I do agree with some of the sentiments of Babayola Toungo in his critique of Obadiah Mailafia's article.
I also believe that people like Miyetti Allah should be seen as part of a criminal faction but not necessarily representative of the entire group of people. We are all scared of stoking Rwanda - like genocide tit-for -tat reprisal activities that could go out of hand.The Buhari government has to be fully condemned for not acting decisively enough. We are in agreement here on that point.
GE
Addis Ababa
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2018 12:49 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Right Wing Fulani Colonization Drive : Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria, By Obadiah Mailafia
Thanks for your effort, Babayola.
Why is it that people like you are silent when Miyetti Allah, run by Nigeria's most elite Fulani, most prominent among whom are the Sultan of Sokoto and the ex-Nigerian bank governor and now Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, justify the various massacres carried out by Fulani herdsmen in the Middle Belt and even threaten more and carry it out, as in their open defiance of the state's open grazing law carried out to protect the state against the murderous rapaciousness that Fulani herdsmen, led by Miyetti Allah, have come to be associated with, from Southern Kaduna to Edo state, in which latter state their cows are seen occupying classrooms and where they are repeatedly recorded as murdering innocents?
None of those declarations from various levels of Miyetti Allah leadership was ever repudiated by the apex leadership of the organisation. Neither was the open declaration by a Fulani professor that Benue belongs to the Fulani by right of conquest publicly challenged by any Fulani, to the best of my knowledge, talk less by Miyetti Allah. Yet people like yourself emerge to speak only when you see Fulani interests being challenged in the ongoing war waged by greedy right wing Fulani warlords agst Nigeria using the most visible Fulani cultural activity, nomadic cattle husbandry, as an instrument of national penetration and a platform to manipulate Nigeria's political processes in favour of your ethnicity.
When you do speak, you pretend to be unaware of the directing of the ongoing genocide by an elite group whose members are among the most visible face of your ethnicity in Nigeria. When you acknowledge that reality, you refuse to address the sheer horror that people of such eminence have made themselves the sponsors of such a national calamity, a coven of blood soaked vampires. The best you are able to do is to justify such inhumanity as you have done in your piece above, along with ignoring the occupation of Agatu and other locations by Fulani herdsmen in the Middle Belt after decimating the communities:
" He alleged in his disjointed piece that the Fulbe are right now on a rampage of "killing, pillaging and burning down entire villages". Why are they doing so? Just for the heck of it? History taught us about causes, courses and effects. Not only do they kill, according to Mailafiya – they also destroy farmsteads and repopulate them with their own. Can he be benevolent enough to give us the name of one such farmstead destroyed and repopulated by the Fulbe?"
We are all witnesses to this unfolding history and the gradual but consistent red listing of Fulani ethnicity in Nigeria by these overreaching shenanigans.
The gradual but consistent unfolding of public opinion in Nigeria on this hell that a group of anachronistic characters have plunged the nation into can be seen as reflected in the development of opinions on this subject on this group. Having observed the development of heavily armed, military level sophisticated and murderous Fulani militia in action before the 2015 escalation of their terrorist agenda under the cover of the govt of the Fulani national ruler, Nigerian President Muhamadu Buhari, I cried out in this group agst their consistently unfolding horrors in Benue, the SW and the SE, describing them as a govt sponsored terrorist colonization agenda. Buhari dedicates such as Mobolaji Aluko and Salimonu Kadiri dismissed my outcries as unrealistic scare mongering.Today, three years later, they are either silent on the clear ethnic agenda unfolding or are calling for efforts to address the systematic massacres.
Middle Belt scholar Moses Ochonu used to describe me as sensationalizing the situation. Farooq Kperogi whose biography is intimately intertwined with Fulani people in positive terms, has decried what he presented as the scapegoating of Fulani ethnicity for what Ochonu and himself describe as the misadventures of a disconnected band of miscreants, and when they at last came round to acknowledging the reality of recurrent massacres carried out by well organised Fulani militia, they insisted they were a disconnected band of brigands they called Bororos.
What is their position as of today?
They have both declared Miyetti Allah a terrorist organisation. They both cry out about the collusion between the fed govt , Miyetti Allah and the Fulani militia terrorist campaign, as graphically represented by the support given by both the Inspector General of Police and the Minister of Defence to the murderous vision of Miyetti Allah to force Benue into submission through massacre, demanding the state must not act to forestall their free roaming brigandry.
What does this imply?
An admission that a highly coordinated terrorist campaign is in action, centred in a directing group, Miyeti Allah, itself led by the country's most elite Fulani, a terrorist campaign supported by the Fulani or Hausa-Fulani heads of Nigeria's security organisations, a govt led by a Fulani man whose accommodation of the terrorist campaign is clear, in a govt in which appointment to leadership positions is dominated by what Kperoqi calls a policy of Arewaisation.
It is wise to see the writing on the wall and retreat rather than invoking genocide when you are the one abusing the trust and slow comprehension of Nigerians as a platform for carrying out genocide.
It took years for ex-minister of defense Theophilus Danjuma to declare the current situation as genocide and to urge people to defend themselves or face extinction in the face of the Nigerian army's and by implication the Nigerian fed govt's collusion with the terrorists. This has come years after Danjuma and a group of Middle Belt elders held a public meeting on this subject and cried out even as some people were yet to wake up to the reality, not getting a positive response to the earlier outcry, Danjuma has made a more telling declaration.
So, whom do you blame for the negative profile Fulani ethnicity is being stained with?
All over Nigeria, people are asking who are these evilly daring warlords, who, their kinsman having secured a national platform on a position of trust by other Nigerians, have proceeded to demand that Nigerians suffer death and enslavement at their hands? Where are they from? Have they chosen to continue the political jihad of their ancestor Uthman dan Fodio who conquered the Hausa states using religion as a cover, only to place his biological heirs and generals as rulers over those states, with his contemporary descendants using nomadic cattle husbandry as a primary strategy to carry the same jihad beyond Illorin after which conquest through the betrayal of his people by Afonja they were stopped by Ibadan warriors?
Social media such as Facebook is rife with the conclusion of a national colonization campaign being carried out by Fulani warlords, a position which I have insisted was the reality since the Agatu massacre when these terrorists murdered hundreds in Agatu, justified it in public and went free, setting a pattern that has recurred in the years since then.
Every Fulani person, every Hausa-Fulani person, bears the responsibility of taking a stand for or against Nigeria in this war
against Nigeria declared on their behalf. The Nazis pursued a vision for Germany based on their warped perspectives. Today, we recall those Germans who gave open support to Nazi executed genocide and dictatorship, those who gave support through silence when they could have spoken out, those who,like Christian priest, Martin Niemoller, objected and paid the price of punishment, even death, for objecting.
There is only so much that control of the country's military might, Buhari's primary weapon, can do. People have taken note that after nullifying Nnamdi Kanu's peaceful IPOB civil disobedience secession strategy through military attack even employing tanks, and disappearing him and his parents, the murderous terrorist attacks from Fulani militia intensified. People have thus noted that IPOB was not the enemy. They have also noted how IPOB fought heavily armed soldiers using stones at best.
Are Nigerians not getting to the breaking point?
Buhari's credibility in the South and with many in the Middle Belt and Southern Kaduna has been destroyed. All he has left as a significant block is the ethno/religious loyalty of supporters in the Muslim North and political loyalists in APC who need him for their own survival. His supporters have demonstrated their readiness, as they did in their pro-Buhari massacres of 2011, to attack and kill those they see as opposed to him in the North, as demonstrated by the Facebook post at that link in which a Buhari supporter celebrates a public mob beating of a person in the North who declared Buhari will not win the 2019 elections. People in the South are stating that if he is returned, he will turn Nigeria into a Fulani dominated colony/graveyard.The South does not want him anymore.
Nigeria is not Rwanda. Neither is it Sudan, where a similar strategy was carried out by a religio/ethnic self deceiver. People are gradually getting to the point of realizing that the most potent weapon agst dictatorship is to refuse to give it support, the road IPOB took with Kanu, not open combat, since dictators like this one take care to secure control of the country's security forces.
The restructuring option galvanized as a response to Kanu's secession vision remains live, though subdued, since its urgency has been tempered by his seeming defeat. People, however, are pointing to those who want the parasitic political system to continue as before so they can keep feeding on a captive nation. The Southern politicians can be protected only for so long in their greed and cowardice, another plank of this terrorist strategy.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, the Greeks declared.
toyin
OBADIAH MAILAFIYA: HATRED, BIGOTRY & INTELLECTUAL THUGGERY
Babayola M. Toungo
Mr. Obadiah Mailafiya is a person that I previously held in high esteem because of certain objectivity he brought to public discourse. However on reading his "Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria", this high esteem I had of him became diminished . In the said article, Mailafiya tried strenuously to prove the allegation of genocide and hegemony against the Fulbes and their being aliens in Nigeria to the extent of rewriting history of the Fulbe to suit his attempt to re-write contemporaneous history . What is glaring in Mr. Mailafiya's essay is nothing but a furtherance of the myopic world view of colonial imperialism and present islamophobia exhibited elsewhere that others here in Nigeria wish to adopt and paint the Fulbe. I will say to Mailafiya "Facts are sacred sir, therefore you can't change anything by lying through your teeth." The man has always presented himself as an intellectual – what I have always struggled to understand is whether he is the academic or thuggish type. He always comes across as a victim without a cause with a penchant to create villains on whom to hang his grievances. In all, throughout the rambling piece he has penned, the only truth I could find in the article is his quotation form Gramsci. Which he failed to apply to the issues he was raising.
In his fixation of trying to hang the Fulbe he didn't bother to reconcile the contradictions inherent in his write-up. For instance, he postulated that "historians the world over agree that the original home of the Fulani people is the Futa Jallon in the Upper Guinea highlands of the West African Republic of Guinea" who are these historians? The colonialist or Anglo-American pontificating culturalist who tried to make the world his or her own? In the next breadth, he continued, "…the Fulani are thought to have emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East in ancient times, settling in the Futa Jalon Mountains…". There may be a different meaning for 'original', which I may have not come across. For Mailafiya and his fellow dreamers, who crave for the establishment of a "Middle Belt" of their warped dreams, the Fulbes are original to every country and continent, bar Nigeria. The Fulbes can't be Nigerians and therefore are fair game to be targeted for annihilation. It is in this type of propaganda that pretext is provided or veiled "hate speech" given credence to provide the environment for ethnic cleansing. Mailafiya's attempt to re-write the history of the Fulbe is a message that could be interpreted that the Fulbe's origin is elsewhere therefore they are not Nigerians to enjoy the benefit of the rights of citizenship and therefore they could be treated at will and to their detriment.
Our good Doctor failed to tell us when the Fulbes came to Nigeria and the tribes they met in what is today known as Nigeria. But in the typical fashion of the emerging ethnic bigots masquerading as intellectuals, Mailafiya couldn't even crosscheck his facts about the Sokoto Jihad – where it was fought, Dan Fodio's participation and how it reached the Fombina. Attempting to separate the Caliphate and the Fombina is part of the mischief of Mailafiya and his frustrated group who think they can wish away the past. Nobody took the jihad to Tiv land and Shehu Usman Dan Fodio did not fight anywhere near Tivland for him to be 'wounded' in battle which led to his death. Is this the new fable? "Dream on sir."
Mailafiya took time to detail the travails of the Fulbe in Guinea with relish and one can feel him practically drooling when he got to this part and how he wished this same thing can be applied as a final solution to the Nigerian "settler" Fulbes. Oga, how do you present a people who could not rule in their "original ancestral land" as hegemonic in a country where the likes of you are the lords of the manor? He glibly said the Fulbes are about 20 million spread all over West Africa, can he tell me any other tribe with such a spread and number in the west coast?
"The lack of political opportunities in Guinea explains why the Fulbes turned their attention to Nigeria," so proclaimed our sage. So the British Empire saw in the Fulbe a contemporaneous empire building traits indigenous to West Africa? And this is the narrative that the likes of Mailafiya want to perpetuate? So Fulbes are just turning their attention to Nigeria? Compared to the history that Mailafiya is relying on, when did Nigeria come into being? Is it a construct of the British colonial enterprise? The Fulbes? Or the likes of Mailafiya? The great success of the Fulani jihad led by Shehu Usman Dan Fodio and his son Muhammadu Bello preceded the 1884 Berlin Conference and subsequent colonial chicanery of the French and English particularly in respect of what is now known as Nigeria. Were the Mailafiya's of this world represented at the Berlin Conference? Or in the Colonial administration of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria or the amalgamated territories of Northern and Southern Protectorates? Mailafiya reminded those who might have forgotten that the country had three leaders of Fulani extraction in the past – Shehu Shagari, Murtala Mohammed, Umaru 'Yar Adu'a "and the current incumbent of our High Magistracy Muhammadu Buhari". Na wa wo! Why was Buhari qualified as "High Magistracy"? Mailafiya unwittingly showed his hand – the target all along is Buhari. Lacking the courage and firm conviction to come out and attack Buhari, he chose the well-beaten path of ethnic hatred.
The whole article was a bunch of contradictory postulates. What has come to be known as the "Sokoto Jihad" was never for slave raiding and other reasons Mailafiya wants to ascribe to it. The underlying reasons of the Sokoto Jihad have been well articulated that I could only advise Mailafiya to go and read the books written by the leaders of the Sokoto Jihad or latter day historians like the late Abdullahi Smith. When the Imperial British came to this part of Africa, it was only the emirates that stood up to them and the British had to use superior firepower to subdue the emirs. The British destroyed the emirates, not strengthened them. Any elementary reading of history can tell you that. I now know why many of the likes of Mailafiya are opposed to the teaching of history in our schools – so that they can rewrite it. The British destroyed the Caliphal system because emirs under the Caliphate resisted the conquest, while others welcomed them with open arms. Could the British, who were accompanied by Christian missionaries, be supportive of an Islamic Caliphate to the extent of supplanting existing Christian chiefdoms as alleged by our "erudite" scholar? Can he tell us when the Berom chiefdom was created, before it was stealthily converted to that of Jos?
In attempting to demonise the Fulbe, Mailafiya glibly linked the Fulbe with slave raids in the Middle Belt. The usual "divide and rule" argument perpetrated by the British colonialist and now perpetuated by the likes of Mailafiya. Were the Fulbe jihadists ever in "his" middle belt? I think what he is trying hard to hide (or deny) is the fact that he is failing to place the blame at the feet of those that sought to use our population to provide cheap labour whether here in Africa or their other colonies elsewhere in the world. In all historical narrations by real scholars, I have never come across such brazen lie that Shehu Usman Dan Fodio took the jihad to the Tivs. That was not the modus operandi of the Sokoto Jihad. It was local leaders that were convinced of the egalitarian aspirations of the Sokoto Jihad that went to Sokoto or specifically to Shehu Usman Danfodio to declare their allegiance and be made part of the Sokoto Jihad. I hope Mailafiya understands the difference that the Sokoto Jihad was not about conquest of "geographical territory" in comparison to British Imperialism. I therefore cannot fathom the point Mailafiya was trying to make here knowing he is lying through his teeth. Feeding the minds of young innocent ones on a diet of hatred and bigotry?
The average Pullo hates being called a 'hausa-fulani' because such "new mongrel race" as postulated by Mailafiya, is a creation of his friends, the then Lagos – Ibadan press, just to compress the population of the two groups. A term, or yet still – a new mongrel race – coined by Mailafiya and his challenged bedfellows, is now to be used as a weapon of hatred by the same people. Claiming that most Fulbe are largely settled in urban Nigeria is admission clearly coated with bile. To admit there are settled Fulbes in urban Nigeria is to jolt the narrative out of sync. He rambled on about the Fulbes not able to speak Fulfulde, scattered across states like Gombe, Adamawa, Katsina and Kano. I wonder what point he was trying to make by this assertion. He alleged in his disjointed piece that the Fulbe are right now on a rampage of "killing, pillaging and burning down entire villages". Why are they doing so? Just for the heck of it? History taught us about causes, courses and effects. Not only do they kill, according to Mailafiya – they also destroy farmsteads and repopulate them with their own. Can he be benevolent enough to give us the name of one such farmstead destroyed and repopulated by the Fulbe?
In the recent haste of ethnic profiling and hate mongering, I cannot remember coming across a poorly done hate crusade by someone strenuously trying to present himself as not preaching hate. I will like everyone to read his piece and see how hatred and bigotry spew out.
If Mailafiya found the call by TY Danjuma to his people to come out and defend themselves to be in line with the Nigerian Constitution, in conformity with the sacred precepts of the Law of the Nation, Natural Justice, Equity, Good Conscience and the dictates of the Just Law Theory, why does he begrudge the Fulbe from enjoying such legal protection?
Intellectual thugs and a complicit media bred the Rwandan crisis. The genocide started with dehumanizing the Tutsis (a Fulbe group) by politicians and their intellectual thugs in the media; the killings started and did not stop until about 800 thousand souls were wasted. When the Tutsis gained control of the country in 1995, they restored peace, social harmony and egalitarian cohabitation that is genuinely federalist. There have not been reported that the Hutu's have been harmed on a "retaliatory ethnic attacks by the Tutsis" because of who the President of Rwanda is. Neither did Kagame attempt to create hegemony for the Tutsi's because he is one.
Let's be well advised to be mindful of what we say in our utterances made public or in the public.
On Monday, 28 May 2018, 14:42:22 GMT+1, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <tvoluade@gmail.com> wrote:
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ugo Harris Ukandu abujarock@gmail.com [Edo_Global] <Edo_Global@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Wed, May 23, 2018 at 4:19 PM
Fulani Powerless in all of Africa but only in Nigeria do they have some power.
Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria, By Dr. Obadiah Mailafia a Former Central Bank of Nigeria Deputy Governor.
The Fulani who once enjoyed great political power as founders of empires are today largely powerless. Despite the fact that they constitute the single largest ethnic majority in their original homeland of Guinea, they have never enjoyed political power in that country. The ethnic composition of Guinea, according to recent estimates, is as follows: Fula (41%); Mandinka (33%); Susu (12%); Kissi (5%); Kpelle (5%); and others (4%).
Ever since independence from the French, Sekou Toure, an ethnic Mandinka, ruled the country with an iron hand. He was particularly hard on the Fula, whom he accused of plotting with the French to undermine his government. One of the prominent casualties was Diallo Telli, a Fula. He was the pioneer Secretary-General of the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) before becoming Minister of Justice under Sekou Toure. In March 1977 Toure accused him of being the arrowhead of a Fula complot to overthrow the government. He was thrown into the notorious Camp Boiro prison where he died a gruesome death.
Subsequent rulers of the country, from Louis Lansana Beavogui, Lansana Conté, Moussa Dadis Camara and the incumbent Alpha Condé, have all been non-Fula. It would seem that all the other ethnic groups have ganged up to ensure that a Fula will never rule over them. One of the closest who came to grabbing power was the brilliant Fula economist and banker Cellou Dalein Diallo. He had been prime minister under the late Lansana Conté where he acquitted himself as an effective administrator. He has become a rallying point of the opposition Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG).
By Dr. Obadiah Mailafia a Former Central Bank of Nigeria Deputy Governor.Perhaps this explains why the Fulani have turned their attention to Nigeria. They remember the great success of the Fulani Jihad led by Usman Dan Fodio and his son Mohammed Bello. They believe that if they cannot establish hegemonic power in their own ancestral homeland then they have a right to turn to Nigeria, a land they believe was given to them by God Almighty Himself. Today, the Fulani number about 20 million worldwide. They are spread all over West and central Africa, particularly Guinea, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Niger, Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and The Gambia. Their population is between 7 and 8 million in their original homeland in Guinea.
ABUJA (Sundiata Post) The Italian Marxist political philosopher Antonio Gramsci was one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. I admire his freshness of approach and his critical spirit in approaching issues of domination and power in world politics. Gramsci invented the notion of "hegemonia" (hegemony) to explain the structure and anatomy of domination in political society. He identified varying forms of domination economy, culture and politics. According to him, dominant elites manipulate capital, political power, ideas, information and knowledge to consolidate their stranglehold on society. Hegemony can be so effective that the people dominated begin to accept their fate as a part of the natural order and the best of all possible worlds. I find this concept of hegemony so relevant with what is going on in relation to the genocide being perpetrated by the Fulani militias in the Middle Belt of our country today.Historians the world over agree that the original home of the Fulani people is Futa Jallon (also known in the French as Fouta Djallon) in the Upper Guinea highlands of the West African Republic of Guinea. Also known as Fula, Fulbe or Pullo, the Fulani are thought to have emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East in ancient times, settling in the Futa Jallon Mountains and intermarrying with the local population and creating a unique ethnic identity based on cultural and biological miscegenation.
Futa Jallon is also the source of the great River Niger that undulates a vast region of our beloved West Africa; traversing over 4,000 km. It is a region of great beauty, with a near-temperate climate. It has been described by a European visitor as "the Switzerland of Africa". The Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampaté Ba famously described Futa Jallon as "the Tibet of West Africa", on account of its surfeit of Muslim clerics, Sufi mystics, itinerant students and preachers.
The second traditional home of the Fulani is Futa Toro, by the banks of the Senegal River in the current nation of Senegal.
Over the centuries the Fulani converted to Islam and some of them became zealous Muslim clerics and itinerant proselytisers. Through war and conquest they formed several kingdoms, among them Tukolor, Massina, the Caliphate of Usman Dan Fodio and Fombina in the early nineteenth century.
Today, the Fulani number about 20 million worldwide. They are spread all over West and central Africa, particularly Guinea, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Niger, Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and The Gambia. Their population is between 7 and 8 million in their original homeland in Guinea.
The Fulani are the world's largest single pastoral ethnic community, ahead of the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and the Karamajong of Uganda. Out of their population of 20 million, a third are pastoralists while the rest are settled, sedentary communities consisting of farmers, traders, artisanal craftsmen and Muslim clerics.
The Fulani who once enjoyed great political power as founders of empires are today largely powerless. Despite the fact that they constitute the single largest ethnic majority in their original homeland of Guinea, they have never enjoyed political power in that country. The ethnic composition of Guinea, according to recent estimates, is as follows: Fula (41%); Mandinka (33%); Susu (12%); Kissi (5%); Kpelle (5%); and others (4%).
Ever since independence from the French, Sekou Toure, an ethnic Mandinka, ruled the country with an iron hand. He was particularly hard on the Fula, whom he accused of plotting with the French to undermine his government. One of the prominent casualties was Diallo Telli, a Fula. He was the pioneer Secretary-General of the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) before becoming Minister of Justice under Sekou Toure. In March 1977 Toure accused him of being the arrowhead of a Fula complot to overthrow the government. He was thrown into the notorious Camp Boiro prison where he died a gruesome death.
Subsequent rulers of the country, from Louis Lansana Beavogui, Lansana Conté, Moussa Dadis Camara and the incumbent Alpha Condé, have all been non-Fula. It would seem that all the other ethnic groups have ganged up to ensure that a Fula will never rule over them. One of the closest who came to grabbing power was the brilliant Fula economist and banker Cellou Dalein Diallo. He had been prime minister under the late Lansana Conté where he acquitted himself as an effective administrator. He has become a rallying point of the opposition Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG).But it would seem that the rest of the ethnic groups are already determined that they would never be ruled by the Fula, who remain the majority as well as being the most educated and among the most moneyed classes. The Mandinka, the Susu and others believe the Fula are a highly clannish and racist group and that once they seize power, they would turn the rest of them into slaves in their own ancestral homeland.
Perhaps this explains why the Fulani have turned their attention to Nigeria. They remember the great success of the Fulani Jihad led by Usman Dan Fodio and his son Mohammed Bello. They believe that if they cannot establish hegemonic power in their own ancestral homeland then they have a right to turn to Nigeria, a land they believe was given to them by God Almighty Himself. They have been encouraged by the fact that the population of Fulanis in Nigeria is even threatening to overtake that of their original home in Guinea. They are also inspired by the fact that three Nigerian leaders have been of the Fulani ethnic extraction, namely, Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari, Murtala Ramat Mohammed (through his mother), Umaru Yar'Adua and the current incumbent of our High Magistracy Muhammadu Buhari.
Under the Nigerian constitution, the Government of Nigeria has a duty to cater for all our citizens. Unfortunately, the Fulani from throughout West Africa and beyond believe Nigeria belongs to them by right. They are under this illusion that they can come from across the border with their cattle and the next day, have a right to demand land for settlement. They also forget that under the ECOWAS Protocol on the movement of peoples, visitors from our region can live only for 3 months as visitors. If they plan to live beyond the statutory 3 months they have to apply to regularise their stay. Unfortunately, recent Fulani emigrants recognise no such regulations. They can come today and tomorrow they are demanding all the rights and privileges appertaining to all bona fide citizens. Not only that, they are laying legal claims to ancestral lands belonging to the peoples of Benue, Taraba, Plateau and the rest of the Middle Belt.Before the arrival of the British, the Fulani spearheaded raids throughout the Middle Belt in a bid to capture slaves and for material booty, land and conquest. The peoples of the Middle Belt heroically resisted them. Usman Dan Fodio was himself wounded by the Tivs in Benue, of which he later died in April 1817. Perhaps it was on account of this that the Fulani established a relationship of "abokanin wasa" (playmates) with the Tivs. For the better part of a century, the Tivs regarded the Fulanis as their friends and playmates. This relationship has foundered on the full realisation of their renewed ambitions for conquest, subjugation, genocide and dispossession.
During the era of British colonial rule, the Caliphate was strengthened to bolster the moral economy of British imperial power. The Emirs were strengthened to lord it over the peoples of the Middle Belt, so long as they were satisfying the expectations of the colonial masters. Thus it came about that Emirs were created in areas that were 99% Christian, including such areas as Jema'a, Lafia, Keffi, Jere and Wase. They were even touting with the idea of creating emirates in Makurdi and Jos, were it not for the grace of God! Where they could not create new emirates the people were placed under the tutelage of Caliphal feudal overlords. A good example is the Tiv people, who for many years in the fifties and sixties were placed under the tutelage of the Emir of Muri.
In Nigeria the original Habe Hausa peoples have become integrated into a new mongrel race known as "Hausa-Fulani". It is a constructed identity of very recent times. Most Fulani in today's Nigeria are largely a settled urban community. Today, their foot soldiers are their pastoralist herdsmen that they have armed with sophisticated weapons to wreck bloodshed and pillage throughout the vast expanses of our ancestral savannah homeland in the Middle Belt. The Fulbe language is rarely spoken by most Fulanis in Nigeria.
Contemporary Fulbe speakers are to be found mainly in Gombe, Adamawa, Katsina and Kano. Although all the Emirs are Fulanis, you are most unlikely to hear their language spoken in their palaces. Hausa has become their lingua franca.
By lumping themselves as Hausa-Fulani, the Fulanis have successfully hidden their oppressive stranglehold on Northern Nigeria. The truth is that the Hausa people make up the bulk of the Talakawa. No Hausa person could ever aspire to be Emir. The Fulani have successfully exploited the Caliphate to consolidate their stranglehold over the North and over the rest of Nigeria which they believe to be their patrimony by right.
What the peoples of the Middle Belt today face is a tragedy that can best be described as genocide. Fulani militias in their thousands have been rampaging across the primeval savannah, killing, pillaging and burning down entire villages. Not only do they maim and kill; they destroy farmsteads and repopulate them with their own people.
I myself do not believe in preaching hatred. We must preach the gospel of love. We would never advocate for people to go about hunting Fulanis and doing reprisal killings. But nobody should deny the leaders of the victim communities the right to voice their legitimate concerns. When General T. Y. Danjuma raised alarm about it, he was told to "use his influence wisely". General Danjuma urged his people to "defend themselves", which is not only in line with the constitution of Nigeria; it is in conformity with the sacred precepts of the Law of Nations, Natural Justice and the dictates of Just Law Theory. The
customs and international laws of war since time immemorial demand that people who face a direct threat to their own existential survival have a duty and right to engage in legitimate self-defence. It is not only a principle derived from law, it derives from morality and international ethics.
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