Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Fulani and Fake News

Moses:

 I have received many abusive messages from those calling for the creation of Oduduwa Republic.

The federal government must see this as its number one mission.

It is painful to read about the situation, if correct, and how murder is described in ways that are too barbaric to talk about. It is also painful to know that  primordial rules can trump the evolution of collective citizenship in the 21^st century.

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, June 13, 2019 at 8:27 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Fulani and Fake News

 

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 iPhone

On 13 Jun 2019, at 17:44, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:

You 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 Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow 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

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

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