Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Buhari visits Trump

Trump is of course wrong in identifying a non-existent agenda of killing Christians, of religious cleansing against Christians, in Nigeria. He is echoing the views of his Christian Right base.

However, Trump's prejudice does not excuse the egregious and repeated error in Professor Ibrahim's interventions on the herdsmen issue. 

Jibo seems oblivious of or simply refuses to recognize two important points:

1. What is going on in Zamfara is banditry. There is killing and looting in rural areas. The conflict pitches Fulani against Fulani, Hausa against Hausa. There is, as far as we know, no occupation of land involved. Even when villagers desert their communities after massacres, there is no indication that the murderers and bandits take over the deserted lands for grazing or other purposes. The killings are a cycle or murderous recriminations.

2. In Benue, Southern Kaduna, Plateau, and other Middle Belt areas, by contrast, the killers almost always work in tandem with herdsmen, and it's no coincidence that whenever they massacre villagers, decimate their villages, and the survivors flee, herdsmen are always in tow and take over those communities with their cattle, sometimes less than an hour after the attacks. In some instances, the killers are literally vanguards for herders, going ahead of them to clear out communities. This is a recurring pattern.

This is what Jibo doesn't understand about the Zamfara-Benue comparison. He is absolutely right that the Zamfara killings are not resonating across the country as much as the Benue killings. The reason, he fails to grasp, is quite simple.  People perceive, for good or bad, the situation in Zamfara as a family affair, brother killing brother, with no perception of "foreign" or "outsider" conquest, or a hostile territorial takeover. In addition, as he knows, notions of ancestral land are quite fluid in the Northwestern part of the country, among the Hausa and Fulani.

By contrast, in the Middle Belt, people are tied to their land, and their identity and economic existence are tied to land. Notions of ancestral land, of ancestral origins and nativity, are very well established in those areas. Add that to the fact that the Middle Belt communities that are attacked are largely non-Muslim and are almost entirely non-Hausa/Fulani. The result is a perception of the killing spree of the armed herdsmen as "foreigners" or outsiders coming to kill us in our own ancestral land, or even worse, coming to takeover our ancestral lands for their grazing activities. There is no such perception in Zamfara or interpretation around the killings in Zamfara.

This perception is not unique to the Middle Belt victims or to Nigerians who may appear to care more about the killings in the Middle Belt because the perpetrators are herdsmen not indigenous to the Middle Belt. The same perpetual compartmentalization applies to Americans as well. Gun violence in America kills thousands of Americans every year. They've become so commonplace that Americans now largely shrug them off as unpleasant aspects of their quotidian reality. However, when people perceived as outsiders attacked America on September 11 2011, the same Americans wanted instant revenge and lashed out  almost unanimously, at the killers. Not only that, terrorist attacks perpetrated by Americans of Christian background, or "insiders" hardly resonate or elicit the outrage that terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreigners or "outsiders" do.

It is human nature. We can tolerate abuse and violence from "our own" and we often don't take seriously conflict "among brothers." But we explode in anger when outsiders or people we see as outsiders with no ties to our communities invade our land and hurt us. It is not just the violence, it is also the feeling of being humiliated in one's own home, in one's own ancestral homeland. Your home/land is your sacred space, and you do not want anyone not related to you or to that space to violate it or to try to uproot you from it or to attack you on it. All these factors are not present in Zamfara, where the perception is that both victims and killers are "brothers" and belong to the same space, have ancestral ties to the space. Many Nigerians, themselves from communities with strong notions of ancestral lands, can relate to this basic human instinct to protect the natal space against "outsider" aggression. It is the basis of their empathy for the people of the Middle Belt and what may appear as their indifference to the "brother vs brother " killings in Zamfara.

I hope that this lengthy explanation gives Jibo some perspective on why the Middle Belt killings are treated and perceived differently than the Zamfara ones. That Donald Trump prejudicially put a religious and a one-sided spin on the killings across the country should not send us into another error of our own.

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 5:56 PM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <tvoluade@gmail.com> wrote:

This is misrepresentation-

' The reality that the combined effects of competition for land and water, crime, and poorly informed media speculations have resulted in a cycle of conflict with mass casualties suffered by both farmer and herder communities...'. 

Kogi offered the Fulani herdsmen land for their much touted cattle ranches.

Yet, they still serially attacked Kogi and massacred their people.

Why?

The attacks on sleeping and defenseless communities across the nation, from the SE to the Middle Belt, for which the Fulani herdsmen terrorists are known, attacks where men, women and children are massacred, are these examples of the '  combined effects of competition for land and water, crime, and poorly informed media speculations'?

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, the Greeks stated.

toyin

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:

President Buhari's Visit to the US

 

Jibrin Ibrahim, Friday column, Daily Trust, 4^thMay 2018

 

On Monday, President Buhari visited with the American President Donald Trump and there is some relief that the visit concluded without any major incident. Coming soon after the much-castigated comments by Muhammadu Buhari about the Nigerian youth, people were looking for another faux pas or de-marketing of Nigeria. Maybe the President's minders are doing a batter job of protecting him from the people, as apparently there was no meeting with the Nigerian community or other public events. President Buhari was the first sub-Saharan African leader to have an Oval Office visit with President Trump and this is not surprising given the importance and place of Nigeria in Africa. The two leaders had extensive discussions.

 

As expected, there was a lot of discussion on countering violent extremism. It would be recalled that the American governmenthad approved a $593 million foreign military sale to Nigeria, including 12 A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircraft, in order to further the nation's military campaign against Boko Haram. Nigeria has been seeking permission from the U.S. government to buy the aircraft since 2015 but the Obama administration had put the sale on hold due to concerns about the country's human rights record. In February, U.S. President Donald Trump signaled his support for the sale during a phone call with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. Nigeria has since pad for the aircraft although the National Assembly is furious because the payment was done without appropriation.

 

President Trump praised Buhari's efforts in the war against corruption and this must have been pleasing to our President who has been under significant criticism at home for the ineffectiveness of his anti-corruption strategy and rising voices on corrupt activities by some of his close aides. In some of his recent statements justifying his decision to contest for a second term, the President has argued that another tenure would be an opportunity to engage in a more efficacious second round struggle against corruption. This is tough terrain for the President as his fifteen-year engagement in partisan politics has always been presented as an anti-corruption programme that would be successful if and when he gets into power.

 

President Trump made a forceful demand for increased importation of American food. This is problematic at a time in which the policy thrust of the Nigerian government is the development of self-sufficiency and it's my hope that this demand would be rejected. This is important because the United States is determined to impose GMO food on the rest of the world with all the associated dangers of the policy. The American promise to return $500 million dollars of our stolen money is however welcome and should be pursued with vigour,

 

Another issue that President Trump raised was the murder of Christians in Nigeria, which he said they would not tolerate. There have been concerted narratives articulated for some time that Christians are being targeted for annihilation in the country. The fact that Muslims are also being killed on a daily basis is a reality that the Nigerian media has been relatively successful in masking. Specifically, Trump warned that his country would no longer accept the further murder of Christians in Nigeria by herdsmen and other Islamic extremists and terrorists. He sad that:"We have had very serious problems with Christians who are being murdered in Nigeria, we are going to be working on that problem very, very hard because we cannot allow that to happen." During the visit, a prominent U.S. group, Open Doors USA, had through its the President/CEO, David Curry, published in America's most widely circulated print newspaper, USA Today and later by The Atlantic Post, an article arguing that the protection of Christians in Nigeria can only be achieved by an international coalition.We are told that:"Buhari's Fulani kin are responsible for hundreds of deaths already in 2018, attacking villages and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and land. The scale of the Fulani aggression threatens to surpass Boko Haram's reign of terror, based on the sheer number of deaths."

 

In September last year, I attended a Human Rights Commission public hearing in Congress jointly led by Congressmen Randy Hultgren and James McGovern in Washington DC on Nigeria. The topic was violent conflict between "Muslim cattle rearing herders and Christian farmers in the Middle Belt". The labelling of Muslim herders versus Christian farmers has been an effective way of misconstruing generalised mass killing in Nigeria to a pogrom against Christians.

 

During the hearing, one Dr. Elijah Brown, Executive Director of the 21^stCentury Wilberforce Initiative told the Commission hat there is an insidious campaign by "Muslim Fulani militants" to kill Christian farmers in the Middle Belt, drive them out of their ancestral lands, rename the seized territory with Fulani names and use the office of the Governor to transfer the lands to Fulani ownership. This is the type of framing that influenced the comments by Trump. The fact that "Muslim-Muslim" killings related to the same herder-farmer conflicts inZamfara state has been higher that "Muslim-Christian" killings in states such as Benue have fallen on deaf ears. The reality that the combined effects of competition for land and water, crime, and poorly informed media speculations have resulted in a cycle of conflict with mass casualties suffered by both famer and herder communities as well as Muslim and Christian communities has simply been ignored. 

 

Codeine and the Drug Epidemic in Nigeria 

This week, the Federal Government finally banned the importation and distribution of cough syrup with codeine. The ban occurred less than 240hours after the release of a BBC documentary on the issue. Its great that this first step has been taken, The fact of the matter however that a major campaign had been on-going by Nigerian advocates over the past two years calling for the ban. It's unfortunate that the Nigerian government only listens when the outside world speaks. I would like to thank Dr Mairo Mandara who has been a true leader in the campaign to rid our society of the menace of drugs. As she has been emphasising, the ban is only a first step and our governments, civil society, religious and community leaders all have a huge role to play in rescuing our youth from drug addiction.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

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