Toyin,
Not sure about any "Fulani supremisct mentality" but it's also disquieting to note that there is hardly ever a response, explanation, apology for these acts of wanton lawlessness from anyone, as far as I know, not even Dr. Tilde who surely does not embrace these rampages of armed Fulani marauders – with impunity - callously spreading death and destruction everywhere they pass through with their cattle in Mama Nigeria. For a long time now they have been classified as the second most dangerous armed group in Nigeria, after the Boko Haram jihadists.
Not that we should expect that mere public protestations ( in English/ Hausa/ Fulani) from e.g. Dr. Tilde, from the minbar or the pulpit would serve as a deterrent that would stop the armed cattlemen in their tracks. More importantly, how are the Government authorities, the Police and military that's supposed to be protecting the innocent lives and valuable property of Nigeria's peaceful, long-suffering, law- abiding citizens responding to this scourge? What punitive and preventive measures are being taken? Inaction is tantamount to colluding or collaborating with this cult of death and destruction whose members are obviously a law unto themselves and one can't help but conclude that they can do what the hell they like, probably because the boss himself is Fulani and they have therefore become his sacred cows? It beats understanding.
Nigerian soldiers are gearing up for action against the Gambia's Jammeh, if he doesn't crack by 19th January, but the Fulani herdsmen humbug is a long-standing matter which we are to presume will continue long after January 19th next year?
We should hate to read a headline that runs, "Trump warns the Fulani Herdsmen!"
On Friday, 30 December 2016 21:19:41 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju wrote:
impressive summation.el rufai is not blundering.i'm puzzled, though, why moses insists on describing as blunders a clear ethnic agenda, one in which buhari, as national ruler, is playing a central role, in harmony with other fulani in govt and strategic agencies, such as the head of the DSS?does one need three eyes to observe this agenda in action across the nation, in Fulani perpetrated massacres and criminality from the middle belt to the SE, to the SW, and fueled by struggles to write Fulani supremisct mentality into law through a grazing routes bill, through employing the Nigerian army as a cattle ranching operation?toyinOn 30 December 2016 at 19:57, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:--
El-Rufai's Blunders and the Christmas Massacre in Southern Kaduna
By Moses E. Ochonu
For the people of Kaninkon Kingdom in Southern Kaduna, this was a bleak Christmas. On Christmas Eve and on Christmas day armed Fulani herdsmen attacked and destroyed Goska village, killing, maiming, and burning. This attack occurred in spite of the area having been put under a 24-hour curfew by the state government, an indication of the brazenness and sense of impunity on the part of the well-armed attackers.
The attack is part of a broader genocidal war against the people of Southern Kaduna state, a war that is in its 5th year and has killed thousands of people in their homes and farms and destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands more. As we speak an estimated 53 villages lay in ruins, some of them occupied by Fulani herdsmen and their cattle, a forceful annexation that recalls the similarly forceful displacement in Agatu.
Let's be clear: the crisis predates the administration of Governor Nasir el-Rufai, so he cannot be accused of causing it or of being behind it as some people are insinuating. However, his utterances and actions in the past and the present have exacerbated the problem and emboldened the attackers. An ill-tempered man given to incendiary, inciting, and divisive outbursts, el-Rufai has made several egregious errors in dealing with the crisis. Some of these errors are errors of approach, thinking, and mentality. The errors have inspired actions that have wittingly or unwittingly transformed what was a low level series of massacres into a full-blown genocide.
To understand some of the Governor's current failures in dealing with the killings, you have to understand his past utterances, his incendiary character, his insensitivity, and his inability to moderate his thinking and resultant public expressions, all of which offer clues about why he has no credibility or political capital to solve the problem and why he is widely perceived as part of the problem, not its solution. Let's consider the governor's many problems in this regard.
El-Rufai is widely regarded as a Fulani supremacist, and with good reason. On July 12, 2012, he tweeted the following: "We will write this for all to read. Anyone, soldier or not that kills the Fulani takes a loan repayable one day no matter how long it takes." The governor's response to the killings in Southern Kaduna has been eerily consistent with this mindset. In a recent chat with newsmen in Kaduna, the governor made three statements that substantiate this Fulani supremacist statement from four years ago.
First, he said when he became governor, he traced the attackers to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger and sent a message to them that one of their own, a Fulani like them, was now governor. This statement displays a spectacularly parochial mentality. A governor of a Nigerian state was basically making appeals based on ethnic kinship and brotherhood to a group of foreign killers of people in his own Nigerian state! In other words, he was appeasing his murderous foreign kinsmen at the expense of indigenes of his state who are not his ethnic kinsmen but whose safety and interests he swore to defend. The governor shocking statement indicates that ethnic solidarity trumped his constitutional obligations to protect Southern Kaduna citizens from the external threats of foreign Fulani herdsmen.
Second, the governor told the journalists that the crisis began in the aftermath of the 2011 presidential elections when foreign Fulani herdsmen passing through Southern Kaduna were attacked with some of them killed and their cattle stolen. The governor claimed that the ongoing genocidal killings are revenge for the 2011 attacks.
It was irresponsible for the governor to make this statement without providing a shred of evidence other than that this is what the foreign Fulani attackers told his emissaries who traced them to various neighboring countries. What the governor was doing was legitimizing the herdsmen's genocidal campaign by giving it the cover of revenge. He was lending gubernatorial authority and credibility to the claims of foreign invaders that they are revenging the killing of their kinsmen on Nigerian soil! Shocking as it is, however, the governor's current explanation is consistent with the tweet I quoted because he is still espousing and promoting what he, as a Fulani man, believes to be the Fulani ethos of revenge. El-Rufai was also doing classic victim blaming, blaming the victims for provoking the killers and bringing calamity upon themselves.
Then of course there is the fact that even if the claim of revenge were legitimate, one would be compelled to ask how much Southern Kaduna blood would need to be spilled to pay for the herdsmen and cattle allegedly killed in 2011. How long is this Fulani revenge spree supposed to last? Ten years? Twenty? Is this Fulani blood debt that El-Rufai speaks of eternal? This genocide has been going on for five years already. By the way, who or what gave foreigners the permission to freely violate Nigeria's borders and penetrate deep into the Nigerian hinterland with their cattle and destroy farmlands in the process? Should any claim by people who have illegally breached our borders and destroyed the farmlands of Nigerian citizens be taken seriously let alone privileged above the suffering of citizens?
Third, El-Rufai stated that he had paid off the attackers as a way to stop them from continuing the killings. This is of course an explosive confession. He admitted to paying foreigners who illegally breached Nigeria's borders to attack citizens of his state. This begs the question of why, in spite of the payments, the attacks have continued and have become more intense. It also advertizes the governor's poor judgment. He rewarded those who confessed to killing citizens of his state, instead of working with the federal government to hold them accountable or to stop them from further breaching our borders to kill citizens.
It is safe to say the governor's poor judgment is anchored on ethnic solidarity with the foreign killers. Furthermore, to the extent that El-Rufai used state funds to pay the so-called compensation to the foreign killer herdsmen, the beleaguered people of Southern Kaduna, partakers in the state's patrimony, were in fact being forced to pay their killers to stop killing them! It is not out of place to speculate that the killers may have used the governor's payments to acquire more sophisticated weapons, which may explain why the scope, intensity, and sophistication of the killings have increased in recent months.
The decision to pay off the killers, moreover, contradicts the governor's own words from three years ago. On April 26, 2013, el-Rufai tweeted the following words: "any society that responds to crimes by forgiving and bribing the criminals will inevitably create large contingents of criminal waanabes(sic)." On that occasion, despite the legitimacy of the foundational grievance of the Niger Delta militants and the fact that they, unlike foreign Fulani terrorists, are Nigerians and were not invading villages and killing innocent men, women, and children, El-Rufai registered his opposition to paying them off through an amnesty program. The governor's shocking departure from this principle in the case of his killer Fulani kinsmen shows him to be a hypocritical opportunist in addition to being a Fulani ethnic chauvinist.
These confessed blunders are consistent with the governor's character and past utterances. In an interview before he became governor, el-Rufai was asked about the killing of some Southern Nigerian Youth Corpers in the 2011 post-election violence in Kaduna. He objected vehemently to the premise of the question. He wondered why the press was obsessed with a few youth Corp members who were killed by hoodlums and asked why there was no concern for "our people" who were killed in Southern Kaduna. By "our people" he meant Hausa-Fulani people. This interview was quite revealing, for it showed that he thinks of victimhood in strictly ethno-religious terms.
Today, as he gropes confusingly to get a handle on the killings, the governor is blaming nameless people he accuses of trying to "divide the people" along religious and ethnic lines. Such rhetoric from him is laughably hypocritical, for no one has contributed to the atmosphere of ethno-religious division in Kaduna State than El-Rufai. In his quest for power, he pandered shamelessly to ethno-religious loyalties, much to the consternation of those who regarded him as being above such sentiments. Having seemingly written off Southern Kaduna, a PDP stronghold, el-Rufai engaged in the most blatantly ethno-religiously divisive campaign in the state's history, projecting himself as a champion of Fulani and Hausa-Fulani interest. He became a proud provincial man as his controversial tweets indicate, even though those who know him personally say the man is urbane and cosmopolitan. As El-Rufai struggles to get a grip on the killings, his habit of deploying slash-and-burn, divide-and-conquer strategies for short-term political gains has now become a liability. It has denied him the trust and dialogic capital necessary to secure the input and cooperation of the Southern Kaduna people.
El-Rufai has personalized the crisis, making it all about himself and ignoring the views and entreaties of the Southern Kaduna people. His and his defenders' stock response to this criticism nowadays is to say that the committee he empanelled to look into the crisis was headed by a Southern Kaduna indigene, General Martin Luther Agwai. It is implied that he is merely implementing the recommendations of the Agwai committee.
However, by the governor's own admission, the Agwai committee simply identified the foreign Fulani herdsmen as the culprits in the killings and did not recommend monetary payments to them. Nor did the committee recommend other failed, half-hearted measures. Moreover, he is the governor and so, whatever the origins of the actions he is taking, the buck stops at his desk. He owns those measures and is responsible for their failure or success. The choice to either reject or implement any recommendations rests with him. Deflecting blame to previous administrations or to the Agwai committee is ludicrous.
The first thing the governor did upon being sworn in was to work with the federal government and other Northwestern governors to deal with the cattle rustling that presented a serious security threat to the northern and central zones of Kaduna state. Troops, helicopters, and other military assets were deployed and within months the rustlers were either killed or arrested and the forest that provided a base for their criminal enterprise was pacified with intense military patrols. The question is, why did it take El-Rufai more than a year and half to request similar federal military assets to intervene in the Southern Kaduna situation? Why did he initially prioritize payments to and appeasement of the killers and the humiliation of the victims before finally running to Buhari for help? Is it because the people of Southern Kaduna are neither Hausa-Fulani nor APC voters?
El-Rufai is now captive to his own political posturing and long-held ethnic supremacist tendencies. His approach to the killings has continued to bear out his tendency for stoking unnecessary drama, for ethno-religious insensitivity, and for personalizing public issues. He sees the Southern Kaduna people as blame-worthy and the Fulani herdsmen killers as deserving of appeasement. A few weeks ago, as though to further humiliate the people of Southern Kaduna in their distress, the governor fancifully launched what he called "apology billboards." The billboards were erected across the local governments of Southern Kaduna. In other words, El-Rufai's solution to the killings is to force the people of Southern Kaduna, the victims, to apologize to their killers. It was a humiliating political subjugation of a people already under genocidal siege. The Southern Kaduna people were paying for billboards that apologized to their killers instead of the other way round. And this was haughtily done without consulting with the Southern Kaduna people.
As the governor blames others, including Niger Delta militants (!), he has not stopped to acknowledge that his past and present utterances and gestures have created an atmosphere of distrust between him and the people of Southern Kaduna and between the ethnic and religious groups of the state. He needs to look inward and take responsibility for stoking ethno-religious distrust and for emboldening the killers or at least giving them the impression that a sympathetic member of their ethno-religious group is in power, and that this kinsman is willing to legitimize their murderous cause and even pay them appeasement money. No wonder the people of Southern Kaduna attacked his convoy on his visit there last week. They were tired of the governor's condescending attitude, his empty preachments, and his efforts to humiliate them while rewarding their tormentors.
Helpless in the face of his inability to contain the rising current of ethno-religious division in the state, the governor has belatedly run to President Buhari to deploy more troops to Southern Kaduna communities. This is the same army, by the way, that on July 20 2014, El-Rufai tweeted the following about: "Genocidal Jonathanian army kills once again." On that occasion, El-Rufai was condemning the killing of some Shiite members by soldiers. He was obviously pandering and opportunistically exploiting the Shiite's sectarian angst because today he is the biggest persecutor of the Shiite in Nigeria. Moreover, he has partnered with the same army he described as genocidal to wage his war against the Shiite minority.
The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost for El-Rufai. His past utterances, his prior political posturing, his divisive, incendiary, and insensitive ethno-religious pandering and comments are coming back to haunt him. He has no one but himself to blame. He has little sympathy, having arrogantly and selfishly alienated foes and friends alike.
El-Rufai's current travail offers a poignant lesson, which is that those seeking political positions should moderate their supremacist ideologies, temper their arrogance, and stop pandering to or riding the wave of popular but fleeting primordial anger.
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