By Olakunle Abimbola
The cold-blooded slaying of the Wasimi 6 — a three-generation family, from doomed grandfather to slain grandchildren, and in a mosque at that! — signals the descent of contemporary Yoruba society, into bestiality hardly ever imagined.
But no one ever seems to notice, since folks’ attention appears riveted elsewhere, by accident or by design.
The “herds media”, so-called because it conjures “Fulani herdsmen” to spice every crime in the land, suddenly got funereally quiet about this one.
Why, a particularly comic online platform even blamed “Fulani herdsmen” for its own video reportage, which nevertheless showed the wailing Fulani victims!
Other more serious media duly reported the tragedy. But they were quiet on the sensational whodunnit — that fashionable garnish of ethnic profiling, for avid bigoted minds.
Why that quiet? Because, as the “hated” Fulani, they were the “right” victims, though the outrage was in Wasimi, near Ikire, Osun, in the heart of Yorubaland?
Or because the killers were the “wrong” ones the media would rather not crow about, as they do of “Fulani herdsmen”?
By the way, who were these Fulani of Wasimi? Folks, from Kwara, that spoke Oyo Yoruba like natives; wept and mourned in Yoruba, not Fulfude, to express their innermost anguish; and betrayed sheer impotence: despite the catastrophe that befell them, they have nowhere else to go, except Wasimi, their home and world, all-life long!
That, by the way, is the reality of millions of Nigerians — Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Edo, Ijaw, Tiv, Idoma, etc — scattered outside their native areas, all over Nigeria.
This natural value-added (of settling and thriving far away from home), inside a sprawling country, is what the hate-belching elite, with their loud, crass and reckless enforcers, now take for granted!
It’s such a moment of mass madness!
Still, when trouble bursts (to parody Peter Tosh, the late Jamaican reggae great), where would these folks run to, even if they are no “oppressors”, as in Tosh’s memorable riff?
So long for tragedy-baiting folks; and a media self-condemned for surrendering to the herd (that word again!), instead of calmly leading the people, through a period of crisis! Pray what did Zik say of his West African Pilot, with its famous torch? Show the light and the people will find the way? Not any more!
Besides, the Yoruba credo of justice-before-kith-or-kin, for which that ethnic group is much admired, appears in grave danger here.
The Yoruba society, over the ages, would have bristled at the Wasimi killings; root for the killers to be nabbed, even if it’s their next-of-kin; and see, in that execrable crime, a great peril to their age-long liberality and famed accommodation of others.
Again, not any more! That omoluabi ethos now risks being gutted by a fiery Yoruba nativism, that pushes Fulani hatred as core imperative; and sickening mind-poisoning of the unwary, as bounded — nay, desperate — ethnic duty.
In such sweet, scalding hate, the Yoruba risk being diminished — except, of course, good sense prevails.
Still, does this push for sanity, in a moment of crisis, excuse violent crimes against law-abiding travellers, farmers and their spouses, who have fallen victims of kidnap, murder and rape, by elements suspected to be criminal herdsmen?
Never! Everyone, nationwide, has a right to safety and security. Everyone has a right to travel in peace, on secure roads, free of killer-kidnappers and bandits.
So, while it is provocative that defenceless Yoruba are fatal victims of herdsmen criminality, a more clinical analysis shows this crime is no monopoly of any region.
Indeed, if the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” harbour a sole Yoruba — or even combined anti-South murderous agenda — why are these same criminals (also profiled as “Fulani”), as bandits, kidnap, kill, loot and rape all over the North West (particularly Zamfara and Kaduna), and parts of the North Central (Niger)?
Are these “Fulani herdsmen” then sworn to wiping out everyone, including their own kind? And for what purpose?
The cold fact is that the worsening security situation marks the grand collapse of Nigeria’s central policing system. That offers an epochal opportunity to re-federalize the Police and create state police — now that almost every geo-political zone has bought into the idea, hitherto a near-exclusive South West push.
That means more police personnel, more materiel to fight crime, more employment for youths in police recruits, more local motivation to fight crime.
On this score, the Federal Government must take the lead. It’s its historic duty to do so. Even the arch-centralists in-there can see the hard facts for re-federalization. You can even convert the furious ethnic militia nationwide, to vibrant, crime-busting intelligence corps, to boost the new policing order.
But instead of grabbing this rare opportunity to settle a core federal question, folks have regressed into sweet atavism and dangerous nativism, as if the best of the future lay buried in the past.
Among the Yoruba, suffused with ethnic crowing, it’s a near-consensus that Amotekun, the pan-regional security support corps, scaled down to state outfits by panicky central authorities, can adequately secure the South West. It can, even where the central Police flail and fail, because it has intimate knowledge of its locality.
But so could equivalent zonal outfits, in South East, South-South, North Central, North East and North West. So, if you can gain the ocean, in improved security nationwide, tapping into respective local resources, why settle for a mere pond, squeezing yourself into an ethnic cocoon?
Besides, who hankers after Amotekun (with its throwback to local hunters with Dane guns) or Oodua People’s Congress, OPC (which cadres are accused of alleged arson and murder, while helping to haul in an alleged kidnapper), when you could gun for a full-fledged state police, that could harness the native intelligence of both bodies?
But that flawed thinking is hardly shocking, when you ethnicize crime, make a general malaise appear an exclusive problem, and profile an entire ethnic group for the crime of a few; mistaking common criminals as a hideous army of a looming culture war. Still, the security challenge is a national problem. It cries for a national solution.
By the way, in 2021, a Nigerian woman, Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, a female activist in the United Kingdom, took out the Queen, on British TV, over the Harry-Meghan affair. But that very year, her own Yoruba homeland touts unbridled nativism, for a nationwide security meltdown they would rather not think through!
Awo, great thinker, thought Nigeria and pushed federalism. His noise-some children think Nigeria, but scamper into Oodua Republic. Interesting times!
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