationalities has exacerbated since Buhari became president. Clashes are not new, least of all in the southwest. In one instance in 2004, if memory serves us right, Buhari went as far as Saki in Oyo State to calm nerves and plead for inter-communal harmony after deadly clashes. In that instance, the issue was resolved and everyone returned home happy promising to be his or her brother’s keeper. It should not be any different now that he is president and commander-in-chief not only of the armed forces but also of the APC.

But no sooner than he became president than insouciance became the ground norm of dysfunctionality leading to ultimatum left, right and centre. Leadership lacuna has paved way for riffraff to attain cult status in various regions from east to west, north and south urchins masquerading as spokesmen for various amorphous groups.

Speaking of ultimatum, the Igbo were asked to leave the north by individuals who were neither in government nor in power. Nobody took them to task. The Oba of Lagos, a retired senior police officer threatened to feed the Igbo to the Lagoon without reprisal. Remi Tinubu was recorded saying the Igbo could not be trusted when it came to voting for her husband’s anointed candidate in Lagos – no reprisal.

When 93 corpses emerged from a blood-curdling orgy of murderous herdsmen in Benue, the Miyeti Allah openly admitted to carrying it out as reprisal for 300 missing heads of cattle. In 2019, Abdul Azeez Suleiman, an unknown scamp calling himself spokesman for Northern Groups gave a 30-day notice to other Nigerians to vacate the north boasting that if the Fulani were not free to enjoy peace elsewhere in Nigeria, no other ethnic group should have that privilege.

Of course, the wounds that followed the threat against Bishop Hassan Kukah are still fresh on our minds without arrest. Akeredolu was playing smart but not being clever when he issued an ultimatum that he had no capacity to enforce. Buhari was snoozing on duty when he ordered his senior media aide to respond to an explosive ultimatum involving his kinsmen and he responded without due consideration to the security implications of his vituperation.

As for Sunday Adeyemi, aka Igboho, like Ganiyu Adams before him, a vigilante suddenly finds an opportunity to attain national notoriety. Since it is generally agreed that we northerners are so backward it might be excusable when scalawags assume the right to speak for us; that should not be the lot of the Yoruba with their sophistry, level of intelligence and exposure.

I have often made a distinction between the Nigerian Fulani and his African cousins. In making that distinction and in the light of recent happenings, I have asked myself if the Nigerian Fulani is not a hostage of his brigand cousins. It looks obvious, from videos circulating on social media that the enemies of Nigeria currently stoking ethnic violence are actually not Nigerians.

The Fulbe language is mutually intelligible by all Fulani, but these brigands give themselves away by interspersing it with French. They have obviously infiltrated our borders and are using the local Fulani as ethnic shield. The local Fulani cannot snitch on their bloodthirsty cousins armed to the hilt without the fear of annihilation. Nigeria has no track record of willingness or ability to protect its citizenry from armed thugs or anyone from reprisal attacks.

In this confusion, opportunistic local leaders have exploited the lacuna in leadership and failure in intelligence gathering to make quick bucks acting as intermediaries between foreign marauders and captive hosts. In playing this silly role, they endanger themselves and the unity of Nigeria. When the stuff hits the fan, maybe they’d be accepted elsewhere, the rest of us have nowhere else to go. We should tread with caution or be damned!