The Complicity of Fulani Elite in the Ongoing Genocidal National Colonization Strategy
by
Nigerian Government Aided Fulani Warlords
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Abstract
Argues that Nigeria's Fulani elite are complicit in a genocidal terrorist campaign being carried out on the behalf of their ethnicity by Fulani warlords with the support of Nigeria's Fulani led Federal government and security agencies.
Why is it that Fulani elite 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 Benue state's anti-open grazing law enacted 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 Fulani elite emerge to speak only when they see Fulani interests being challenged in the ongoing war waged by greedy right wing Fulani warlords against Nigeria using the most visible Fulani cultural activity, nomadic cattle husbandry, as an instrument of national penetration and as a platform to manipulate Nigeria's political processes by seeking to legislate into law the ceding of Nigeria's land to Fulani herdsmen.
When they speak, they pretend to be unaware of the directing of the ongoing genocide by a group whose members are among the most visible face of Fulani ethnicity in Nigeria. When they acknowledge that reality, they 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 they are able to do is to justify such inhumanity as 'Babayola M. Tuongo does in"Obadiah Mailafiya: Hatred,Bigotry & Intellectual Thuggery", a response to Obadiah Mailafiaya's "Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria" which addresses"the genocide being perpetrated by the Fulani militias in the Middle Belt of our country today". The Fulani apologists, as Tuongo does, also ignore the occupation of Agatu and other locations by Fulani herdsmen in the Middle Belt after decimating their native 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 the scholarly group USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google 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 goverment of the Fulani national ruler, Nigerian President Muhamadu Buhari, I cried out in the group against their consistently unfolding horrors in Benue, the SW and the SE, describing them as executing a government sponsored terrorist colonization agenda. Buhari dedicates in the group 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 federal government, 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/Hausa-Fulani heads of Nigeria's security organisations, a government led by a Fulani man whose accommodation of the terrorist campaign is clear, a government in which appointment to leadership positions is dominated by what Kperoqi calls a policy of Arewaisation, the consolidation of power for the national ruler's Northern Nigerian ethno-religious base.
It is wise to see the writing on the wall and retreat rather than invoking drumbeats of genocide directed against critiques of the genocide being carried out by the right wing Fulani political and military organisation, as some Fulani elite are doing, when their representatives are the ones abusing the trust and slow comprehension of Nigerians, using that 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 federal government'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 about the bloodletting 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, who is to 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 years ago through the betrayal of his people by Afonja their further advance was stopped by Ibadan warriors?
Nigerian social media space, exemplified by Facebook, is rife with the conclusion that a national colonization campaign is being carried out by Fulani warlords supported by the Fulani led Federal government, , a position which I have insisted was the reality since the Agatu massacre years ago when these terrorists murdered hundreds , 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 the ruling APC who need him for their own political 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 Muslim 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 against 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. The secession option continues to grow in credibility as the stranglehold becomes more savage.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, the Greeks declared.
Also published in
Nigerian Development blog
Scribd ( PDF)
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