The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Herders’ challenge

    Herders’ challenge

    By Emeka Omeihe

    Events happened in many fronts in the last few weeks to highlight the inherent contradictions in extant practices in cattle rearing business in this country. Not that the issues are entirely new. But the momentum they gathered, seem to suggest that something more innovative, more enduring and futuristic has to be done before altercations and acrimony arising from the cattle rearing business tear this country apart. And ominous signals to that effect have begun to emerge in statements within the public domain.

    Tension was seemingly ignited by the raiding of some forests in Oyo State by the States’ Security Network Agency-Amotekun to rid them of criminal elements terrorizing, kidnapping, killing and raping women hiding under the cover of the bushes. The raid was part of the determination of people of the state to protect themselves against sundry criminals in the face of the inability of the federal government to confront and tame the rising insecurity across the country.

    In the ensuing operation, three alleged criminals were killed. The Fulani community raised dust claiming that the killed men were genuine herders and not criminals as alleged by Amotekun. But both the state government and Amotekun operatives insisted that those killed were criminals and not genuine herders as the Fulani community claimed.

    However, another dimension to the Oyo forests’ raid emerged when 47 well armed Fulani men in buses were arrested by men of Operation Burst– a security outfit made up of soldiers and the police. Initial reports claimed that the armed men came to the state on the invitation of their kinsmen to avenge the killings arising from the raiding of the forests. But the leader of Fulani herders in the state said they were not criminals but members of the ‘Vigilante Group of Nigeria’ fighting banditry, kidnapping and robbery in the area. It remains uncertain under which law such arms-bearing group operates- Oyo State or the federal government. But that is part of the muddle you find in the scheme of things in this country.

    Before the dust of the Oyo altercation could settle, the Ondo State governor, Rotimi Akeredolu issued an order on herders without authorization to quit their forest reserves within seven days. The governor said the government took the step to address the root cause of kidnapping in particular and other nefarious activities detailed and documented in security reports, the press and debriefings from victims of kidnap cases in Ondo State.

    The governor said the security challenges are “traceable to the activities of some bad elements masquerading as herders…that have turned our forests into hideouts for keeping victims of kidnapping, negotiating for ransom and carrying out other criminal activities”.

    But the presidency in a statement by its spokesman, Garba Shuhu said Akeredolu was least expected to “unilaterally oust thousands of herders who have lived all their lives in the state on account of the infiltration of the forests by criminals”. He sought to justify the inappropriateness of such quit orders by citing federal government’s positions when he claimed the IPOB issued an order to northerners to quit the southeast and the very recent one by a Sokoto Muslim group asking the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah to quit.

    But the statement misread the context of Akeredolu’s quit order. He never gave quit notice to all herdsmen living in Ondo State. He only asked those occupying the state’s forest reserves without permission to exit the reserves and get registered with the government. And he is within his rights as the governor to do so. This is especially so with security and media reports as well as accounts of kidnap victims indicting some herdsmen as the masterminds of such criminal activities.

    The indecent haste with which Garba reacted and his obvious misinterpretation of the order led to accusations that the federal government was out to shield herders despite mounting complaints on their complicity in sundry criminalities emanating from the cover of the forests they occupy. Garba’s position fits into the overall attitude of the Buhari regime in shielding herders for the criminalities associated with their activities across the country.

    Then, the emergence of one Sunday Igboho said to be a Yoruba freedom fighter. Apparently piqued by recurring complaints from the people of his area, Igboho had also issued a quit order to the herdsmen to leave. He did not stop at that but assembled his men and stormed the Ibarapa area of the state- the hotbed of the recurring crisis between herders and local farmers.

    Igboho and his team also went to the premises of the leader of the Fulani community after passing through three security check-points allegedly mounted by the Seriki. There, he saw clear evidence that the Seriki was living luxuriously in an environment that had been despoiled by kidnapping and other criminalities. Reports had it that Igboho interrogated the Seriki on the sources of his huge wealth and could not get convincing answers.

    After he left the area, a mob was said to have stormed the house of the Seriki, burnt it down together with 11 very expensive cars parked there. The Seriki has since fled that community. Some days after the incident, one of the houses of Igboho in Ibadan was set on fire in what was alleged to be a reprisal attack. That appeared to have set the stage for serious tension.

    The southwest is not alone in this as there have been some skirmishes in parts of the southeast and the south-south with women groups staging demonstrations against open grazing.  Some northern groups have reacted angrily with some warning of possible reprisals if the trend continued. One of such came from Bashir Tofa, chairman of Kano Elders Forum when he alerted there could be attacks on southerners in the north.

    He said tension was beginning to build and “if revenge attacks against southerners begin in the north, it would be difficult to control”. But the reaction of the Northern Elders Forum NEF was to ask Fulani herders to return to the northern region if their security cannot be guaranteed by their host communities in the southern parts of the country. NEF said the advice became necessary following alleged attacks on Fulani herders, their families and communities in some southern states. There have also been interventions from some governors calling for calm and stressing the dangers in self-help in the festering crises.

    Parallels have also been drawn with other crimes where people from certain sections of the country were allegedly found most complicit without tagging those sections with that crime label to underscore the incongruity in profiling Fulani herdsmen as kidnappers etc. That may as well be.

    But in all the references to the criminal activities that take place through the cover of the forests and bushes, the point raised is that criminal elements hide as herders to perpetrate these crimes. Akeredolu made that point very clearly citing security reports and accounts of victims. He even said that most of these criminals are foreigners.

    If accounts of kidnap victims and security reports show that those in that devious enterprise in the forests are mainly of the Fulani ethnic stock, that makes matters difficult and the attempt to exculpate that ethnic from crimes emanating from the forests the mainly occupy, patently diversionary. The snag is in the inability to draw a line between the genuine herders and the criminal ones.

    Those who complain about the profiling of Fulani herders as criminals must also be concerned with this fact. That is by no means to imply that all herders are criminals. No! But they have to come up with suggestions on how to make that differentiation in the face of worsening criminalities associated with their business in the face of the waning patience of the host communities.

    And for how long shall we engage in blame games when life has been reduced to nothing in many communities by criminal elements hibernating in their forests. That is the puzzle. That is the monster some state governments seek to confront by flushing out suspicious elements from those forests. It is a desperate solution to a desperate and debilitating problem.

  • Powder cake

    Powder cake

    By

     

     

    My  late history professor makes this essayist think of what he might think of insecurity today.

    He always walked in crisp and dapper in his French suits. Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin filled his classroom with his deep bass. His grave face belied the wry thunder that parted his lips. He did not seem to orate, but when he was done, it was as though he had perorated.

    His words were few because they lit the tinder of unrest in the mind.

    In one of those sessions, we were discussing colonialism in West Africa, and somebody referred to what many historians taught us from secondary school as “indirect rule.”

    I never heard him laugh, but his shadow of smile was like a cacophony.

    “What’s indirect rule?” he churned. “I know that is what they have taught you.” Some of us, like Osagiator Ojo and Austin Odion, named him Segu Tukolor Empire, the title of his book on colonialism in French West Africa.

    The term was one of the neocolonial vestiges. The British enacted a phrase to expiate their tyranny, and our historians did not question it. We parroted their sins. They called it indirect rule even though they made the law, they forced our chiefs and intermediaries to execute them, and they benefited by exploiting our resources and making England a coquette of plenty. If we thought the system was bad, then our people shared the blame. That way, England was no more sinning than the locals. It is the Prospero-Caliban dynamic in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. The oppressed fawn over the oppressor. They still teach that today in the pockets of places where history is taught. It took me years to know that England deployed the same subterfuge to rule over the medieval Irish under King James, the lecher who empaneled the translation of the Holy Bible. The prof killed the term, the class embalmed it.

    It was the same Oloruntimehin, who opened our eyes to the cunning and wily depravity of slave abolition with the following sentence: “The abolition of slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” Men like Oloruntimehin decolonised our past with his historiography of fortitude.

    It is because of Oloruntimehin, who passed on recently at 81, that we must regret our tepid study of history today. It is because we do not have the Oloruntimehins as guiding lights that we do not understand that, perhaps, Nigeria is closer to a civil war today than any time since this country turned from a powder cake to rubbles of flesh and blood in the 1960’s.

    History has taught us that when hostilities begin, no one believes it. We overestimate the dove in human nature. The Yoruba wars began over a fight over pepper. That food nutrient was to fodder hate for decades in Yorubaland. The first World War broke after the murder of an archduke who no one knew until grenades met grenades across the world. No one thought the First World War would happen because, more than any time in history, the world had interconnected. The tensions blew over one odd moment. But the beast reigned over peace. It was the divorce that erupted over the taste of egusi soup or the snore at 2 am.

    Hence we must beware of the warlords. The president ought to address the slide into a de facto hate state. We are gradually descending into a normalisation of inter-ethnic hate.  A man rose from the southwest. No man knew him except as a routine hireling of politicians. His tribesmen are victims of another tribesman. No one cautions the rampage of rape in the farms, abduction of his people and the amassing of fortunes of the enemy at the local’s expense. He roars with their collective pain. They hear him. They follow him. He returns hate for hate. Anger sheds blood and houses burn. Love fails.

    We are supposed to have a federal government. But no one is able to chasten Igboho, not only in Ibadan and all of the southwest. The Igboho phenom develops hooves and horns like the character in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.  He is beginning like a little lizard in the sewer. He takes nourishment and grows bigger by the day. Everyone who feels like him feeds his expanding appetite, and do not know or care if this little master metastasizes into a monster. They are donating money, filling his purse. They are enriching his armoury.

    His growing fame emboldens him. He has become an evangelist of hate, trying to work up ethnic miracles from state to state for all who gripe or pine. It is not as if he did not see a need, or that he is not filling a need. It is because the centre is not holding.

    The main failure is not arms from government. We often think the bigger the troops, the heftier the stockpile, the better the security. Knowledge is stronger than arms. David was puny before Goliath. In the two world wars, Germany began with best army. But  we have no knowledge to fight. We are being destroyed for lack of knowledge. Or a resistance to knowledge. Do we not have secret service? Where are they? Did they not know of the Seriki Fulani of Igangan and his atrocities? If they knew, why did they do nothing? It is because they did nothing that they fold their arms as Igboho preens and struts. But Igboho has become an untouchable. His is a flame of fire now. To put it out is like the guards who wanted to quench the fires of the three biblical Jews. They made the fire, but who would put it out?

    The same thing is happening across the country. Lai Mohammed said the bandits hear Sheikh Gumi more than the government. That is a tragedy. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. It is because the security failed that they are looking for extra-government help. Does it not show military impotence? If the Sheikh knows them, it means they are not spirits. So why can’t we root them out?

    Security is about local knowledge. No one can say, in the intelligence forces, that we don’t know who the hoodlums are and where to flush them out? In each forest, there are demons. In each forest, Nigerians farm and hunt. Why is it impossible to trace them? The best technology in the world for this is the drone. It is cheap and works.

    It is not enough for the army to publish pictures of airstrikes and torched hideouts of Boko Haram. We are never asked to corroborate them, or even to assess their impact on strategy and the prognosis of the war on terror. Our military is like the cat prowling and growling about in the savanna.

    We cannot make peace by changing service chiefs but by a strategy and map for victory. It is not generals who win war, but strategies. Hence during the American civil war, Abraham Lincoln hinged his endgame, among others, on horses. He told his army chief about getting horses and when he was told that it would cost him his generals, he said, he could make new generals but he could hardly make new horses.

    We need a word from Aso Rock. We need the president to address the country. Not the sugarcoated flatteries of spokesmen. The president achieved an extraordinary milestone by linking the Apapa seaport to the Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan rail. The east should be waiting with fanfare over the Second Niger Bridge. Ordinarily, it should vibrate over the waves. But what damsel wants a mansion when the houseboy is a rapist.

    We need to tamp down the tensions. As I noted last week, we cannot be a nation when citizens are less at home when at home. Let’s save the powder cake and make a sweet one for everyone. Professor Oloruntimehin must be purring same from his grave.

  • Warlords

    Warlords

    By Sam Omatseye

    We are living in the age of the tribesman. An age of biceps, the dagger and the caveman’s eyes. Pity has no role over a corpse. Nor laughter after a slaughter, except to scorn. The tribe is now the refuge, the high tower of the person. The commonwealth has regressed into an antique. Only the mouse goes there. The strong roar: To your fortress, O tribesman.

    Hence today, the men with bandwidths of fame are not the frontline workers in moon clothes, or the doctors on the danger list of Covid-19. It is the people who issued a quit notice to a Bishop for expressing his views like another cleric in another time, in communist Poland, Father Jerzy Popieluszko.  Or a man undistinguished, except for three slashes on each jaw and his resort to counter-hate, sends a group out of town. Both meet a past master in the ring.  He is a young man in solemn attire and a priestly face but whose phrases boil fear into arms.

    So, we hear of the rise of a shadowy man called Sunday Igboho in the west, and an ethnic entrepreneur in the east called Nnamdi Kanu, and in the north, we see quite a few of them who now issue quit notices. It should surprise no one. In Hausa language, it is lokachi. In German, it is zeitgeist.

    It is a time when we extol and serenade hate of the other, and Jean Paul Sartre captures it in an apocalyptic register: “Hell is other people.”

    The pity is that they all have cheerleaders. It is not just a pity. It is the tragedy. Quit notices did not begin today. Not a few years ago, an activist Shetima Yerima issued a quit notice to the Igbo living in the north. It raked up dust of fury from the elite, and it turned out to be another non-event, like the irritant of a fart. It set a precedent though, and now it has become a scourge of the day.

    The fellow from the southwest, Igboho, hit the news wave like a folk hero. He upstaged his governor, the showy Seyi Makinde of Oyo State. Igboho’s people in Ibarapa wanted a voice. They had lived in fear and trembling. They had farms but they could not reap. They had wives, but they were defiled. They had homes but could not sleep in peace. Bandits from another land had snatched away their sovereign pride. They have wailed, but no official ear listened. They became a people without a help. Like V.S. Naipaul’s novel, In A Free State, they were going to be a people without a place. They needed a hero. When Igboho came, they embraced him. They had found a hero. Marxists would not agree that a hero can transcend a people, but the Igangan people will differ. The Marxist Playwright Bertolt Brecht wept in his play Galileo that “unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.” The people would spit at the German’s taunt. Igboho was their man. He embodied their aspiration. He was a messiah in flesh and blood.

    He is a hater. But they see him as their lover. He is the one who made the world know that their community was a kidnapper’s haven, that the marauder enthroned impunity. They made feast out of their sweats, their leader made fortune out of their absences and servitude. Their red-blooded men played David’s eye on their Bathsheba and were smitten by their Babylonish garments. So they raped and were free enough to rape again. And they could do nothing.

    Bonfire ensued, the settlers fled, and their leader dethroned forever. The Seriki Fulani was accused as the broker over the broken. He fattened on their misfortune.

    Governor Rotimi Akeredolu had attracted the Governors to his state, and they agreed that open grazing was not allowed. They gave great speeches. But to this essayist, it was a cosmetic show. Who was going to enforce the law? The headlines did not say that what Akeredolu issued was legal. It did not say it was not legal. They just came to make peace, to paper over the crack. They did not address the bonfire in Ibadan or the incident in Ogun State when soldiers led herders to defy villages like Iggua and Eselu in Yewa North Local Government Area. Neither did they have the power to do anything other than rhetorical grandstanding.

    The place to address the matter is not Governors Forum. They have shown they can do little to ease tensions. They do not control the police. They have no power over the army. They can only cry. Governor Akeredolu’s order was a cry from his people’s marrow. The Ondo State governor was not the sort of chief executive to undermine Abuja. He was under pressure. He must have felt deeper worry when the presidency countered his order out of illiteracy. He did not order them out of the state as another newspaper headlined. The editor of that newspaper, in a professional moment, ought not to retain his job. It was the sort of headline that could set a nation on fire. Newspaper headlines have done so in the past. Like the Spanish-American War in the era of Yellow Journalism. Publisher William Randolph Hearst had said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”

    The Governor’s Forum forgot a big, wailing elephant in the room: The presidency. Rather than play umpire, Garba Shehu was playing irredentist. He thought he was being a fair interpreter of the governor’s order. He turned out the man was stoking the flames up north. He was doing that on behalf of a president I am sure did not see the release. Or they did not explain to President Muhammadu Buhari the true import of Akeredolu’s words.

    As Barrister Femi Falana (SAN) noted in my television show it was an act of hypocrisy – my words – for anyone to berate Aketi’s order while we are witnessing droves of almajiri being evacuated from state to state in the north. No uproar came from Shehu that someone was violating the children’s rights. The ongoing NIN exercise is a security measure, but no one complained that it was wrong to register. Yet all the Ondo State governor asked for is to register.

    Up north, some fellows have exhibited the same spirit of eviction. Some of them are so-called professor, like one Isa Maishanu  and Abdul Azeez Suleiman. They are riding the wave of xenophobia. Bishop Kukah has said all he has said as a bold man should. But the tribesmen are bristling and drooling. They are baying for blood.

    Nnamdi Kanu must welcome the new firebrands. The Igbo warrior must hug the Igbohos and Suleimans. But they are the warlords of the day. They are not patriots of Nigeria. They are subverts and warriors in closets. They are men of hate. They are opportunists of fear. They are not Nigerian heroes but closet haters. But they are saints to the locals, arbiters of their impulses, channels of their grief. In the words of Poet W.B. Yeats, “He, too, has been changed in his turn/Transformed utterly/ A terrible beauty is born.”

    But they are filling a void. They are replacing a leadership that the centre has left a vacuum. There is an important work to be done. It beckons for a fair and firm control of the proceedings. Ibarapa area is still stark with rage and fear. After a week of silence, fresh attacks were reported. It shows we are on a thin rope between peace and violence, authority and anarchy.

    The Governor’s forum did not give any template of peace and cooperation. I advise them to seek one of their own who is executing a blueprint: the Lalong model. When Governor Simon Lalong became Plateau State’s chief executive, he set up a rubric for all the contending forces. It ensured each group accounted for its own role when peace was breached. It is imperfect, but the difference between his stewardship and what he met tells the story.

    The real danger is making anyone feel less at home when at home. We cannot be seen as a people without roots. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her tome, The Origins of Authoritarianism, “Rootless persons are always violent.”

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  • What’s on in Orlu?

    What’s on in Orlu?

    By Emeka Omeihe

    Nobody seems to know for certain what ruffled the security situation in the Orlu Local Government Area of Imo State that led to the deployment of soldiers and other security agencies.  But within the last three weeks or so, there were two separate incidents of security agencies engaging some groups for conducts considered inimical to peace and orderliness.

    There was the reported burning down of the offices of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra MASSOB led by Ralph Uwazuruike in the Mgbee community by a detachment of soldiers and police.  Uwazuruike had in a statement after the incident, blamed the destruction of his group’s office on mistaken identity. According to him, the security agencies that burnt down his Mgbee office must have mistaken MASSOB for the proscribed IPOB. That operation was seemingly orderly since no life was lost

    But there was another violent clash penultimate Friday in the Okporo community also within the same local government. Media reports said sporadic shootings ensued when security operatives arrived at the community early morning in search of members of the Eastern Security Network ESN. When they could not find them, they started shooting and caused panic in the community

    One person was reportedly killed even as eight buildings including a church were burnt in the ensuing melee. The state police spokesman, Orlando Ikeokwu admitted knowledge of “a military operation going on in the area”. Nobody was forthcoming on the nature of the military operation and what could have led to it. All was therefore left to conjecture.

    But things appeared to have gone out of hands last week when residents of Orlu started fleeing their homes and business premises as guns boomed in a manner reminiscent of war situations. Soldiers and other security agencies were alleged to be confronting suspected members of the ESM that was floated by the IPOB.

    There has been no official figure of the number of casualties but conservative estimates put it at 10 even as the number could be much higher. A viral video showed bodies lying on the streets of Orlu including that of a woman. There were clips of soldiers lying on the ground aiming at and shooting their targets in and around public places, markets and residential homes. The situation was so confused and highly volatile that any passers-by could have been caught in the crossfire. Nobody seemed to know what was happening and what brought about the levying of war on an otherwise peaceful town. Even the media has curiously not been forthcoming as to what the issues really are.

    The gravity of the situation was to dawn on all when Governor Hope Uzodinma in a statement, announced the imposition of dusk to dawn curfew in 10 of the 12 local governments making up the Orlu zone (Imo West Senatorial District). He said the measure was as a result of disturbing reports on the “activities of a group of militants who unleashed a shooting spree in the Orlu area of the state, killing and maiming innocent citizens in the process”.

    Uzodinma said he was appalled by what appeared to paint the picture of a breakdown of law and order in the Orlu area even as he condemned extreme act of hooliganism and brigandage that accompanied it. He directed security agencies to fish out all those behind the carnage and bring them to face the raw teeth of the law.

    But, he left serious gaps as to who are the victims of the attacks and the issues that led to it. This communication gap gave rise to all manner of speculations regarding what the confrontation was all about and those behind the killings. Nobody is privy to what the issues were before the deployment of soldiers. Neither is the government forthcoming on what triggered the seeming breakdown of law and order necessitating the deployment of soldiers and other security agencies to the Orlu town.

    It also remains uncertain why Uzodinma had to place 10 local government areas on curfew for an incident that appeared to have taken place only within the Orlu local government area. But the unmistakable impression that was created by the turn of events is that the purported militants that were involved in the shootings are spread across the other nine local governments under curfew. Unfortunately, there was no evidence of fighting or killings by either the purported militants or any group of arsonists in those local governments. There was also no record of security breach in any of the other nine local governments before the curfew.

    The fact of this raises posers on the propriety of the curfew in the other local government areas. Or how else do we rationalize a curfew that is bound to impose serious hardship on the local people in those areas for an incident they probably had nothing to do with? And as expected in such military operations, there have been reports of extra judicial killing of innocent citizens for offence that are yet to become public knowledge.

    Video clips showing the ransacking of private home by soldiers in search of the so-called militants have been in the public space. Markets were shut down for fear of the unknown especially given that much of the shootings happened around the markets and residential areas. This has taken a serious toll on economic activities especially for a rural community that depends on daily running around to make a living.

    Perhaps, the only deduction that can be made from the fighting especially since the governor accused ‘militants’ for the killings, is that the deployment of the military is to fish out the so-called militants. Who these militants are, their modus operandi and how long they have been in their illegal activity are all left to guess work. Many of us are getting to hear for the first time that militant cells exist in Orlu and its environs.

    We are yet to be shown proof of that even as it is common knowledge that militancy in this country is associated with oil producing areas. Yes, Imo is an oil producing state. But the two local governments that have that natural endowment domiciled under the belly of their soils are not among those under curfew. That is why the issue of militants in and around the local governments under curfew does not seem to add up.

    The inevitable speculation that confronts us is to accept the suggestion that security agencies were deployed to fish out members of the ESN floated by the outlawed IPOB. But how the deployment degenerated to the reported killings are things that still need to be explained. So the most probable thing is that those dubbed militants are members of the IPOB-floated ESN.

    That makes the matter somehow further complicated. And as we have argued in this column, the problem with such operations hinges on profiling. Because there are no trademarks to differentiate members of the IPOB or their purported security network, innocent members of the ethnic group from where the IPOB draws a preponderance of its followers are often victims in such security operations. This has seen to the arrest and brutalization of law-abiding young men and women for the seeming misfortune of belonging to the Igbo ethnic group.

    Perhaps, nothing illustrates this issue more poignantly than the manner the soldiers and other security agencies went about the Orlu operation. They were seen shooting in public places, markets and chasing people about in their business premises. They did not seem to have an idea of where their targets were. And in situations like this, any and everything is possible. That has been the recurring danger that can be avoided through credible intelligence.

    But the state government and the military authorities owe the public a duty to come clear on what the issues really are in the Orlu confrontation.

  • Okorocha’s anti-party dance

    Okorocha’s anti-party dance

    By Femi Macaulay

    Senator Rochas Okorocha, a former governor of Imo State and founding member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), recently told journalists that he and some other politicians in other parties were planning to launch a new political party. It was a further indication that the ruling party may be falling apart.

    Significantly, the information also introduced a new scenario regarding the battle to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari in 2023.  Another major party may well be involved in the succession drama, apart from the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    It is unclear how far Okorocha and his partners have gone concerning their plan, and how soon the new party would be launched.  He said: “The movement for a new Nigeria has begun and we must come together, I mean progressive Nigerians, to make the country work.” It is ironic that Okorocha spoke of starting a new progressive party when his current party is supposed to be progressive.

    “APC was a hurried arrangement formed to take power when the then government was drifting,” he explained, suggesting that the party is either not progressive enough or not progressive at all. “APC would have been better,” he remarked, “until people who were not members of the party, people who came for a congratulatory message, hijacked the party and became lords.” He did not name the alleged hijackers, but it is noteworthy that he blamed them for the ruling party’s performance, which he implied had been unimpressive.

    “We are talking about the character of the politicians,” Okorocha said, adding, “For instance, if President Muhamamadu Buhari had surrounded himself with good people, the story will not be the same today.”  So Okorocha wants a party of good politicians, which is a good idea. However, it is unclear how such politicians would be identified. It is interesting that the senator presents himself as one of the good politicians who can “make the country work.”  Is he?

    About a week before the Abuja announcement, Okorocha had tried to sell the idea of a new party to Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike of PDP. He was in Wike’s state to open the Rumuche/ Rumuakunde/Ohna Awuse Link Road in Emohua local government area.

    Wike was reported saying bringing Okorocha to the event should not be misconstrued as associating with a rival party, explaining that they were friends.  His explanation contradicted the thinking that members of APC and PDP are mutual enemies.

    “In this dispensation, there are many bad people in APC, many bad people in PDP. I think the good people of APC and good people of PDP must come together for the purpose of making Nigeria great. I could imagine where I would join forces with Wike,” Okorocha had said.

    Picturing collaboration with Wike makes Okorocha look anti-APC.  It is noteworthy that his party once suspended him for “anti-party activities” in March 2019.  In a display of crude godfatherism, Okorocha, then governor of Imo State, and Ibikunle Amosun, then governor of Ogun State, had shamelessly supported the governorship candidates of political parties different from theirs in the March 9, 2019 governorship election.

    Okorocha and Amosun had clearly carried godfatherism too far, and their party decided to punish them.  APC’s National Working Committee (NWC) suspended the governors “for anti-party activities.”  The NWC also took “a decision to recommend the expulsion of the suspended individuals to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party.”

    The party said “the NWC had earlier written to the suspended governors on their anti-party activities, and several other steps were taken to ensure they desist from taking actions that are inimical to the interests of our party and candidates. Notably, these individuals have not shown any remorse and actually stepped up their actions.”

    The party accused the suspended governors of “serial anti-party activities,” and “noted how the suspended members have continued to campaign openly for other parties and candidates that are unknown to our great party. They have in fact constituted themselves as opposition to APC candidates in their respective states.”

    Two months later, the Progressive Governors Forum (PGF), made up of APC governors, under the chairmanship of Okorocha, organised an event to honour some of the party’s leaders for their leadership qualities and services to the APC since its formation in 2013. Ironically, Okorocha and Amosun were among those honoured for their services to the APC.

    Okorocha’s announcement that he is involved in moves to form a new party obviously reflects opposition to his current party.  APC has not responded to the news. But the party should be conscious of his record on anti-party activities.

    It is bad news for APC. By publicising his participation in the formation of a new party, Okorocha dissociated himself not only from the ruling party but also its performance. It is bad for APC’s image that a prominent founder member is so opposed to its operation that he is planning to leave the party and also planning to form a rival party.

    It is unclear if he wants to run for president, and thinks he may not get the necessary support in his current party.  Considering the campaign for power shift to the South in 2023, and the argument that the Southeast should benefit from such an arrangement because the Southwest and South-south have enjoyed presidential power, Okorocha may just be acting out of self-interest. He is the senator representing Imo West, and by extension represents the Southeast.  He has unsuccessfully tried to be president thrice, and may still be interested in the position.

    “Though I don’t believe in zoning, for the sake of equity, justice and fairness, all the zones should be allowed to produce the president, so that at the end, we will know the zone that produced the best president when we consider their achievements,” he was reported saying. This sounds like an endorsement of the campaign for a Southeast presidency in 2023.  But there is no guarantee that will happen, just as it is uncertain he would be presidential candidate if a new party is formed.

    It is possible that the plan to form a new party will collapse. Okorocha may have spoken too soon about the plan; and he may also have talked too much.

  • In God’s name

    In God’s name

    By Sam Omatseye

    I came upon a video clip where a certain televangelist Sid Roth, a blond, bald and combative septuagenarian, announced that Trump was going to win because he heard it from the lips of tested prophets around the world. The clip featured some of them who uttered, with supernatural pomposity, that the spirit of God had anointed a second term for the petulant American.

    It was a moment in ecclesiastical folly. A well-known Nigerian evangelical made the honored list. He preened in his suit as he dispensed his lie. All the prophets, with Biden now with the crown, must be retooling their ear of prophecy.  They had turned the word of God of no effect. They privileged their imagination over the word of prophecy. Jeremiah said: “They are prophets of the deceits of their own hearts…he that hath my word let him speak it faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat?” One of the prophets in America exploded into a burst of cackles when Biden’s victory hit the waves. His church followers chorused his raucous uproar like hens invaded by hyenas. Kenneth Copeland apologised afterwards. But his fervour for Trump was not lost in that feverish hour.

    Some have said that Trump was a good man, who just had a bad tongue and an impish attitude. Other than that, he was a child of God. Just as they used the Bible to prop slavery, they excavated passages in the Bible to enthrone the bigot as a messiah. After all, he gave the Christians what they wanted. He hissed at gays and abortionists, and he kissed the prophets and judges. He teargased Black Lives Matter irritants so he could twirl the Bible, if upside down, in front  of a church. It did not matter the man did not know 2nd Corinthians, played golf when others prayed in church and spat out expletives like shithole to address a certain people God had created.

    Few understand that the American evangelicals do not prophesy Christ for all but Christ for whites. If you are black or brown, and profess Christ, you are somehow not an authentic soul. You do not belong to the chosen race. You are beneath the priesthood because you are in the hood. To get this we have to go to history, and how they turned Christianity as a tool to justify the black man as chattels in the slave era.

    When slave trade began, especially in the heydays of sugar plantations in Brazil and Caribbean, the white workers were too fragile. So they craved black biceps. It was cheap. All they needed was invade West Africa. Some white consciences did not support, but profit trumped prophets. They then enlisted the church. They said they wanted to refine us out of our savages. Slavery was a boon. The blacks gave them prosperity. They made wealth, especially for England and Scotland. Others in Europe, like the French and Spanish, also wanted to ladle out of the plate.

    Slave traders became the Bill Gates of that era – rich, puffy, snoring in luxury, erecting palaces. They enacted new lifestyles of taste and opulence, the sort that sociologist Thorstein Veblen would later call “conspicuous consumption.” The African sweat inaugurated and justified capitalism. The church bloomed beside them. No one listened to discordant voices. Slave trade made the world of the west and the west made the black man make them. Hence the novelist Daniel Defoe wrote, “No African slave, no negroes; No negroes, no sugar; No sugar, no islands; No islands, no American continents; no American continents, no trade.”

    They converted Africans, but what the whites saw in the message of heaven was, to them, a return home to Africa, to the liberty of their village hearths. Their churches were not for blacks. They brooked black churches but when the revolts disrupted plantations they regretted sometimes that they had evangelised in vain. The whites wanted mammon, but the blacks invoked their God to trash plantation mammon. Yet, some, like Wilberforce, saw the genuine pivot to Christ to free the slaves. When the U.S. was born, it was born for whites. When Jefferson said all men were created equal, he meant not just white man, but rich, propertied cockerels like him. Hence he spoke equality but ravished female slaves he would not marry.

    Today the most segregated hour is Sunday morning. Whites and blacks worship apart. So, when the evangelicals supported Trump, they had no blacks in their imagination. Christianity is less a religion than culture in their eyes. They see God in the white man, and the white man in God. God anointed their race, so others are lesser souls in God’s eyes. When they say Trump is a child of God, they mean he is the point man of the race. They confirm how Wole Soyinka defined religion in his novel, The Interpreters, as “the justification of existence.”

    The quest for democracy and the vote was resisted, even though the black man earned the franchise after the civil war. The KKK fought them back out of suffrage in the 1880’s. They had to wait till the civil rights era of the 1960’s to get the vote. President Lyndon Johnson, who made this happen ended the Democratic Party’s power over the white vote. Since 1964, they have not won the president with the white vote. This was because of what is called “the southern strategy” introduced by President Richard Nixon. The three words were God, Guns and Gays. These three words were code for white interest. The ideas sacralised the race.

    With increasing immigration and spread of so-called coloured folks, the electoral maps will enlist states like Texas and Florida for democratic majority for another generation. That can change America. It will make the southern strategy obsolete and reset the ideological battles, so it will not be a battle about gays and abortionists but for honesty and progress. The white evangelicals will fall out of favour and clock out of history. Bernie Sanders has a strategy to deploy the democratic majority in Congress to entrench progressive ideas for a generation. If Democrats work the electorate to generate a momentum for good ideas, the Republican Party will have to rejig again, like we saw in the times of Nixon and Reagan. It is a consequential moment for America and the world. Will Biden bite?

    The evangelicals claim to love God, but back a loveless villain. It is so because, in their sub-conscious, blacks or browns are not human enough. So, how can their votes count? If a black man is a fraction of the white man, how can we say their votes are equal? In their souls, the black man is still disenfranchised. Hence they say that Trump won and invaded the Capitol. Their math is racist and their prophets calculated it in the spirit. They won the white vote, so Trump was cheated.

    The same evangelicals who cry against abortion back a president who abandoned babies at the borders. They love the unborn but abandon them after they cry out of the mother’s womb. They do charity for poor folks in Asia but vote for poor colored people to suffer. They hold vigils for a racist president but travel here to Africa to preach love and take prophet’s offering back to enrich their lifestyles. It is evangelical contempt.

    The Biden victory can start a new clock to wake Christians to the true value of love, not racism. As one of them, Saint Augustine wrote, “That a beginning be made, God created man.”

  • Hypocritical justice

    Hypocritical justice

    By Sam Omatseye

     

    Our federal state is undergoing a stress test. A priest asserts the truth and a Muslim group breaks the law and issues an eviction notice. The presidency only launches a tepid rebuke. A governor says herders should register in the forest, the same presidency says he is wrong. Then in Oyo State, a fellow orders quit notice and actually sends northerners out of Ibarapa and we see how one wrong can cascade into a virtual anarchy. Bishop Kukah said the truth and he did not break any law. Ondo State Governor wanted the rule of law. If the Miyeti Allah wanted law, they would ask their fellows to register if they have nothing to hide. While Rev Kukah and Governor Akeredolu only acted according to law, a certain fellow Sunday Igboho stepped into impunity and sent people out, and the IGP orders his arrest.

    Why did he not arrest Kukah’s foes and encourage forest herders to follow the law? It took Igboho, who was wrong and foolish, to wrong the IGP to expose the top cop’s bigotry. Igboho reflected a deeper underbelly: the failure of intelligence and impotence of governance. Gov. Makinde cannot now shout. Where was he when the forest crooks raped and killed citizens on his watch? He should have learned from his Benue counterpart. The IGP tolerated Rev Kukah’s detractors and ignored Gov. Akeredolu’s prescience until Igboho did wrong. It is hypocritical justice.

     

  • Teachers’ new retirement age

    Teachers’ new retirement age

    Emeka OMEIHE

     

    Except for the approval of the National Assembly, teachers of basic and secondary schools in the country will now retire at the age of 65 years as against 60 years that was hitherto the case.

    The cheering news is sequel to last Wednesday’s approval by the Federal Executive Council, FEC of a bill to that effect. Titled “Harmonized Retirement Age for Teachers’ Bill 2021″, it seeks to give legal backing to new measures by the federal government to enhance the teaching profession in the country.

    Some other highlights of the bill include the scaling up of the mandatory years of service of teachers from 35 years to 40 years, introduction of bursary awards to education students with assurance of automatic employment upon graduation, rural posting allowance and measures to attract the best of brains in the teaching profession.

    President Buhari had during the celebration of the World Teachers Day in October last year, announced the approval of a Special Salary Scale for Nigerian teachers as well as other incentives to uplift the quality of teaching and learning in the country. Thus, the approval by the FEC is to give effect to the plethora of incentives which the president promised teachers while they marked their day.

    With the approvals, the government has made good its promise as well as demonstrated serious commitment to improving the fortunes of teachers and the education system at both the basic and secondary levels. Before now, also teachers at the tertiary school levels have had such adjustments in both their retirement age, mandatory years of service as well as the approval of special salary scale.

    It would therefore appear the approvals are to bring the basic and secondary education tiers in line with the attention that had been accorded the tertiary level. The overriding argument has been that teachers mature with age and the education system stands to gain immeasurably if their retirement years are extended so as to tap more from the wealth of knowledge acquired from their work over the years. That was also the major argument that saw to the upping of the retirement age of lecturers at the tertiary levels including professors.  And if this reasoning holds sway for the tertiary education level, there is absolutely no reason the basic and secondary schools should be anything different.

    No doubt, the incentives are both visionary and ambitious. It has been long recognized that no country can develop beyond the level of its education system. And in the education chain, the basic and secondary systems are very vital as whatever quality of products they churn out are passed over to the tertiary level. There is without doubt, great wisdom in raising the standards of education at those levels by tackling some of the disincentives that hitherto hampered effective performance.

    Since there is positive correlation between those who handle teaching at those levels and their products, a strong foundation in education must as a matter of imperative start from those levels. That appears the main motivation of the government in rolling out mouth-watering incentives to encourage teachers and scale up the quality of teaching and learning.

    It is good a thing the bill comes with a new salary structure that will enhance the take home pay of teachers including rural posting allowances, science teachers allowance and peculiar allowance. By paying teachers well and motivating them, the education system will be better for it.

    But that is not all there is in uplifting education standards in the country. Many of the teachers who are to benefit from these incentives are ill-qualified and ill-equipped for the new expectations in the bill. It may not be due to fault of theirs. The neglect of the education system over the years had been such that it was unable to attract the best of brains. So the system had to make do with those available and willing to take up such appointments. Today, things have changed rapidly and we can ill-afford half-baked or sub-standard teachers without imperilling the education system. The new bill is conscious of this and promises through training and re-training to reverse the situation.

    But as ambitious as the bill is with the promise to offer automatic employment to graduating education teachers, it does appear it is one promise that is bound to be fulfilled largely in the breach. The reason is very simple.

    Available teaching spaces within the education system pale into insignificance when compared with the number of graduating teachers from our tertiary institutions both at home and abroad. Even now, there is serious glut in the pool of well qualified teachers searching for non-existing teaching jobs across the country. It then remains to be conjectured how the promise of automatic employment for graduating education majors can be actualized.

    Be that as it may, the bill is a very welcome development. The buck now stops at the table of the National Assembly which is expected to expeditiously give approval to it so that the vision that propelled the Buhari administration to come up with it can begin to find fulfilment soonest. The National Assembly must move quickly to give accelerated hearing to the bill and give approval to aspects of it that will enhance the quality of teaching and learning at both levels of our education system.

    With these measures, it is expected that our education system will be better positioned to adjust to the changing needs of the global economy. But as futurist and ambitious as the provisions of the bill promise, the full realization of these goals may suffer major reverses if they are not matched with certain systemic adjustments in the relationship between the states and the federal government.

    With education on the concurrent list, the burden for the payment of the harmonized salary scale will definitely fall on the states. States will be expected to shoulder the responsibility of paying the new salaries when approval has been given by the National Assembly. But the reality is that many of the states will be hamstrung in paying the new salary scale. The resources to pay are not necessarily available given the overconcentration of the nation’s revenue receipts at the federal level with the latter virtually holding the powers of life and death.

    Even with the present salary structure, the story has been that of mounting arrears in the payment of salaries and allowances of serving teachers in many states, non-payment and embezzlement of pensions accruing to teachers and other categories of workers. The situation will definitely exacerbate when the new salary scale comes into effect. We do not need to go far before finding out why the situation will be so.

    The case of the new minimum wage signed into law by President Buhari with April 18, 2019 as its effective date bears this out most poignantly. As I write, it is more than a year and eight months since the new wage came into effect. But the reality on the ground today is that many states are yet to begin payment while some of those paying are implementing it partially. They cite inability to pay as some of their reasons even as mismanagement of available resources is also contributory.

    The situation was such that the Trade Union Congress, TUC had in September last year, said eight states were yet to commence payment of the new minimum wage and its consequential adjustments. TUC said they had written the affected state governments and engaged them in dialogue without success even as they mulled a protest with other unions to drive home their disenchantment with the situation. It remains to be imagined the fate of those states when confronted with additional burden of teachers’ salary increase arising from the new salary structure.

    Here again, we are confronted with systemic contradictions – contradictions from the defective and convoluted federalism we operate. We cannot continue to pile up additional financial burden for states without enabling them take up such responsibilities. What this contradiction reinforces is the imperative for fiscal federalism, power devolution and structuring. And unless the states are empowered to take up additional financial responsibilities by substantially diluting the overwhelming powers of the centre over our collective resources, the enhanced teachers’ salary structure will suffer the fate of the new minimum wage.

  • Alaafin Adeyemi’s majestic milestone

    Alaafin Adeyemi’s majestic milestone

    By Femi Macaulay

    Alaafin of Oyo Lamidi  Olayiwola Adeyemi III postponed the public celebration of his 50th coronation anniversary because of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying “the sanctity of human life is more important to me than any social engagement.” Hopefully, he would celebrate the majestic milestone with befitting pomp and circumstance after the coronavirus pandemic.

    Fifty years is a long time in human affairs, and Oba Adeyemi should see his long reign as a blessing. In his five decades on the throne, the pre-eminent Yoruba traditional ruler has witnessed the changing complexion of the traditional institution, but he remains not only a veritable symbol of Yoruba culture and tradition but also a powerful and influential king even in a democratic context.

    It is a striking irony that Nigerian politicians usually seek the support of major traditional rulers to win votes in a democracy, and even to sustain democratically elected administrations.  This reflects the influence of the traditional institution as well as the capacity of traditional structures of power despite the prevailing democratic system of government.

    Significantly, in mid-December 2020, a group of politicians, South West Agenda (SWAGA 23), visited Oba Adeyemi to seek his support for their campaign to get Asiwaju Bola Tinubu elected as the country’s next president in 2023.

    Tinubu, a pillar of Nigeria’s ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC), has not publicly stated that he wants to be president in 2023, but the group believes he is the best man for the job. Tinubu’s promoters also visited another prominent traditional ruler, the Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Saliu Adetunji, to sell the idea of a Tinubu presidency to him.

    A former minister of state for works, Dayo Adeyeye, who led the campaigners to the kings, made their mission clear.  “Our mission is political,” he declared. “Politics has started and everyone is scrambling. We, the Yoruba people, see it as our turn because it is the agreement that the presidency would be rotational.”

    Based on this, he added: “We have a joker in the south-west and the joker is Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who was part of the struggle for democracy. There are fundamentals of governance and we want someone who is versed in politics to go into the race. We see that Asiwaju Tinubu has the clout and he is qualified. As experienced politicians, we see that Tinubu is qualified.”

    Alaafin’s response showed his position on some of the country’s hot political issues. If there was an agreement involving leaders of the country’s ruling party on presidential power shifting to the south in 2023, Oba Adeyemi wants such an agreement to be respected and implemented.  “In Yoruba land, covenant is very important,” he said.  “We believe that with the law of retributive justice, if you break a covenant the repercussion is great. You may think the race for 2023 is too early but it is never too early to start.”

    Oba Adeyemi also gave an idea of his position on the restructuring debate, and the kind of president Nigeria needs. “If you want to have a country that is forward moving, there must be a federal system of government… We need to have a president who can listen…We have not been fortunate to have the kind of president that we deserve… I believe in your mission.”

    Aged 82, he became the 43rd Alaafin of Oyo on November 18, 1970, at the age of 32, and received his staff of office on January 14, 1971. He represents the continuity of a majestic narrative. In October 2018, an international conference on “The Alaafin in Yoruba History, Culture, and Political Power Relations” took place in Nigeria.  The organisers said: “In the 17th and 18th centuries, Oyo was the dominant political power in Yorubaland and beyond. It also became a major centre for exchanging goods from the forest areas and the coast.

    “The Alaafin was the master of the realm spreading from the Savannah and as far afield as modern Benin and Togo Republics in the West African sub-region.  Oyo also gave a major identity to Yorubaland. The name Yoruba was initially used for the Oyo speaking people, their empire and dialect until the 19th century when European explorers applied the name widely to other Yoruba sub-groups.”

    The Yoruba are today found in the Southwestern part of Nigeria, the Republics of Benin and Togo, Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and other places in the Caribbean.

    The ancient and powerful kingdom, and later empire, of Oyo under the Alaafin no longer exists, but the Alaafin still exists as the occupant of an ancient and powerful traditional office.  According to Oba Adeyemi, “Traditional rulers should be seen as the perfect embodiment of the culture of the place, as well as the synthesis of the aspirations and goals of the nation. This is not only in social values of veracity, egalitarianism, justice and democracy; but in dress, utterances and comportment…”

    He represents an old order in a new milieu. The place of the Alaafin and the traditional institution in modern-day Nigeria is a matter of debate. Interestingly, last year a member of the House of Representatives representing Bodinga/ Dange/ Shuni/ Tureta, Federal Constituency, Sokoto, Dr Balarabe Kakale, called for a constitutional amendment to give defined roles to traditional rulers in the country.

    Also, last year a group called Peoples Movement for a New Nigeria (PMNN) argued that traditional rulers in the country should have specified constitutional roles. The group’s president and founder, Yahaya Ndu, said: “In all the 36 states of Nigeria, as well as in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, traditional rulers are in place in their various constituencies. But strangely, the role of traditional rulers was totally and inexplicably expunged from the extant 1999 Constitution… I, therefore, with all sense of history and patriotism, urge the National Assembly to lead us back to the right track, to restore the glory, honour, and dignity of our traditional rulers; and to create and ensure specific roles for them in the constitution of Nigeria.”

    Of course, there are those who oppose such proposals, which a prominent columnist, Ropo Sekoni, described as “creeping back to indirect rule.”

    The debate won’t end today. Alaafin Adeyemi’s milestone coronation anniversary is a time to further reflect on the relevance, or irrelevance, of traditional rulers in modern-day Nigeria.

  • Amotekun’s Oyo forest raid

    Amotekun’s Oyo forest raid

    By Emeka Omeihe

    There are issues thrown up by last week’s raid of some forests in Oyo State by the State’s Security Network Agency- Amotekun that should be of interest to the debilitating insecurity across the country.

    The raid to clear the forests of all manner of criminals who hide there to unleash mayhem on the society, was billed to be conducted by Operation Amotekun in conjunction with members of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders’ Association. In the course of the onslaught, three men alleged to be criminals were killed. The police confirmed three killings with some sustaining injuries even as other sources posted even a higher number of casualties.

    But things turned awry when the Fulani community in the state claimed those killed were herdsmen and not bandits and kidnappers as alleged by Amotekun. They further alleged Amotekun did not carry them along while embarking on the raid even when they planned it together. The allegations and other issues raised generated so much heat.  Some saw the altercation as another opportunity to renew their opposition to the setting up of that regional security network by accusing it of extra-judicial killings and other human rights infractions.

    The heat was so much so that the state government and the commander of Operation Amotekun had to come public to clarify that those killed were actually criminals.  In a statement, the Oyo State government said Amotekun launched six counter banditry, counter kidnapping and counter terrorism operations in four local governments with such groups as Amotekun, Vigilantes, Hunters and Miyetti Allah vigilante.

    They claimed that some Fulani were part of the operation with the Seriki fully briefed and that those killed were criminals and not herdsmen as claimed by the Fulani community. We are thus left with claims and counter claims on the matter. It may be necessary for Amotekun to furnish detailed information on those killed and the encounter that led to their killings.

    Such details are made more compelling by allegations from Oyo State government that vested interests bent on giving the security network a bad name will go to any length to ascribe ethnic coloration to the killings to frustrate the operations. That possibility cannot be ruled out even as some gaps in the operations of the outfit are also palpable. The government also claimed that some arrests were made and pieces of useful information extracted from those arrested and handed over to the police. It is vital that proceedings on all those arrested by Amotekun in the course of the raids are made public for us to have a proper reading of the issues traded.

    The way things stand, it is now the words of operation Amotekun against the Fulani who claimed those killed are not criminals. But despite this dispute, one thing that stands out very clearly is that the raided forests have been the epicentre of the recurring banditry, kidnapping and sundry criminalities that had made life a miserable lot for people of that state.

    If this is admitted, it would seem absurd that such a coordinated onslaught could be carried out without tracking down some of the criminals who had taken advantage of the bushes to levy war on the rest of the society. So where were the bandits, kidnappers and sundry criminals when the forests were raided? Or are we being made to believe that all those found in those forests had genuine business there? We raise these questions given the well-known fact that the forests provide devious sanctuary for these criminals to torment innocent ones in the society. In operations of this nature, it is to be expected that Amotekun should have some credible information before embarking on the raid.

    No doubt, the criminals live in those bushes and carry out their nefarious activities using the cover of the bushes. It is also not in question that the raid was planned with the knowledge of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association and the Fulani leadership in the area. The point of disagreement following unfolding altercations is the claim that Myetti Allah did not physically take part in the raid even when it was part of the plan.

    It is not public knowledge if all those arrested inside the forests are members of the Miyetti Allah group. If they are, then it becomes a herculean task differentiating between the genuine herdsmen and those who hide in the bushes as herdsmen to perpetrate all manner of criminalities. That appears the crux of the matter. And that is where Miyetti Allah should be seen more helping out. Unless the forests’ arrests involved other criminals not linked with cattle rearing, the misunderstanding that arose from the raids will continue to be a recurring decimal.

    For, much of the challenges of insecurity in the country hinge on the inability to differentiate between the genuine herdsmen and those that hide under the cover of herding to perpetrate all manner of crimes from the bushes. That has been at the root of the ethnic profiling which Miyetti Allah is not comfortable with. The solution is for the herders to rid themselves of those who have continued to give them a bad name due to the uncanny coincidence of their mode of operation with extant practices in cattle rearing in the country.

    It is this conflict that has fuelled and sustained agitations for modern practices in animal husbandry as it relates to cattle rearing. And as long as we still focus on nomadic cattle rearing practices, so long shall we be incapacitated in flushing out criminals from the forests. Unfortunately, rising insecurity has put the government on edge.

    The general temperament now is that the federal government has performed very poorly in this regard as life has become a verity of the atavism that characterized the state of nature. That is what is meant each time there are references to Nigeria as a failing or failed state. Something more drastic must be done to arrest the slide.

    It is obvious the altercation emanating from the efforts of Amotekun to rid Oyo forests of criminals is at the root of the debilitating insecurity across the country. We need to penetrate the bushes. We need to have access to them, clear the forests and smoke out dangerous elements hiding there to commit all manner of atrocities.

    If the herders cannot protect and insulate the forests from being a launching pad for all manner of criminalities, then they share vicarious responsibility for the activities of criminal elements operating from there.

    But the Oyo raids produced yet, another intricate outcome when 47 Fulani men with guns and other dangerous weapons were arrested by men of Operation Burst- a joint security team of soldiers and police. Initial reports had it that the armed men were invited by their kinsmen for reprisals following the outcome of the raided forests.

    The police confirmed the arrests even as they disclosed that those arrested wore “Vigilante Group of Nigeria”, uniform. The leader of the Fulani herders in Oyo state, Ibrahim Jiji corroborated this account when he called for the release of his men allegedly mistaken for criminals and arrested by security agencies. According to him, those arrested are members of the ‘Vigilante Group of Nigeria’ fighting banditry, kidnapping and robbery in the area. He claimed they were supposed to be part of the team to clear the forests and were on the way before Amotekun proceeded on the mission.

    This disclosure is as interesting as it is intriguing. So we have ‘Vigilante Group of Nigeria’ in this country that bears arms and ammunitions and exclusively composed of Fulani men? Under what law do they operate- state or federal? The boldness with which Jiji talked about the group indicated that they have been operating without let or hindrance. The arrests throw up more questions than answers.

    Since the issue is before the police, the public deserves to know under what law such a vigilante group purporting a national outlook operates. This poser is more compelling given the several unresolved cases of reprisal attacks involving herdsmen and their host communities. We may as well be inching towards resolving that riddle.