By Sam Omatseye

The herdsman is a centenarian. He has ploughed lands flat and steep, from farm to farm, crossed rivers small and large, lapped up running water, and clamped the earth dry and moist. His  cattle with unfeigned fortitude have conquered terrain after terrain like T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi. The cows have munched husks and crunched grass. They have survived the fury of whips and ferocities of weathers. They have exercised what John Pepper Clark in his poem described as their “courage so mute and fierce and wan.”

The centenarian wants another century. In fact, they have been more than centenarians. They want eternity. They don’t want to abandon tradition because the past is comfort. So, when many say we should stop herdsmen, it is not ever going to be an easy fight. The strongholds of the radical Miyetti Allah and their cohorts will pit battle against the modern ones. The past will yield to the future. But the forces of the future must wage the battle. They must fight the good fight of faith and seize the eternity of change from the dead-enders who are in the forests and exercising the orgies of rape, kidnapping and killings. We have to abide by the credo of Rousseau, who admonished the French society to “force them to be free.”

Coercion comes in two ways, violence and systemic change. When the president urged his men to kill anyone with AK-47, it was no strategy. It was bluster. Hence hours later, bandits stormed Kaduna airport community and barreled away with innocents. Humans are still bounty. The military fails when it lacks knowledge. Like ours. We need to develop a strategy, not rage. Or rage powered with strategy. In our forests of a thousand demons, we need brains to defeat the brawns of wild men thrashing about with antediluvian appetites and promising anarchy.

While we are at that, we need to make the herdsman obsolete. Ganduje made a point in public about the need to stop open grazing. But Sokoto has put that in motion quietly for years on the watch of Governor Aminu Tambuwal. The idea began with his predecessor, but it was abandoned when they sought cattle from Argentina and they could not adapt them to our climate and circumstances.

Governor Tambuwal sought South African breeds of the Jersey, Red Swiss, white Holstein, and created clusters or experimental ranches across eight local governments of the state. He started with nine animals, reported Dr. Adamu Abdullahi Abdukadir, director of veterinary services, Sokoto State. Pointing to the bulky beings, he said “That is American jersey.” A few minutes later, he announced the Holstein and the Swiss red.” The calves were grazing about. Their parents were mouth deep in wheat and corn offal. He reminded me not all of the animals were from outside.

“We have indigenous cattle here. We call them Gudali. When you cross them with the foreign species, we get what you see here.” It is a tour of pointing fingers. Each of the clusters across the eight local government areas received nine foreign ones. At the time this writer visited, there were about 300. Some of them have been sold. The government is preparing a 5k hectares for a more elaborate project in Rabah Local Government Area.

The process is hard slog. It is not a cluster for meat alone. Some of the animals are good only for milk and others for meat. It is biological division of labour. They have milk sheds, with milk tanks, milking machines. They also have feeding troughs and water troughs. I was fascinated with what Dr. Abdulkadir called Early Control, which a section that traps the animals between metal bars and poles.

“When you want insemination and embryo transfer, you restrain them,” he said. The result is that they become hybrids. He took me through the process of semen analysis and implanting the seeds in the uterus, but before that the female ones must be fertility ready. They will become ready to mate and follow the males. This process takes at least 10 months before the calves scream out of their mother’s wombs.

He also took me through the process of milking and how to turn this biological reality into a commercial fact. That is the quiet war against the herdsman crisis of the day.

I observed the cows, plump, ruddy, rested and weighty with meat and milk. These were like the animals I saw in my American sojourn. These animals will not travel from border to border, confront the snarl of beasts or the snake’s forked tongue, or collide with the innocent farmer on the outskirts of Aba or the omen of an Amotekun uniform. So, they will be lush with nutrients for the Nigerian buyer, rather than the lean, weary, whipped wraiths that excite the owambe parties.

As Gov. Tambuwal said, the clusters are a part of an overhaul of the Sokoto young for the future. By implication, it is the right pivot for northern education. We have not heard of a bandit foray into a school in the state. But with Zamfara flailing on his border, he first amalgamated boarding schools, especially those verging on the borders of Kebbi and Zamfara states as well as the Niger border. Now, he has disbanded boarding schools, and allowed the students to attend day schools close to their residences. Gov Tambuwal said, on my television show, The Platform, the idea is not to fulfill the Boko Haram vision of abolishing education. The children have to go to school, he noted.

So, that is the journey to the future, and if there should be emergency in dealing with herdsmen situation, such projects as in Sokoto should take accelerated momentum. Tambuwal said he has also visited Indonesia for the same purpose.

Yet, ranching will not stop  bandits overnight. Some of the criminals don’t even have cattle anymore. Hence we have to prioritise security, and mobilise the intelligence agency against them. It is not about weapons, it is a war of knowledge. The greatest victories in history were won less by superior weaponry than superior intelligence. Goliath had more brawn than David. America lost to puny Vietnam for lack of knowledge. It defeated ISIL through intelligence first. Tambuwal signed a Hisbah law, not to pursue Sharia principles, but to gather intelligence. He said “the forests are vast but humans are limited.” So we need men to alert the security forces.

Gov Tambuwal also emphaised that we have to re-examine our ECOWAS protocol and change it to suit our security need. The marauders are taking advantage of the law for rapine and slaughter in our country. It is a very important issue that President Buhari has to take up. We cannot open our borders to crooks.

The centenarian herdsman is no easy hurdle. Removing him is a battle against tradition, and an effete one at that. Traditions have expiry dates, so do herdsmen.  We have to use force and system to fulfill it.

Just a thought

In an interview with Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the Ondo State helmsman made a comment that intrigued me. He said when the Amotekun arrests erring cows in the state, the herdsmen has to beg to retrieve the cattle. He implied the cows would not follow their masters until the Amotekun gave the animals the permission to go. It is a story not arms, I suppose, but of charms. But the governor did not want to go into details. Maybe the Amotekun folks should let us know how they have humbled the herdsmen without guns or bullets. We would do with more battles without arms.

Was it the same situation when we saw last year of lightning striking cows down on mountains? Just a thought.

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By Sam Omatseye

His head swathed in hoary beard, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi might be ensconced today as a recluse, the holy man in his mosque in Kaduna, projecting a less dramatic persona than his father. His voice might have emitted lower decibels in the country if bandits did not go into and come out of the forest. If they did not ransack our bushes and made them home. Suddenly he became a prophet as a sort of rock star, his hood, beard and demeanour making him sometimes cooler than Davido!

If he had patience with his life in uniform, we might know him today as a general, a retired soldier with exploits we shall never know. And he seemed he made his path for moments like this. Especially when he volunteered to walk into the bush. The bandits are sick people in the flesh. As a doctor, he can conjure his scalpels and tablets and heal them. The bandits are sick in spirit. As a sheikh, he can redeem them. He has no reason to fear their hoods and guns and bravado. He left the army a captain. He knows how to make a gunner gone.  A healer. A fighter. A Preacher.

He was trained a medic but he picked a cleric’s life over a clinic. Hence he is a shepherd over souls. That’s all he ever wanted to be. He could preside in a consulting room, a scalpel replacing his sideburns. But his eyes beam in between ruddy and sometimes scraggy white beard. To be sure, he is sheikh rather than chic.

He seemed to be the deliverer just over a week ago when Lai Mohammed enunciated the federal government’s official surrender. The information minister said his government had no influence with the brutes. Only a non-state actor like Gumi could meet them and mitigate the turmoil in the land. Gumi also seemed to forget his ascetic aspect and swiveled into the grandiose role of a rock star peacemaker. It was the vanity of the priest, but some had hope. The bandits did not see him as a traitor. They did not fulminate at his shadow. They did not rustle in the woods, growl or shoot him, or even threaten. They welcomed him as a father of sorts, as a man they could engage.

He did not alight from the forest as a man of light. He came out as an advocate for sinners. He said the bloodthirsty youths needed to be listened to. A professor of bones and blood, Yusuf Usman, who reportedly accompanied him, said on Arise News that the boys were between 13 and 17 years of age. The sheikh and professor say the bandits have grievances. They have legitimate points. We should not sit in our moral high horses in Lagos and Abuja and condemn those who have made the bush their habitation and our homes, schools and roads their hangman’s noose.

They changed the narrative before our eyes. The boys are arboreal heroes, new-minted revolutionaries in the woods. They deserve the pardon we gave the Niger Delta militants. The priest made a sacerdotal heresy. He was asking the sinner to forgive the sinned against. We who are afraid should now show faith. They who made us fear are on God’s side. Who are the sinners now? Those now in trauma that they abducted and released? Mothers who died, fathers who bled to silence in front of children? Mothers looking in impotent horror as goons raped their daughters? Schools vandalised, those whose bank accounts now atrophied of millions? We should pardon them for stealing, killing, raping and stirring anarchy? Whose justice will it be? Is that the Sheikh’s own definition of good and bad? In fact, it means we should be begging them for pardon so they do not barrel into our lives again.

First, we have what is called false equivalences. Savage as they were, the Niger Delta militants did not abduct students, or crash into homes. They did not stop vehicles for kidnap of whole families. They blasted the jugular of our oil wealth: the pipelines. They targeted the governments, and enriched themselves with illegal bunkering. They were daredevils and lawless. But the communities even shielded them because they sometimes played robinhood, stealing from the state and plying them with some of their resources. They had a cause, if they did not fight the good fight. With such comparison, Gumi is making the Niger Delta militants glorious though they were not.

But Sheikh Gumi says the boys have a cause. They hate being ostracised. They hate being left jobless because of their rustled cows. They want free access to the farms of others, to trample and graze with impunity.

He seemed to have scored when some of the bandits dropped their weapons. But we had not heaved a sigh when, Gbam!, over three hundred girls were whisked into the lorries and driven into the shadows of Nigerian forests. When asked what happened, he said the bandits under question were not the ones he met. Chibok, Leah, and the long trek of boys from Buhari’s backyard, the slaughter of innocents, the dread of parents, the closure of schools, all took new dimension with the 317 students snatched among the gold mines of Zamfara.

But Gumi’s narrative had hit a snag. He was not a Nigerian negotiator. He was not making peace for all, but for a section. He distinguished the Christian and Muslim soldier. According to a now viral speech to the gangs, Gumi said only Christian soldiers were after them. “What I want you people to understand is, soldiers that are involved in most of the criminality are not Muslims. You know, soldiers have Muslims and non-Muslims. The non-Muslims are the ones causing confusion just to ignite crisis.” What a peacemaker! This is the peace of the bandits, not peace for Nigeria. He wants them to become converts to the priesthood of division, of a bigoted clergy. Gumi has not walked back that tirade.

This episode only recalls his father’s Islamic orthodoxy, an oedipal legacy. His father did not hide his contempt for Christianity. He was a cleric of division. He espoused the purity of faith, the firestorm of bigotry. He took on the Sufi, who saw Islam as dynamic. His father Abubakar saw it as dynamite. He was a slash-and-burn puritan who set the stage for religious hate in the country. He did not believe Christians should lead, only Muslims. His son only followed his father’s path in spite of the cosmetics of education as doctor. His father once made headlines when he said, “Christianity is nothing.” As editor of The Guardian Express, Nduka Irabor called him “fire mouth.” He was a Grand Qadi, the last to hold that title. That was before Boko haram.

His son is aping the father. As he walked into the forests, he saw himself as alternate government. Not only that, he took on the toga of religious alternative to secular government, a theocratic presence. This is what happens when a government has no strategy, when the police scratch for solutions, the air force lumbers in the clouds, when the army thrashes about in the bushes, when intelligence has given up the ghost, when the centre cannot hold, when a sizeable population believes the president is enabling the bandits with his silence, and when the president would not break that silence with a reassuring speech in which we can measure his voice, facial expression and then say, yes the man means it.

As this essayist has noted, the bandits are not invisible. They are juveniles with hot blood and death in their cargoes. If we cannot strafe them, and dissolve them, we stand the present danger of being eliminated as a nation. It is not civil war I fear. I dread anarchy, the mere anarchy that the Poet Coleridge moaned about, the sort we saw in Rwanda not so long ago.

By Sam Omatseye

I remember the great Aminu Kano and I look at Muhammadu Buhari, and I say, let us not forget the talakawa. They are the northern jewel, but they are more like gold dust in the mud. Their shine will never match their value because, somehow, no one allows them to be.

Today, the growl of the bandit is the voice of the talakawa, a distorted echo of their elegancies. It is more their frustration, its loss of leverage, its fall out of grace. Most of them are helpless while a few among them are wrecking the house.

The poor in the north has never purred with joy. Each time salvation peers, it veers into trouble. Whether in the mining storms of Zamfara, in Kaduna where home is no longer refuge as they become refugees, the anarchy in Niger, ghost farms in Sokoto, or the villages on their knees in Borno, the talakawa are a people adrift for a long time. What we are seeing today is a culmination of failure, not of the poor man but of the northern elite, especially that segment that has always seen them as at once battle axe and breastplate.

The past half century has been the story of two men the talakawa gave a worshipful bow. They were their fount and redemption. With the duo, they peered at a promised land but their feet ran cold. When Aminu Kano rose, he came with faith and butter. He was a great Islamic icon as well as Marx’s marksman. His vision was an alchemy of  God and the world, materialism with mysticism.

He was conscious of the north as feudal forte. He wanted to free the poor. He formed the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU). The choice of the word ‘elements’ has often fascinated me. He craved to conjure Marx out of the people: their skill, their sense of justice, their rage, and above all, a quest for equality. He wanted to overthrow the feudal system. He was a sort of Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who sought to dismantle feudalism. But Kano opted for suasion over revolution, or the ballot over blood, a revolution of the willing and not Nasser’s staccato of gunfire. He was Nasser’s dove.

Gradually, the poor knew Kano, and followed him. He became, next to Awo, the most genuine political leader of his generation. But more than Awo, he was the great mobiliser. He fought against an ideological mountain. He was a loner for equality. He exposed elite hypocrisy while praying at the same altar. He enshrined a war against privilege and entitlement, against the confidences of class divide sanctioned by faith. He asked his people to see the Quran and also inhale the disruptive scents of Das Kapita, and make wedlock of butter and the book. He was squaring up to over a century of sanctimonious contempt.

They loved him enough to give him a berth in the Second Republic. The two big prizes of the North, Kano and Kaduna States, bowed to the noble impulses of new party, The People’s Redemption Party. He had Governors Abubakar Rimi and Balarabe Musa. It turned out that the two stewards of his vision, Rimi and Balarabe, fell short and cut him short. Rimi embraced ideological flamboyance. Musa lacked tact. Both of them lost their way with their leader. Kano’s vision was lost to the bargain, and the man who had fired a great crowd and brought men like Soyinka, Bala Usman and Achebe to the fold was left a spectator of his own impotence.

That was the first big disillusion of the masses. They looked for another, and had to wait for one tall, gangling man of reticent ways and winsome face. He first materialised with a beret in his first misadventure, which included a coup that ended Kano’s life adventure. And because of that misadventure, he nurtured the talakawa. If Kano captured the talakawa with ideas and charisma, Buhari did with soul, a mystical air and spartan exterior. He was the messiah they were waiting for. They were with him always, in temptation and narrow triumphs. They were with him until, after four tries, he won the crown.

Before him they had been astray. Now they wanted to climb out of poverty. They wanted what Aminu Kano promised. They wanted to have good education, good jobs, good homes. They wanted an end to the al majiri system. They wanted the girl child out of the persecutions of genital tyranny and husband’s patriarchal furies. They wanted to traipse into the bright light of the classrooms. Kano was a short, sprightly fellow. His (Buhari’s) head sometimes dodges a lintel. He was Kano’s reincarnate.

Rather, in his backyard, students are carried away in long treks, their villages come down in ruins from gunfire and machetes. The poor are getting poorer and the rich are purring. No safety at home. No school to nurture the mind. because the bandit has spoken. They are still betting on a suspect future while the rich are belching from pots above their waists. His north is the prostrate part of the country, where the talakawa lives but mostly looks to God and not to the man they saw as messiah.

The people always stray when they don’t find their leaders. But once they see a person who flatters their secret hopes, they exalt and follow. When Moses left to the mountain, the Israelites strayed to other gods. They crave what Weber called the charismatic fellow. If anyone dresses up in that toga, they make him an altar, whether he is genuine or not. Napoleon emerged on the ruins of French rabble. Moses stuttered his away to his people’s redemption. They are either good or bad. Hence Brecht was wary of heroes. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” he wrote. He knew heroes often are made of clay feet. “No man’s virtue is complete, the great Galileo loved to eat.” Even in the southwest, Igboho is whipping up nativist ire and reifying himself as the new Yoruba leader. He does not know that a blast can wipe everyone. His Yoruba kin are all over the country. As my father Moses once said, don’t throw a stone in the market because you cannot guarantee the safety of your mother.

The streets and villages are alive with death and dying. The talakawa is broken and today is not the day if they are looking for that man who can flatter them into salvation. What we should fear is not the civil war that Abdulsalami Abubakar invoked, but anarchy. Anarchy is worse than civil war. It foments many centres and trajectories of trouble. The centre cannot hold. We are seeing a void when we need the president’s voice.

The rise of violence from the herdsmen is a consequence of a void. The excuse that the marauders came from outside the country does not explain why they can still thrive within the Fulani in the country and blend. If there is no weakness within, the outsider has no entryway. As French philosopher Montesquieu said, a republic cannot be broken from outside. The infiltration of  infection is here. Before he took his bow, President Washington warned that American democracy would only fail if the system developed its own internal fault lines.

The talakawa are now left to their own devices. That is what we are seeing all over the place. How can we stop a killer who makes a big ransom of millions of Naira in a day’s work when as almajairi he will not make same in a lifetime. When the government relies on a religious minister rather than its own minister to make peace with bandits, it means it has lost the argument. They say we should forgive the bandit who killed and raped but leave the crayfish thief in Kirikiri. It means we have it all upside down. It is the same lack of care that produced the bandit that is forcing us to broker peace on its own term. The innocent are brought to the justice of the murderer.

It is a failure of political stewardship. The talakawa had two heroes. They both failed them. Having no God and no man to follow, they are shooting their way to their own promised land.

By Sam Omatseye

The story is told of an act of benevolence that went awry. It was Lateef Jakande’s example of looking a gift horse in the mouth. He was no longer governor, and somebody thought the man, with his mammoth legacy, ought not to ride in a crawling contraption.

The man sent him the choicest of cars: a Mercedes. But the former governor was not impressed with the German invention. He did not want to appear ungrateful, and so he called his benefactor to say thank you. As an aside, he enquired in what dealership the car lay quiet before money sent it out to his home. He just wanted to know.

The unsuspecting benefactor told him the truth. Jakande quickly returned the car to the shop and asked for the refund. The dealership obliged. After all, it was Jakande, and he probably bargained a profit for the sellers.

That was Lateef Jakande, known as LKJ, the first civilian governor of Lagos State. That anecdote was an emblem of the austere politician. But it showed that he was simple but cunning. Yet he would rather be cunning than showy or false.

The man had always been an enigma for me. Anytime I saw him in public I tried to unmask the sage, to rip open his soul. He was now hoary. Age had subdued his flesh. He walked into a venue without fanfare and often outlasted the event with wordless presence. He looked slow but not geriatric.

I always wondered why he did not remain at home. But he insisted on being around, often he arrived early. You thought a certain brio bubbled inside, his ears alert, his eyes without a glitter of surprise, curiosity or even joy. His pose, with a little stoop, gave him an unflappable appearance of unbroken age. A fighter against time, a warrior in silence, his soul a battlefield. He engaged without oratory. Often, the only reference to him was an emcee’s acknowledgement. Even then, he did not seem to crave it or even want it. He sat still. But everyone knew this was the man of Lagos, the man who was the first to inspire the word “action” as a prefix to governor.

In spite of all I saw of the man in public places, I always wondered why I thought that the man finished his life story many decades ago, when he completed his tenure as the chief helmsman of Lagos. His song grew dark after that. He seemed to have spent the rest of his life trying to recreate that grandeur, that moment in the people’s graces when some called him Baba kekere, when he became a synonym for political stewardship, when many saw him as heir to the greatest Nigerian ever, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

So, I thought LKJ did not die a few days ago. I thought the man had gone decades ago, and that was his days as ripe apple. The days of his visionary audacity, when he challenged governance and proved at once to be the litmus test and success, to be the visionary and implementer, the talker and doer. He embodied the dream fulfillment. It was the time when he collapsed day and morning schools, when he turned his mockers into a hallelujah chorus. When they said he built poultry sheds as schools and the same products are more brilliant than their children.

When the people choked under landlords or under the sun, he built them sprawling shelter. When they thirsted for knowledge, he gave schools. For more knowledge, he erected a university. He opened roads and sub-divisions. He started the inlets into what is Lekki today. He saw tomorrow but he wanted to be there. Not like the children of Israel who did not see the Promised Land. Or like Martin Luther King, who knew he would not get there with his fellow blacks. Or the dream prose of Obama’s memoirs called The Promised Land, but it must have, at times, tortured him to write it. Jakande planted and reaped.

He was called Baba kekere because, somehow he wanted to be Baba. Buhari and his military men saw to it that he didn’t become baba. His Metroline project has become a metaphor of his abbreviated dream. Just as Buhari stopped the train, he ensured Jakande’s personal train could not puff ahead. Jakande never stepped up, again. He wanted to be baba when he ran for president. But even his party and kinsmen could not mobilise for his local triumph. He could work for Lagos, but he could not craft a successful political platform in Lagos. When his group settled for a compromise, they gave us a governor, the late Otedola, who was an antithesis of Jakande. Yar’adua became a grand puppet master of southwest politics, especially Lagos, with his formidable party. His acolytes like Dapo Sarunmi, Yomi Edu, et al, made mincemeat of the great LKJ.

If he rose to be Lagos governor on  Awo’s back, he could not be baba after baba soared into the sunset. So, 1983, when the coup swept him out of office, was the beginning of the offence against him, and his work horse of a life.

But what aches this essayist was an episode in the aftermath of LKJ’s turn as minister under the Abacha junta. It was an Afenifere event, and the door was locked against him. He, the man who was the governor of his generation, and arguably one of the best ever to bear that title in the country. He, who made the sick well and blind see. He who was an ambassador for the race. He the model in integrity, a contempt for extravagance. He who did not steal. He was let out of the inner sanctum. He was not welcome in a meeting of his own folks.

It was because he did not leave the junta when everyone said he should. The story had it that he had warned Abiola and the June 12 caucus that no one should trust the soldiers when Abacha teased them with offices and promised to leave the office in six months. Jakande joined as works minister. He worked well, but his performance did not invest him with the spectral dignity of his time as governor. But that was beside the point. When the time came, he remained with the junta when the rest of his homeland burned with rage against the goggled brute. Others in the cocoon that Yorubas labeled as traitors were Ebenezer Babatope and Olu Onagoruwa. The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi rang loud his objection to his bosom friend Onagoruwa’s cohabitation with the despot.

That chapter casts a shadow on our Jakande, and history will have to script whether all he did in material terms could overshadow his act of looking the other way when his people groaned under oppression. They would ask why he did not become Moses and leave the palace when his people’s back bent under the tyrant’s whip.

Hence I said, our Jakande died long ago. The person I saw in events was probably the Jakande, the disembodied hero trying to resurrect that old fire, that man of action we loved and applauded. But time and flesh have overtaken him.

Gbaja’s poser

Recently when Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila addressed the media after a session with the president, he made it clear that the nation was in a security crisis, and we all should work together as a people to solve it. At another time, he noted that the Nigerian leadership had failed in that area. That was a moment in elite humility. He did not utter his words in syrupy lines.

He belongs to the legislature. He has cried as well as his House colleagues over the herder problem. Such an act of eating the humble pie should send a lesson to the president. It is the president who should have said what the speaker said. After that, he would act. The house does not have guns, cannot command the army or order the police, or even appoint them. It is the executive’s assignment.

The point is, we have not seen even that level of contrition up there in the presidency. As Wordsworth said: “Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop  than when we soar.”  Shasha Market in Ibadan is the latest of such a breakdown of law and order.

But we are not even seeing any hint of humility upstairs. When a man cannot unite his family, or even his party, how can he unite our country?