Great thanks Obadiah Mailafia,
You are clearly better informed on this horror than myself and have done us the honour of sharing your knowledge and making a wise suggestion about what the communities facing extermination should do anidst the Nigerian govt's complicity by omission.As for your argument about Nigeria in comparison with the US, I think you have a problem there.
The US is the outcome of the colonizing will of the Caucasian majority who share particular values and who are dedicated to the nation they created.
They fought for the nation agst the British after stealing the land from the Native Americans and unified the country through the victory of the American Civil War..
Whose will does Nigeria represent?
The will of colonizers who have long left.
Trading and other relationships that emerged among Africans before colonialism are not equivalent to nationhood or represent the harbinger of a united nation hood.
The same goes for contemporary interpersonal relations.
A better example might be the European Union which exists as an expression of the recognition of correlations in European culture, history and economic development.
That does not mean,however, that the various countries of the EU will be collapsed into one another and even within the EU the UK has kept its own currency amidst current rumblings about why the UK should leave the EU, and is not bound by EU law in all instances.
You can live in Berlin and work in London, as someone I met does, but there is a world of difference between Germany and England and these countries are keeping their differences as central to their individual identities amidst their overarching unity.
That looks to me like a better model for Nigeria than the current behemoth that belongs to no one.
thanks
toyin
On 2 March 2016 at 05:39, Obadiah Mailafia <obmailafia@gmail.com> wrote:
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,Thanks for your own contributions to the national debate. Yes, I believe THERE IS A COUNTRY. The fact that we face enormous political and developmental challenges does not negate that fact. The United States of America -- on the authority of Alexis de Tocqueville -- was a wild collection of unruly communities. The 'Wild West' was a historic fact. War, conflict, slavery, violence -- these were the realities of the living experience of most Americans. And yet, out of that bedlam, there emerged a nation. Nationhood is a process, not a finite equilibrium solid state.One of the greatest myths that our latter-day irredentists harp upon is the false notion that Nigerian nationhood was a historic 'mistake' committed by the British in 1914. This presumes that the various fissiparous collectivities that constitute modern Nigeria were somehow artificially put together by the logic of colonial administrative fiat. The truth is much more complex. The various groups that made up modern Nigeria were already in close interaction (the effusive and ebullient Emmanuel Ayandele would say 'intercourse') with each other for the better part of a millennium. Recall the recent family quarrel between Ife and Bini, all of them undisputed legatees of Oduduwa. The Yoruba are spread as far afield as Ilorin and Okun in Kogi State. The Ebira are intermingled among the farming communities of Ondo and Ekiti. The Onitsha royal clan trace their origins to Benin. The Igbo sacred 'inri' heritage hails for Igala land in the Middle Belt. The Igala themselves are spread as far afield as Onitsha and Nsukka. The Kanuri and Yoruba share the same racial origins in being a Nilotic people. The Nupe of the Middle Belt have strong links with Yoruba and Bini civilisations. Whatever the Yoruba and Bini pride themselves is an offspring of the great Nok civilization of the Middle Belt which has very strong links with ancient Egypt. I believe that most historians are agreed that the flow of demographic migrations were from the north to down south and not the other way around. The so-called Hausa-Fulani are an amalgam of two distinct groups that became fused together. They are also intermingled with the Yoruba in Kwara, right down to Ibadan and the rest of it."Par la force de destin", lots of Nigerians are gradually acquiring a genuine national consciousness. Consider a man like General Ike Nwachukwu. He is a gallant retired Igbo general whose mother happens to be a Fulani princess, being the younger sister of late Sir Usman Nagogo, illustrious Emir of Katsina. His wife is Yoruba. His son, who is "Yorigbo", is married to a beautiful Yoruba young woman. What would you call the offsprings of people with such a pedigree? If we break up Nigeria, where will they go? And these are no longer isolated cases. I have met many young Nigerians with that sort of background.Speaking for myself, I feel, if truth be told, a Nigerian at heart. Ethnicity means very little to me. Neither does religious affinity. I relate to people first and foremost as Nigerians and not like Bini, Esan, Idoma, Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba or Ndigbo. People are people and we must begin to see ourselves as Nigerians, no matter what.Having said this, I also that Oluwatoyin for his expression of moral outrage regarding the recent horrendous massacres among the Agatu. This thing has been going on for years, but our Hausa-Fulani brethren refuse to take moral responsibility. In my own local government area of Sanga, the so-called 'Fulani herdsmen' descended one dawn with sophisticated weapons. By early morning, 900 lay dead -- women, children, the elderly, the infirm -- it was an indiscriminate feast of death. The same sort of thing has been going on in Plateau villages for years. And also Adamawa, Taraba, Benue, Southern Kaduna and Kogi. It is an undeclared Jihad. The purpose appears to be to decimate and demoralize the local communities of the Middle Belt and achieve what the Fulani Jihad failed to achieve in the nineteenth century. We must call evil by its name. This thing is worst than Boko Haram. The silence of the authorities speaks so loud that we can safely ignore their hypocritical pieties. There is an ancient Arab military doctrine known as "fitna". You keep pounding communities and continuously hound them until they surrender and leave the land to you. This is the scenario that has ben unfolding. Sadly, many of these mysterious so-called marauding 'herdsmen' are foreigners. For those of us who speak Hausa, whenever anyone opens his mouth, you know exactly where they come from. Hausan Kano has its own distinctive cosmopolitan panache. Hausan Sakwatto has its own seductive sonority. Hausan Jos has flair and sophistication while Hausan Zazzau has a mix of cosmopolitanism mixed with a touch of learning and prosody. Hausan Niger and Chad and Cameroon sound a bit wild to some of us. A lot of the killers speak that kind of Hausa. Truth is there are probably millions of people from neighbouring countries who cross the border and become automatic "Nigerians". In the North they would have more rights than Christian northerners and Yoruba, Igbo and others who dwell in the North. It is these aliens who are the vanguard of the undeclared genocide in the Middle Belt.The solution: People should stop whining. When I hear Idoma leaders bleating like lambs, pleading for the authorities to "come and save us before they finish us of", I get angry. The leaders of the affected communities should take steps to defend their communities. This is a socrasanct principle of international law since John Locke and Hugo Grotius. It is an established jurisprudential principle of the Law of Nations that communities who face an existential threat have a right to resort to self-help if the state is unwilling and/or unable to defend them. Churchill famously said you don't negotiate borders; you defend them. Communities that have been persecuted and traumatized must take bold action to defend themselves if there is no one that is able to come to their help. I was nurtured on the nonviolent principles of MLK and Mahatma Gandhi, but I am also a believer in the teachings of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If a madman is driving a truck against the traffic on the highway in total disregard of the laws, it shall be our duty to stop him.--On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:39 PM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <oluwasrividya@gmail.com> wrote:--Oluwatoyin Vincent AdepojuthanksAnything else can only benefit those who are happy with life in the jungle.Form new political parties, debate endlessly about one issue or another, ultimately anything different from close collective examination of the social space called Nigeria, allowing those who want to leave the forced union to do so and those who wish to remain to do so, while establishing the terms for either choice, is a waste of time.It is simply a space where brigands are in control and those who have an understanding with these brigands can do anything they like.All these are expressions of the fact that the social space and geographical entity where all this is taking place is not fit for human habitation, no matter how much people pretend about it.The problem is not the current chasing of political opponents in the name of fighting corruption while ignoring members of the national ruler's team who have spent millions in building a personal website or in hosting a birthday, among other inanities.The problem is not the allocation of millions for books for the office of the Vice-President, or the massive amounts allocated for food in the ruler's residence, along with other silly allocations in mind staggering amounts.The problem is not the strange 2016 budget in which millions were allocated to pay rent on the official residency of the national ruler.A no-mans-land where wild animals roam and among whom some humans insist they want to dwell.What we have is a jungle.We could build all the fine houses we like, engage in as much politiking as we like, we don't have a nation.I increasingly think this object Nigerians call a country is a waste of time.It is akin to pouring water into a leaking basket.
The problem is not with the years long consistent murders, rapes and pogroms by Fulani herdsmen/militia, reaching a climax in the ongoing Agatu massacre in which which whole communities have been rendered full of corpses and razed to the ground as the Fulani move in with their cows to occupy the land while the government presided over by a Fulani man surrounded by his cronies maintains silence or pretends what is happening is a quarrel between neighbours.
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