By Abraham Ogbodo
We had accused President Muhammadu Buhari very wrongly. Without clear cut facts and evidence, we said he had an agenda to Fulanise Nigeria. Or let me put it that the facts and evidence against him were not tested to establish their admissibility. We just felt that putting only Fulanis or Fulani affiliated persons at the head of almost all the nation’s security agencies was in furtherance of an agenda. That is, an agenda to reopen the truncated Uthman Dan Fodio Jihad and have it concluded by bringing the entire territory of Nigeria; from the Sahael to the coastlines under Fulani conquest and domination. It would be such that my Urhobo land with 24 kingdoms and kings would be collapsed into an emirate with one imperial emir that reported to the Sultan in Sokoto, in charge.
Same way, Benin, Warri, Asaba and Agbor, for instance, would dissolve into emirates and instead of Oba, Olu, Asagba and Obi respectively, sitting on the thrones of their forebears in these kingdoms, it would be emirs and Alhaji this and that. The beautiful kingdoms in the Southwest parading varied kingship titles would be lumped into a uniform description. The time-honoured title of the Alafin of Oyo would change to Emir of Oyo and the immutable Ooni of Ife would follow suit. It was a most dangerous prospect and part of the anti-Buhari campaign back then, was to stop this from happening.
That was the charge. In Nigeria, there is a big group called the Hausa-Fulani. This is just for purposes of ethnic identification. It is even much larger than that conceptually and geographically. Other Nigerians see all Hausa speaking areas of Northern Nigeria as being bound by a common interest. That interest is to dominate the polity and the political economy. The fact that, beyond the Niger/ Benue confluence to the far North, there are hundreds of ethnic nationalities and the core group called Fulani, are less than eight million human beings, does not affect the perception. Every group, from the Plateau and Benue through Adamawa, Borno, Gombe and back to Taraba, Nasarawa and Niger, including even Kogi and Kwara, is equally yoked. It is only now that the rich are also crying everywhere in the North that people are beginning to see the difference between the Fulani man, the Hausa man and other men in the vast North. It looks like while some are herders others are farmers.
Meanwhile, here are some of the supporting facts and pieces of evidence to reasonably allege that President Buhari was on a continuation of the Sokoto Jihad that started in 1804 and ended in 1808. Under him, the heads of the Army and Air force were Hausa-Fulani. So were the heads of the police and secret police otherwise known as the Department of State Security (DSS). Other strategic areas of state operations like the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFFC) which has morphed over the years from an anti-corruption agency to an attack dog in the hands of the central government, the Customs and Excise Department, Immigration and Civil Defence were headed by Hausa-Fulani.
It is the way of governance in Nigeria and nobody was particularly disturbed by it. It is usually a turn by turn arrangement in which the incumbent plundered the common wealth and reworked existing state structures to give advantage to his group. People only got agitated when a correlation somehow evolved between how herders operated unchallenged; killing and maiming farmers and others across the land, and the reality of the national security architecture under Buhari. No arrest, prosecution and conviction of killer herdsmen were ever recorded. Instead, it was one Sunday Igboho who saw how his people in Oyo were being killed by herdsmen and rose stoutly in defence that was branded a criminal that must be liquidated at all costs by combined federal forces. Even when the defender backed off and left his people to be slaughtered by armed herdsmen, he did not have respite. He was traced, tracked and fixed in Republic of Benin.
There was also Nnamdi Kanu in the Southeast who sought and still seeking clarifications on the many aspects of the Nigerian Federation. The man has not known peace since he started asking too many forbidden questions. Questions like, why his Ibo people have not been fully integrated into the Nigerian system more than 55 years after the end of the civil? Kanu and Igboho basically asked the same question, but in different ways. However, while Igboho, since the advent of Tinubu, has been repositioned to ask more questions, Kanu is in the gulag and still searching for explanations for his ordeal. He has been in detention since 2021 when he was forcefully abducted from Kenya into Nigeria. People are saying his only offence is that he is an Ibo man. It is like asking him why he chose to be born into Nigeria as an Ibo instead of an ethnic identity that offers better advantages and privileges.
But that is not why we here today. We are here to reiterate that when President Mohammadu Buhari left on May 29, 2023, there was some joy in the land. The relief that, the alleged Uthman Dan Fodio incarnate, bent on reopening and finishing the truncated Islamist agenda of 1804, was gone for good. A new Pharaoh who did not know Yusuf and his people had entered and the herders’ carnage would soon stop. This is more than 22 months after Buhari’s exit and nothing has even abated not to talk of stopping. The killings have heightened and it has become imperative to search for other reasons, outside Buhari, to explain the current situation. From Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Katsina through Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Benue, Plateau, Kogi to Ekiti, Ondo, Edo and Delta, it has been an unbroken story of bloodletting. People are killed without qualms as if human life has become mosquito life in Nigeria.
Not even in the jungle does that degree of mindless killing take place. If it does, both prey and predator will be endangered. The lion kills when it is hungry. It does not kill for sports or for keeps. In Nigeria, we are killing for the fun of it. We kill for sports, the same way the Nazis dispatched millions of Jews in a Final Solution scheme. Bandits and terrorists would storm a sleeping community and in the ensuing melee, they would aim at fleeing residents and take them out like game. And nothing happens thereafter. One estimate puts the deaths at about 200,000 since terrorism, banditry and kidnapping gained notoriety in Nigeria.
It has become so bad that Buhari himself is endangered in Daura, Katsina State. He now lives more in Kaduna. He is helpless in the face of an un-abating existential onslaught. Yet when he held together all the variables, we had attributed the situation to his unwillingness to combine the right factors to achieve definite results. I can now understand why the sages say history is the best judge. The true judgement has come out after only two years of history. If we had insisted on stoning Buhari to death for supporting the Jihadists invasion of Nigerian territories, we would have killed an innocent man. Now, the security architecture has been redesigned with a new localisation of the power points. The new Commander-In-Chief is not a Fulani Champion. The Service Chiefs and other security heads are fairly localised within a geo-ethnic zone. Why haven’t the killings stopped?
This is why I am suggesting that a delegation should be sent to Daura or wherever Buhari is, to say sorry to him on behalf of all of us. That we had accused him wrongly for encouraging murderous Fulani herders to take over our land. It was not Buhari that failed after all. It was the Nigerian system that failed. Nothing appears to add up for good. The big defence budgets for years have not added up to an operationally efficient military that can combat effectively the problem at hand. Policing at all levels has become official extortion and any cross-border criminal who is fairly open-handed at the borders can move in and out of Nigeria with the same ease that President Tinubu jets in and out of France on official and working visits to review his two years performance as the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Seriously, it is like something requires to be exorcised from the Nigerian system for things to work properly. Buhari did not know how to perform this surgery. For eight years, his media aides sustained the lie about his competence to carry out a successful surgery without endangering the life of the patient. President Tinubu has also been beating about the bush while killers roam the real bushes to kill citizens. Like Emperor Nero, Tinubu looks for whom to blame for the fire in Nigeria. He has detailed some aides to look for those to blame when there is fire. That is what Bayo Onanuga and others in his communication team do for him. When there is no ready scapegoat to carry the cross, his handlers would speak grammar to a situation that requires action. They think rationalisation is specific performance.
On the body part of Nigeria that needs to be cut off for happiness to endure in the land, a suggestion has been made. Some people have said the cancerous tissue troubling the anatomy is the leadership. Settle this and the body-polity will become healthy forever.
