Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Hypocritical Vilification of TY Danjuma in the North

Well done, Farooq.

Is there any credible evidence this is not true?- 'Buhari had no school certificate, and that he got enlisted in the army on the written recommendation of his high school principal. '

Buhari claimed his school certificate was with the army. The army said he was free to request for the copy they hold. I am not aware he ever presented such a copy coming from the army's records. I am also not aware the army stated categorically that he had no school certificate. Perhaps I missed that.

As for the El-Rufia link, I followed it and saw that it was a response to Shiite leader El Zakzaky's description of the military killing his children in GEJ's time.

I wonder what El-Rufia has had to say now that a huge no of El Zakzaky's followers were murdered by the Buhari army and the man kept illegally in prison, perhaps even dying there? Most likely, justification of the act or silence.Just pointing out that invoking such a reference in a discussion needs to be adequately contextualized so as to  clarify its politics.

I salute your acknowledging your mistakes in public commentary. Your initial response to Buhari's incendiary words, against the backdrop of his followers' massacre of innocents in protests on account of his 2011 election failure, long puzzled me.

It is also good to see Moses Ochonu and yourself, both from the Middle Belt, the epicenter of this undeclared civil war, at last acknowledging that what is occurring is an ethnically motivated systemic campaign of terrorist warfare, not  uncoordinated assaults carried out by merely criminal groups, as  a no of people once argued, with both of you correctly identifying the herdsmen's association,  Miyetti Allah, as a terrorist organization.

I believe Moses and yourself are facing a serious challenge of reality reconfiguration that reflects the troubled place of the Middle Belt in Nigerian politics. You have written movingly of your family's closeness with nomadic Fulani herders. On a different note, the Middle Belt was particularly significant in the 1966 counter coup that focused the control of the military in the North, thereby reshaping Nigeria's subsequent political history, as well as playing a central role in Nigeria's victory in the civil war, these being the contexts that enabled Danjuma's strategic place in Nigerian political and military history. Yet, the most powerful figures in the [Muslim] Northern establishment now see the Middle Belt as expendable.

The leaders of Miyetti Allah are Nigeria's most elite Fulani, with the Sultan of Sokoto and former central bank governor and now Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as the most prominent.

In the various open justifications by Miyetti Allah regional, state and ward leaders of the massacres carried out by their militia   in Agatu and other areas of the Middle Belt and their threats to strike agst the Benue anti-grazing law enacted to protect the state from the Miyetti Allah terrorists' culture of massacre and land theft through ethnic cleansing, declarations which having made, they went scot free, there has never been any response from Miyetti Allah apex leadership, except for the last Benue massacre when Sanusi declared, in defense of the Benue massacre by these terrorists, that a huge no of Fulani were earlier murdered in Taraba, a claim disputed by the Taraba state govt and improbable, since the normally nationally ouspoken Sanusi is not known to have made any public declaration on what would have been such a sensitive and dramatic  issue at the time, if it occurred as he claimed.

Note, that Sanusi focused on Fulani. He did not simply say 'herdsmen' as some are insisting we should say.

The nomadic herdsmen culture is more a Fulani culture than that of any other ethnicity in Nigeria. Without having done a census, I believe  it is safe to conclude that the no of non-Fulani herdsmen, if any, must be so negligible as to be practically insignificant. Who are the public  ideologues,  coordinators and spokespeople for the terrorists- Miyetti Allah, led by elite Fulani, supported by the Hausa-Fulani defense minister, the Hausa-Fulani inspector general of police and the Fulani national ruler.  What is the response of most Fulani to this terrorist campaign- silence, dilution of its gravity, or justification.

Yet some claim we should not speak of a terrorist war organized  by right wing Fulani elite, supported by Hausa-Fulani politicians using national resources to advance the interests of Fulani herdsmen, such as the attempt at passing  an open razing law, followed by a cattle colonies law and co-opting the security agencies into either passivity or active connivance with the terrorists, security agencies which the Fulani national ruler has made sure are almost all led by Hausa-Fulani, one of his earliest acts in  office though delaying for six months in appointing minsters.

Is such denial of an ethnically organized terrorist war  not dangerous escapism?

All Germans, as a commentator  reminded readers on this Fulani herdsmen/terrorist army/Hausa-Fulani politicians/Miyetti Allah alliance, were not Nazis. But Germany was dominated by the Nazis who mobilized Germany in fighting a cause  created by the Nazis. That is the current situation between the Hausa-Fulani, Miyetti Allah, the Fulani national ruler, the Hausa-Fulani led security agencies and Nigeria. That is the fundamental import of Danjuma's crying out.

Danjuma can afford to refuse to fully name the ethnic configuration he is referring to, using the euphemism of 'bandits' on account of his own particularly strategic public role, but can others afford to do so?

If most Germans had fought the Nazis, would they have had such sway over Germany?

If Europe had mobilized decisively agst Hitler before he went to war, and while he was still building his army and his anti-Jewish momentum in the 1930s,  the Holocaust would have been averted.

Naming the ethnic character of this crazy supremacist, land-theft-by-massacre-campaign is not equivalent to demonising innocent Fulani or innocent Hausa-Fulani. Its acknowledging that some fanatics in the Fulani leadership are pursing a supremacist agenda  in the name of Fulani people, using Fulani herdsmen as an advance guard and an  associated militia as a terrorist army, backed by a  nationally coordinated political and military cover, while most Fulani either pretend not to notice, try to dilute the significance of the campaign or even justify it in various ways, responses demonstrated by most Germans in Nazi Germany.

The immediate and most readily achievable goal of these ethnic supremacist fanatics seems to be to resettle nomadic Fulani in the Middle Belt by wiping out communities in that region and possibly subjugating others.

Their complementary goal seems to be to resettle nomadic Fulani across Nigeria, using intimidation and political manipulation.

Their practical motivation might be problems  nomadic Fulani are facing with desertification and Boko Haram as well as a national supremacist vision.

Their ideological motivation seems to be an understanding of themselves as scions of conquerors, as represented by Usman Dan Fodio's successful prosecution of the Fulani jihad that subjugated the Hausa states and penetrated what is now Kwara till they were stopped by the Ibadan military, if I got the progression right.

The facts need to be acknowledged and the international community brought into the picture as blood continues  to flow at the hands of these mad people and Nigeria inches closer to anarchy and civil war.

toyin

On 7 April 2018 at 15:24, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:

Hypocritical Vilification of TY Danjuma in the North

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

General T.Y. Danjuma has become a bête noire in my part of Nigeria, that is, the Muslim north, for saying two things: that people should defend themselves against armed attackers and that the Nigerian military isn't neutral in conflicts.

"The armed forces are not neutral. They collude with the armed bandits. They kill people, kill Nigerians," Danjuma said in a speech at the first convocation of the Taraba State University on March 24. "If you depend on the armed forces to stop the killings you will all die one by one. The ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba state, must stop in all the states of Nigeria. I ask everyone one of you to be alert and defend your territory, your state. You have nowhere else to go."

These are certainly strong words, especially from someone who embodies and wields the kind of enormous social and symbolic capital that Danjuma does. Until now, he was one northerner who had managed to capture the imagination of both the Christian north and the Muslim north. Although some sections of his immediate, primordial vicinity don't see him as "neutral" in the slaughterous communal upheavals that episodically erupt between the Jukun and the Kuteb and between the Jukun and the Tiv, he excites— or used to excite— positive passions among both Middle Belt sub-regionalists and pan-northern Nigerian enthusiasts.

No living northerner even comes close to approximating this sort of mutually exclusive appeal in the region. And it's precisely this fact that got some people in the Muslim north heartbroken. But this heartbreak and the stream of coarse attacks it activated against Danjuma are hypocritical for a number of reasons.

First, it's a universal truth that self-preservation is the first law of nature. It's instinctive. And it's lawful. So Danjuma didn't say anything new. More than that, though, several prominent people have given expression to Danjuma's sentiments before and after him.

For instance, in a March 31, 2018 interview with the Daily Trust, the Emir of Birnin Gwari, Alhaji Zubairu Jibril, echoed Danjuma's exact sentiments. It's worth quoting at length.

"A month ago, in one area called Anguwan Gajere, the bandits attacked a village, and the villagers fought back. In the process they killed more bandits than the people of the town," the emir said. "All of a sudden, we were told that the people who came were Fulani men, and Miyetti Allah was in the vanguard of protecting them. What we have been preaching to our people is that they should not sit down like fools and watch themselves and their families get killed. If you can do anything to protect yourselves, protect yourself and I will repeat it in front of anybody…

"Nobody can stop me from telling my people to protect themselves…. The soldiers that are being brought come and sometimes make matters worse."

As far as I am aware, there was no condemnation of and virulent denunciations against the emir for echoing Danjuma. Instead, on April 2, the presidency gave a tacit stamp of approval to self-defense, which it had condemned as "capable of emboldening criminals" when Danjuma advocated it. During an interview with Channels TV, presidential spokesman Garba Shehu appeared to walk back his earlier wholesale condemnation of self-defense. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with you defending yourself in line with the law," he said. "The security services in the country will probably not be telling Nigerians to do nothing when they come under attack."

If we've all come round to agreeing that self-defense isn't unlawful, why was Danjuma condemned for advocating it?

In 2012, General Muhammadu Buhari said something even more incendiary, and the people who condemned Danjuma for what he said on March 24 defended Buhari vigorously at the time. Buhari said if PDP rigged the 2015 election, "the dog and the baboon will be soaked in blood." I was one of the people who wrote to defend Buhari then.

In my May 27, 2012 grammar column titled "Idioms,Mistranslation, and Abati's Double Standard," I pointed out that "kare jini, biri jini," the original Hausa expression Buhari used, was merely an idiom to connote fierce competition. "[H]ad the non-Hausa speaking spin doctors of the presidency understood 'kare jini, biri jini' as the lexical substitute for 'fierce competition' (the same way, for instance, that English speakers … understand the expression 'break the back of the beast' not as a call to violence against wild animals or humans but as the lexical substitute for 'overcome a difficulty') this pointless controversy wouldn't have emerged," I wrote.

But Dr. Raji Bello, a dispassionate, multi-talented medical doctor and analyst from Adamawa, correctly faulted my argument. His response, which I published in my June 7, 2012 column, went thus:

"My concern is that Buhari's remarks are still a bit problematic even if correctly interpreted. Let's assume that 'kare jini biri jini' just means 'fierce competition.' From his remarks, I can gather two things: 1. Whatever he was predicting will happen AFTER the 2015 election and not before it 2. He is promising a NEW kind of reaction to PDP's rigging different from the way his party has reacted before.

"Now, considering these two points, how would you apply the expression 'fierce competition' to the 2015 post-election period? Was he referring to a fierce legal battle or fierce post-election press conferences? Or is it fierce rallies and demonstrations? It is unlikely that he was referring to a fierce legal battle because his party engaged in that three times before with no positive outcome. It is also unlikely that he was referring to fierce press conferences to reject the rigged result because his party has done that one too previously. The last one, i.e., fierce protest rallies and demonstrations is the likely one because his party has not done that before officially.

 "If my assumption is correct, here is the problem: while peaceful demonstrations and protest rallies are legitimate and legal, what form would CPC post-election protest rallies take in the imagination of ordinary uneducated supporters if their leader says they are going to be 'fierce'? In the leader's mind, a fierce rally may just mean a well-attended, noisy and persistent one; to the uneducated supporter, it could mean a rally where participants bear clubs and machetes. This is where the problem lies."

I couldn't agree more. In other words, Buhari instructed his supporters to take the laws into their own hands if the election was rigged. That's unlawful.

And it's absurdly escapist to pretend that the military is neutral. Minister of defense Mansur Dan Ali has already taken sides in his unwise pronouncements in the aftermath of deadly conflicts between farmers and herders.

Buhari himself was the victim of the military's lack of neutrality during the 2015 elections. Service chiefs conspired with Jonathan to cause the date of the presidential election to be shifted. Army spokesman Brigadier Olaleye Lajide also told the news media that Buhari had no school certificate, and that he got enlisted in the army on the written recommendation of his high school principal.

That's not a neutral military; it's a military that is beholden to the president and what it perceives to be the president's interests, a reason Governor Nasir El-Rufai (in)famously called the Nigerian armed forces "genocidal Jonathanian army" on June 26, 2014. Why should there be an uproar because Danjuma acknowledged the military's lack of neutrality?

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperog

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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