I find it so nausearing for people to be trying at all cost to deny what is as real as the noon day. Naming and shaming were used in the past to bring people to a sense of contrition and possibly deter others. The rationalisation of evil is what is festering and making it worse in Nigeria. While one should not generalise, as it is not every Fulani person who kidnaps, the fact remains that majority of the people who are involved in this heinous act of kidnapping for ransom in the Southwest are Fulanis. Blocking the road with cows and using that as a decoy to kidnap as it happened at the airport road, Akure this past Sunday (reported in the punc of Monday 10th June, 2019) is one evidence of this. What are we gaining by trying to explain this away? The forceful occupation of ancestral lands of people that Prof Moses Ochonu referred to cannot be denied. What has the government done to undo this? Or is it an official policy of the state? Are we defending this and calling people names because we have not been directly affected? Oga Jibo has formed this habit of labeling people who dare to disagree with him with all manners of uncharitable names, the latest being that such people, perhaps including me, are gangs. This is intellectual arrogance at its worst. How will you feel if some Ijaw of OPC boys move over to Kano and take over your family property and the state look the other way? Will you still maintain this ambivalent and non-challant position? How long shall we continue to feel so un-empathetic to the victims of the marauding criminals? How long shall we tolerate the inefficiency of a government that has failed in the performance of the first duty of the state: protection of lives and property? Are we truly crusaders for democracy or just opportunistic champion of convenience?
I am shaking my heads in disbelief on how low we have sunk in thinking less of our fellow country men and women, that we think we can dispense with without a whimper. I have said it before, when pushed to the world, people will ultimately rise up to defend their ancestral land and at that point, the so called federal might, might not be able to save the government.
On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 8:50 AM Ashafa Abdullahi <abashafa@gmail.com> wrote:
Fulanization & Islamizatiin by Dr Ayo Owoade:I will be the last person to deny that kidnappers are on rampage however, seeing it as an act perpetrated by Fulanis or as an agenda to Islamize Nigeria is where the narrative start to get ethnic and religious undertone.We should see criminals as criminals instead of using the calamity to generate unnecessary sentiments.In the last few years, more than a dozen of my colleagues in PH have been victims with ransom paid. About six weeks ago, two of my colleagues were kidnapped on East-West road in daylight while on official duty with one of their police escorts killed.Night life in PH has practically disappeared. But we see and referred to perpetrators of this horrendous act as criminals, not Ijaw or ikwere or Kalabari kidnappers or people with 'Christianisation' agenda.In 2015 when ijaw/ ilaje boys were on rampage around Lagos, kidnapping school children in Epe, ikorodu and arepo Turkish school, we treated them as criminals and no tribal or religious agenda attached to it.Why do we now have double standard in treating criminals operating in north west axis of the country by stigmatizing their tribe and assumed religion.In our desperation to run our beloved country down, we even have to import videos and pictures from troubled and war torn neighboring countries to push ourselves to despicable intolerant level.The Fulanisation and Islamization agenda being championed by some of our politically spent and expired leaders, who are the greatest beneficiaries of our lopsided system, and who unfortunately, have lost out and become politically vulnerable, and who are now exploiting the opportunity to become tribal warlords, do not in any way have facts to back it up. The first reason being that we have more southerners living and striving in the Hausa / Fulani traditional enclave than we have the latter in the southern part of the country. If there is anything close to that, it is the southerners that are making more inroad into northern territories. There are more southerners with physical assets and flourishing business in the north than northerners presence down south. Also, the just concluded election in Abuja is a clear example of how southerners are making there presence felt within the northern political landscape.The islamisation agenda being championed by these leaders is something they either never really reflected on or they are just being mischievous about it and I am going to use my immediate environment to drive home my point. I moved into this estate 12 years ago. As at mid 2007 when I came in, there were about 4 or 5 mosques along this road to Ajah with less than 10 churches but as at today, I still see those 5 mosques but the number of churches have gone up geometrically. When I drive along lekki epe road, and indeed any other part of Lagos, I see more of Christianity footprint than Islam. Likewise Lagos ibadan Express way, lagos badagry Express way, abule egba Santo otta ifo ewekoro, abeokuta road, sagamu ore Benin Express way, Ibadan ilesha akure owo Benin road, gbongan osogbo ikirun inisha erinle offa ajase ipo road, omuaran egbe kabba lokoja road, Ibadan oyo ogbomoso ilorin road. Even my village, ilorin, with 99% Muslim natives, is not spared in this modern Christianity tsunami. I am sure there are more churches in ilorin now than Muslim worship centers. The outlook is not different in other parts of the north, we have more churches springing up everywhere. The south south and south east of the country also have their own share of rapid expansion of churches, while the number of mosques in those regions would hardly be up to 100. In contrast ilorin alone, which is a Muslim town has more than 100 churches.These are facts that are verifiable and one continues to wonder the sources of misinformation being propagated by these divisive ethnic and religious bigots. The only conclusion one can deduce from their utterances is that these criminal elements ravaging the north who are being branded as Fulani jihadists seem to be working for these expired leaders. Because I may not know how to Islamize a society but common sense tells me that it cannot be achieved by committing genocide against your own people who are predominantly Muslim and using the few converts on your side to blow up the so called 'infidels ' within your vicinity. This definitely does not add up.In fact if there is any group of people that requires reawakening, it is the Muslims in this country. Most of the land being used for building churches in the northern and south west part of the country are sold off by Muslims. I wonder how many Christians will in good faith sell their land for mosque to be erected on it. They are the ones being aggressively overrun by the other faith, yet the predator is claiming to be the prey. It is looking like a winning tactics now but like any other thing built on falsehood, it will definitely collapse in not too distance future.For those of us who are genuinely concerned about the level of insecurity in the country, we need to be careful not to sail in their wind. It is important to channel our collective effort to help government in subduing this menace otherwise, the gravity of the precarious situation will be lost if it is anchored on tribal or religious sentiment just to score cheap political blackmail.--On Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 03:06 Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu wrote:If leaders of thought and peace don't emerge right away, grounds for genocide are in the making.--The narratives are now moving away from cattle.
Sent from my iPhoneIn my post, I mentioned Dakingari as the Governor of Kebbi State. It is Atiku Bagudu, not Dakingari.
--On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 7:49 PM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Oga Falola,
I hope you don't inadvertently provide a crutch for denialists, Fulani supremacists, and rationalizers of Fulani expansionist violence. The existence of fake alarms and fake news does not obviate the real, homicidal rampage of armed Fulani herdsmen and bandits across the country. It would be a disservice to the victims of this violence if we allow incidents of false panic and mischaracterizations to deny or muddy the real threats that Fulani bandits and criminals pose to the country.
Note that in the early days of Boko Haram, there was a similar tendency to attribute to the terrorist group attacks across the country that were carried out by other groups, including in places where Boko Haram did not have a cell. That, however, does not mean that Boko Haram does not exist or that it has not killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people while destroying critical infrastructure, occupying territory, and threatening Nigeria's sovereignty.
In fact as we speak, many communities in Southern Kaduna, Plateau State, Nasarawa State, Adamawa, and Benue States have been forcefully occupied by armed Fulani herdsmen in a de facto expansionist occupation. With the double-standard being deployed by Buhari and his pro-Fulani security services, there is no chance of reversing this brazen annexation of ancestral lands by the armed herdsmen and bandits. So there is a real, territorial Fulanization going on, in addition to the political and symbolic Fulanization so brilliantly analyzed by Adunni Adelakun in her PUNCH column.
Many parts of Katsina, Zamfara, Kebbi, and Sokoto States are effectively occupied by well-armed Fulani bandits. So rampant is this Fulani banditry that the Northern objection to depicting the violence by the ethnic name of its perpetrators has collapsed. In Northern social media and discursive circles, the violence is now being called by its ethnic name. The immediate past Zamfara Governor and his deputy both publicly blamed the insecurity in the state on Fulani bandits; in a fit of silly, impotent anger the former governor, Abdulazeez Yari, even threatened to forcefully remove Fulani herdsmen from the state. He alleged that the bandits and the herdsmen were working together as ethnic kinsmen.
All the kidnappers and bandits publicly paraded by the police and in some cases interviewed on camera are Fulani. When a prominent Muslim cleric (a Fulani himself and, according to reports, a leader of Buhari's Muslim prayer warriors) was kidnapped and a huge ransom paid for his release he said publicly when asked that his kidnappers are Fulani. Many other Hausa-Fulani kidnap victims, themselves speakers of Fulfulde or people who, as Hausa speakers, can recognize Fulfulde-accented Hausa have testified publicly that their kidnappers are Fulani who spoke Fulani amongst themselves in their camps and spoke Hausa to outsiders.
I have personally listened to several recorded ransom negotiations, including the recorded call between the kidnapped UBEC Chairman and those trying to raise his ransom. In the recordings I've heard, the kidnappers clearly speak Hausa (in one case English because the victim was Yoruba) with a clear Fulani accent. There was even one hilarious one in which the bandits kidnapped the wife of another Fulani kidnap kingpin and the ensuing phone conversation between them clearly indicates that the Northern kidnap problem is a Fulani franchise. The person who forwards these recordings to me on Whatsap is himself Fulani, a titleholder in a prominent emirate. By the way, here is what this same Fulani friend of mine wrote on his Facebook page several days ago: "Your uneducated kin cannot constitute a dominant criminal nuisance to the entirety of Nigeria's 200 ethnic nationalities and expect your pastoralist way of life to endure much longer! The leadership of NOMADIC FULANI need to understand this truth!!!"
I've gone to this length to demonstrate to you that even in the North, your type of narrative of dis-emphasizing the Fulani ethnic factor has given way to a stark, if reluctant, acknowledgement of the growing, spreading menace of Fulani banditry. This has happened because the North, the Muslim North is now arguably the biggest victim of Fulani banditry.
All of this is not to critique your caution about spreading false alarms and fake news, but to state that the invocation of fake news, if the proper caveats and qualifiers are not emplaced, can now be a huge gift to deniers, escapists, and pro-regime Fulani supremacists who do not want to acknowledge the rampant problem of Fulani banditry.
Personally, I won't post or spread things until I've verified them from multiple sources, although recently I posted on the widely reported presidential approval for state police only for the presidency to deny that the president "approved" state police. All of Nigeria's major credible publications had reported the approval. One can never be too cautious in this age of fake and manufactured realities. But a program of caution should not preclude an acknowledge of the mortal danger posed to Nigeria by marauding hordes of armed Fulani bandits, kidnappers, and expansionists. One should also stretch the caution in the opposite direction so that one does not validate the rhetoric of those who say with a straight face that Fulani herdsmen are being victimized by all other ethnic groups rather than being aggressive, violent, homicidal, marauders.
Finally, on the question of citizenship, I agree that a constitutional amendment regarding it is important, as are other constitutional amendments dealing with devolution, resource control, and a truly federal structure. But here is my additional point here. In the north, religion, not ethnicity, is the idiom of identity or identification. You coauthored a book on religion and politics in Nigeria, so this is something you already know. The implication of this, as Matthew Kukah demonstrates in his own book, is that it is easier in the Muslim North for a Hausa speaking Yoruba and Afenmai Muslim to be accepted as a citizen of Kano and to access the privileges and benefits of such citizenship/indigeneship (I actually know so many and one of them was my college classmate and was on Kano State scholarship) than it is for a Benue, Plateau, Adamawa, or Kaduna Hausa speaker like myself who is a Christian, or even more tragically, for a Kano or Jigawa Hausa-Fulani Christian to do the same.
In fact as we speak, there is a controversial case of Justice Esther Asabe, a full-blooded indigene of Kebbi State, whose appointment as Chief Judge the Governor, Dakingari, has refused to confirm despite the NJC strongly urging him to do so. The judge has now petitioned the NJC after working in an acting capacity for two years, alleging that the governor's refusal is hinged on her religion.
I say all this to point to the fact that merely doing a constitutional amendment to redefine citizenship will not solve the problem of citizenship (and the rights derived therein) in the North since such a constitutional effort would only deal with ethnicity but not the ingrained idea in the north (not in the South) that Christian indigenes (and Christians in general) in Muslim-majority states are inferior and slaves who deserve only crumbs and are not entitled to the rights of full citizenship like their Muslim co-indigenes.
By the way, Muslim indigenes of Plateau state have complained of the reverse problem, so this is not just a problem of majority Muslims oppressing minority Christians. It is a problem of how identity, belonging, political solidarity, and rights were configured and understood in religious terms from colonial times--how the politics of claim making, representation, inclusion, and exclusion were defined as coterminous with the way one worshipped God. That has remained the preeminent identity locus in Northern Nigeria to this day. This is a fundamental divergence from the South, where ethnicity and ethnic solidarity trumps religious affiliation. In advancing constitutional amelioration of the citizenship question, this divergence should be acknowledged so that what might work in the South is not assumed to provide an efficacious remedy for the problem of citizenship in the North.
Those of us who study Northern Nigeria know that a constitutional redefinition or clarification of citizenship will only partially deal with the citizenship question there.
On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 2:52 PM Ibrahim Abdullah <ibdullah@gmail.com> wrote:
Jibo:--You mean the Gang of Four? Why don't you combat them? You're a tested Guerilla fighter and rugged combatant.Bon chance!
Sent from my iPhoneYou no de fear, I said this and got insults, the gang will have no choice now but to characterise Toyin Fall as an ideologue of Fulani Jihad and conquest of Christian territory.
Professor Jibrin IbrahimSenior FellowCentre for Democracy and Development, AbujaFollow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17
--On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 at 21:21, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
--At 1 am, someone woke me up (as if I sleep!) that the Fulani, about 600 of them, had overrun the city of Ifewera, close to Ilesa. and I should wake up call some state governors. I took it seriously, trying to reach Pastor Adeboye who is from there. I was told that the churches are full of people. I could not sleep.
It turns out not to be true.
All of us must exercise caution. If something is not true, we should not be party to it. What people now call "Fulani" is becoming an accumulation of those they don't like—Yoruba thieves, Igbo kidnappers and criminals are now calling themselves Fulani.
Now, Falola is APC!!!!!!
TF
Toyin Falola
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