Category: Femi Orebe

The solution to our insecurity, sad to say, is not in drones or CCTV cameras alone.

“Mobilising the people of a country as complex and heterogenous as ours, under the banner of a common purpose was never going to be an easy task, but this is not to say it is impossible. Multi-religious and multi-ethnic countries all over the world, grapple daily with tensions that come with diversity” VP Yemi Osinbajo

I yield this column today to Ologun Afemikhe, a graduate of the University of Lagos, with a strong bias for international relations, and security matters. He is an advocate for the right security architecture in Nigeria.

Happy reading

Concerning security, Nigeria is in dire straits but we are not totally helpless. A lot could still be done if we are serious. and treat insecurity in our country like a cancer that has metastasized. In analysing our current security situation it is necessary  to diligently study  the details  as they occur. This I have tried to do.  After a very painstaking interrogation  of the modus-operandi of the criminal elements and the consequential mayhem visited upon communities across the country, I have come to the unmistakable conclusion that rather than being Fulani herdsmen, what we have tormenting Nigeria today are Boko Haram elements,  and  the earlier we all come to this realisation, the better. One critical question to ask those who finger Fulani herdsmen as the culprit, especially in the Southwest is: where are their cattle, and the farms destroyed?

They cannot be found – well, maybe a few farms as decoy –  because they are simply  not available. A closer scrutiny would reveal that this is the strategy Boko Haram prefers so that they would not be treated to the pounding they are getting in the theatre of engagement in the Northeast, A brief insight into this will reveal the following:  Before the 2015 elections, Boko Haram had reached as far as Okene in Kogi State where the boundaries between it  and Edo State is almost non-existent. This is where we  have the Ososo hills , Ogori Magogo, and other arteries  which are contiguous  to the Southwest, especially around  Ibillo in Akoko-Edo, dovetailing into  Akoko in Ondo State –  areas  which are so porous, and without any iota of localised policing. From here, through Igarra and Auchi, all the way to the South south, and the south east, there are not very many major highways, so that any one travelling through is largely anonymous, the illegal road blocks littering the few roads in this entire territory are manned by police men who aid the criminals with Intelligence gathering, get paid, and easily look the other way.

After the bombing of both the Louis Edet and U.N offices, in Abuja, subsequent changes in military strategy in the north east, especially by the multinational joint task force, it has become almost impossible for these criminals to move further north. Rather, they moved into the middle belt, gradually gravitating towards other parts of the country. Does it seem reasonable that over 100 people would be killed because of cows and farms? Common sense would not let this fly because it is impossible. Take another look at the killings in Plateau State and it remains a damning amazement that people still think we are dealing with herders.

Believe it or not, Boko Haram is in town, and has become operational all over Nigeria. Only this can explain the efficiency of their operations and the ease with which they elude our security agents that even where a hundred of them operated, policemen would hardly succeed in arresting any. Another surprise is Miyetti Allah, ever eager to protect the herdsmen,is  never able to appreciate that Boko Haram elements have since taken over. A major challenge is that any state which successfully dealt with these elements would only have succeeded in pushing them to the next state as borders are not so distinct. Is it even reasonable to think that Boko Haram, which rustles cattle, and robs banks in search of funds, would not want to take part in the stupendously lucrative kidnapping?  What exactly have our security forces been thinking?

The solution to our insecurity, sad to say, is not in drones or CCTV cameras alone. First and foremost, all the security personnel on most of the rural arteries connected to major highways, especially in the flash point areas should, as a matter of great urgency, be weeded out as they are, in most cases, working in cahoots with the so called Fulani herders, but who, really, are Boko Haram elements, operating as professional kidnappers and armed robbers but using the ‘Fulanisation’ of the crises, and the lackadaisical attitude of the police, as cover. 80 percent of the criminals operating between Ore and Benin are indigenous to that area. Or where are their cattle?

I have been pursued twice on that road during which they operated like commercial transporters in a Toyota picnic bus; and the people in that vehicle who pulled a gun at me were not Fulani “herders”.

What the situation calls for is a solid recruitment process of graduates who are smart,  and motivated enough,  to  form a 1000 per state special forces, drawn  mostly from within the localities. The Oba, or his representative, should head a local committee on intelligence gathering, while a central intelligence hub, at the state headquarters, should be manned by a clergy or retired judge, or somebody with the right credentials. Here, prompt response and communication is key.  A help desk – more like a public complaints commission – well funded and functional in many locations in each state, where people can promptly report credible observations to the authorities must be available. Special numbers, toll free, should be put on stickers and pasted in homes, as well as public places. Road transport unions should be asked to document travellers on a manifest which must be inspected weekly.  If I have my way, new  arrivals  in a state, anywhere in the country, who would be staying for  more than a week must document his/ her  itinerary, and purpose of visiting, even though people will shout fundamental human rights.  These are no ordinary times in our country and for us to get it right, some inconveniences will have to be suffered since to make an omelette, eggs must be broken. I suspect that people who go to the president to suggest that drones,  and CCTV, alone,  should be used to fix this massive insecurity, hardly travel by road, and so may not understand the urgency of now  as well as what it will take to fight the menace.

Of course, technology is important and will help tremendously but given our level of development, and the extremely poor electricity situation, they cannot form the core of this battle against insecurity.

Amongst the 1000 graduates recruited for each state, there must be, especially in the forest areas to the South, forest rangers as well as those who will monitor the highways under the protection of well armed members of the Nigerian security forces.

The official security agencies must be ready, 24/7, to act on credible intelligence.

In all these, human intelligence will be key and the security agencies must be equipped with tracking equipment which would be pressed into service once any report of a kidnap is made. In such places, prompt investigations must be made to ascertain whether there is collusion or in serious cases, the entire police contingent should be moved out and new ones brought in to replace them. A cardinal aim of the new security architecture must be to allow communities take ownership of their security since they feel the pain the most and know the areas like their palm.

The federal government, since it continues to observe a stranglehold on almost everything in the country, must know that it has to sufficiently fund this and for that reason, special grants must be given to the states.

We are in dire straits and everything must be done to restore sanity into our affairs.

Not only are people no longer able to travel freely, farmers have been run out of their farms meaning that hunger may not be farfetched. Above all, government must realise, and own up to the fact that we are fighting, not against only herders, some of who hug AK47 and still  perpetrate truly heinous crimes, killing and destroying farms, but principally against Boko Haram elements  most of  who are foreigners and,  therefore, think nothing of slitting throats or disembowelling pregnant women. They are evil and our response must be equally ferocious. We must exterminate them like ants from our Fatherland.

Government is already far behind in ensuring  the security of our lives  and properties but it may not be all lost yet, as a stitch in time may still save nine.

I reproduce below, History.com Editors’ capture of the Rwandan Genocide which began on April 6, 1994 after a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over the capital city of Kigali, leaving no survivors. The casus belli for a war can be just about anything. It could be as little as some fake news or a hate speech.  For World War I, it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Sarajevo who, with his wife, was cut down by 19-year-old Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. That was the small speck which resulted in one of the bloodiest wars in human history resulting in 35 million + Military deaths at 9.7 million. Wounded were 21.2 million and prisoners of war and missing soldiers were put at 7.5 million.

I am not giving these details for fun.  Please recall that the world expected Nigeria to have unravelled in 2015,  and  although  then  U.S  Ambassador  to Nigeria,  Mr. Terence McCulley,  categorically denied it, not a few people believed that the United States was promoting a breakup, in what  is commonly  known as the ’tissue scarcity scare’ scenario, where the suggestion and promotion of a concept leads to its manifestation. Indeed, a U. S group actually predicted a Nigeria break up in the months leading to the 2015 general election.

I write all this now to enjoin our leaders, as well as ordinary Nigerians, to put the interest of this country at heart and do NOTHING that can lead Nigeria into war. There is no small war and if there is anybody out there who does not yet know it, a war in Nigeria is guaranteed to be bloody; and will cause years of internal convulsion and unimaginable suffering.  I cannot see the entire West African sub region containing Nigerian refugees.

Will our leaders,  therefore, beginning with President Muhammadu Buhari,  please dedicate the next  many  months  to putting in place those structures, agencies, processes  and constitutional reforms, that will cohere our country of many nations, and begin anew, a re-building  process  that will turn Nigeria away from its present march to  Golgotha.

Happily, President Buhari will not have to re-invent the wheel.  If like me, he is not enamoured with the opportunistic 2014 Nigeria Confab which his party, the APC, disavowed of ab initio, we already have in place, the party’s EL RUFAI COMMITTEE recommendations on power devolution. He should immediately call a national summit, not the usual jamboree – consisting of persons knowledgeable in these matters, to critically interrogate, and deepen, the recommendations of that committee. With minimum fuss, the National Assembly should rapidly pass appropriate laws to enable a national referendum to which the recommendations would be remitted for ratification.

This needn’t take a full year if we are serious.

At the same time, government could set up a committee of experts. Along the lines suggested  by  Professor Olatunji Dare in his column in The Nation of Tuesday, July 16, 2019 in respect of the raging farmers/ herders crisis.  He wrote: “A committee of accomplished agronomists, agricultural economists, veterinary scientists, rural sociologists, working with representatives of pastoralists, farmers, and farm labour should be set up to define the situation and prepare within six months wide-ranging” guidelines aimed at, once and for all,  solving the hydra- headed problem in a more pragmatic way.

For Nigeria to remain one, united country, time is of the essence.

The Rwandan genocide

During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and two million refugees (mainly Hutus) had fled Rwanda, exacerbating what had already become a full-blown humanitarian crisis.

Rwandan ethnic tensions

By the early 1990s, Rwanda, a small country with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, had one of the highest population densities in Africa. About 85 percent of its population was Hutu; the rest were Tutsi, along with a small number of Twa, a Pygmy group who were the original inhabitants of Rwanda. Part of German East Africa from 1894 to 1918, Rwanda came under the League of Nations mandate of Belgium after World War I, along with neighbouring Burundi. Rwanda’s colonial period, during which the ruling Belgians favoured the minority Tutsis over the Hutus, exacerbated the tendency of the few to oppress the many, creating a legacy of tension that exploded into violence even before Rwanda gained its independence. A Hutu revolution in 1959 forced as many as 300,000 Tutsis to flee the country, making them an even smaller minority. By early 1961, victorious Hutus had forced Rwanda’s Tutsi monarch into exile and declared the country a republic. After a United Nations referendum that same year, Belgium officially granted independence to Rwanda in July 1962.

Ethnically motivated violence continued in the years following independence. In 1973, a military group installed Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, in power. The sole leader of Rwandan government for the next two decades, Habyarimana founded a new political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD). He was elected president under a new constitution ratified in 1978 and reelected in 1983 and 1988, when he was the sole candidate. In 1990, forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), consisting mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. A ceasefire in these hostilities led to negotiations between the government and the RPF in 1992. In August 1993, Habyarimana signed an agreement at Arusha, Tanzania, calling for the creation of a transition government that would include the RPF. This power-sharing agreement angered Hutu extremists, who would soon take swift and horrible action to prevent it.

Rwandan genocide begins

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over the capital city of Kigali, leaving no survivors. Within an hour of the plane crash, the Presidential Guard, together with members of the Rwandan armed forces (FAR) and Hutu militia groups, set up roadblocks and barricades and began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus with impunity.

Here in Nigeria, God forbid, a single killing can be the match stick.

Among the first victims of the genocide were the moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her 10 Belgian bodyguards, killed on April 7. This violence created a political vacuum, into which an interim government of extremist Hutu Power leaders from the military high command stepped on April 9. The mass killings in Kigali quickly spread from that city to the rest of Rwanda, with some 800,000 people slaughtered over the next three months. During this period, local officials and government-sponsored radio stations called on ordinary Rwandan civilians to murder their neighbours. Meanwhile, the RPF resumed fighting, and civil war raged alongside the genocide. By early July, RPF forces had gained control over most of the country, including Kigali. In response, more than 2 million people, nearly all Hutus, fled Rwanda, crowding into refugee camps in the Congo (then called Zaire) and other neighbouring countries. After its victory, the RPF established a coalition government similar to that agreed upon at Arusha, with Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, as president and Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, as vice president and defence minister.

Habyarimana’s NRMD party, which had played a key role in organising the genocide, was outlawed, and a new constitution adopted in 2003 eliminated reference to ethnicity. The new constitution was followed by Kagame’s election to a 10-year term as Rwanda’s president and the country’s first-ever legislative elections. As in the case of atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia around the same time, the international community largely remained on the sidelines during the Rwandan genocide. A United Nations Security Council vote in April 1994 led to the withdrawal of most of a U.N. peacekeeping operation (UNAMIR), created the previous fall to aid with governmental transition under the Arusha accord. As reports of the genocide spread, the Security Council voted in mid-May to supply a more robust force, including more than 5,000 troops. By the time that force arrived in full, however, the genocide had been over for months.

That exactly is what happens in the end: we will have to carry our own can as international do-gooders turn their backs.

TO FUNKE ETERNAL REST

For me, the passing of Mrs Funke Olakunrin is a personal grief. I lived in Akure for many years and Papa took me as nothing short of an adopted son. In my inner mind, I can still hear Funke calling ‘Uncle Femi, Uncle Femi.’ The good Lord will rest her soul in perpetuity and comfort Papa and all members of the Fasoranti and Olakunrin families.

• Adieu Funke.

By far, too many things are happening to keep restructuring on the front burner.

Fiscal federalism in Nigeria is a system that is very shallow compared to the actuality of the system. When juxtaposed with practices in places like Canada, Australia, USA etc, it can rightly be said that what obtains here is a far cry from fiscal federalism.  In the countries mentioned above, constituent parts of the country have exclusive control over the natural resources in their respective territories, but pay taxes to their central (federal) governments.

“However, Nigeria has adopted a system many now refer to as fiscal centralism in which revenue allocation and fiscal policies are left to the central government and not the fiscal federalism (decentralised, and devolved revenue allocation and fiscal policies) it so claims to practice. This practice has, in fact, fallen short of expectation due to political manoeuvring arising out of the 1976 constitution which vested all mineral rights exclusively under the control of the federal government” – Ikpatt in The WritePass Journal.

Chief Segun Osoba, the inimitable journalist, and suave politician, was 80 this past week, and the launch of his book – Battle lines: Adventures in Journalism and Politics, not unexpectedly, brought restructuring into a vibrant limelight once again. Talking of the suave politician reminds me of a story Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu once told a friend, and I during a visit to his house on Bourdillon Road, Ikoyi.

Although the current 13% derivation principle had been agreed through political negotiation at the 1995 constitutional conference as a compromise between the dominant proponents of 8% and the opposing 18%, President Obasanjo was not ready to pay anything beyond the extant 1%. This was when the highly foresighted Tinubu reached out to the ‘Baffday Boy’, pleading with him to help convince the northern governors to persuade Obasanjo to reconsider his position.  This was because he knew that Obasanjo’s reluctance arose out of his fear of offending the north whose representatives at the conference had predominated the dominant 8%  lobby.

Osoba went to work, deploying the massive contacts he had made, nationwide, over the years as a first rate journalist. The result: Obasanjo gave in, albeit, willy nilly.

And why did Tinubu go to all that extent?

According to him, he knew that paying 13% derivation to oil bearing states would mean they’d have in their bank accounts huge funds they did not foresee coming and so could not immediately deploy to funding projects. These huge funds would therefore lie fallow in banks awaiting good projects to fund; and knowing the developmental horizon he intended to take Lagos State, he saw this as the opportune moment to approach the banks with projects they couldn’t turn down.

That, in short, was how, states, applying to banks for bonds to fund strategic projects, was born in Nigeria.

I digress.

To say that Osoba brought restructuring back to limelight is, however, not to suggest that it ever went away from our discourse menu.  By far, too many things are happening to keep restructuring on the front burner. Given our multifarious challenges, restructuring looks like the panacea, even if it would not be the silver bullet, to all our problems. Among these  challenges is the totally needless Ruga Settlement project, which recently witnessed  very atavistic,  inter-ethnic  diatribes  across board, but which would have best be  configured as the north’s  answer to having thousands of her herdsmen having to   traverse  the entire length and breadth of  Nigeria, alongside millions of cattle, in all manner of weather condition. Such a scheme, in the north, would have benefited hugely from the country’s two major rivers that run through the region, as well as the several multibillion dams and irrigation projects the federal government has long built there.

This could have, within a few years from now, turned the north, and Nigeria into a meat exporting zone, and country, respectively comparable to Brazil. which exported 1,850,000 metric tons of beef in 2016, making it the world’s largest beef exporter, or  India, which  exported 1,850,000 metric tons in  the same year.

It is simply baffling that, rather than waiting on government, many of the several billionaires in the north have not turned their attention to the huge opportunities in this. For instance, there would be massive employment of the north’s teeming unemployed youth most of who now make do with kidnapping, banditry and drug addiction etc, in addition to the huge financial returns, they would harvest, mostly in foreign currency).

Another totally unnecessary challenge, which the president must do everything to avoid this time around, is his northcentric appointments. This earned him so much opprobrium in his first term that he just should not repeat it this time around. It is a veritable source of embarrassment for his supporters in the south and a withering tool in the hands of his traducers, down south. He needs not give them such luxury.

There are others.

Meanwhile, the man who issued a 30 day fatwa to southerners is still walking free, just as our security services, mostly under the leadership of northerners, remain unperturbed that John Yakubu Yusuf, who fleeced the country of billions, from the Police Pension Fund, and was sentenced to six years imprisonment on March 22, 2018, is still walking free. The least any serious government should do is make complicit officers join Yusuf in jail, no matter who they are.

What then is Osoba’s position on restructuring?

Left to me, his position is as logical, as it is commonsensical. In a chat with state house reporters, he canvassed the APC position, stressing that the party has devolution of power, and true federalism, in its manifesto for which reason it set up the El-Rufai committee whose recommendations the party endorsed.  Continuing, and just like President Buhari once told the nation, he said the power to restructure the country lies with the National Assembly, emphasising that the president cannot decree it.

The National Assembly, he says, would have to surrender part of its powers via an Act, to set the process in motion.  What he did not tell Nigerians, however, is that  it is now well over a year ago that the report  of  the El Rufai committee was remitted to a ‘technical committee’, where it has been gathering dust, most probably on reading the president’s body language. So let me say to Chief Osoba that the party has far more to do to convince Nigerians of its seriousness about restructuring.

That said, let me hasten to say that I have no truck, whatever, with Papa E.K Clark over his preference for that highly remunerative Afenifere baby, aka, the Jonathan Confab of 2014. So keen was Afenifere about packing the Confab’s membership that they ran to Abuja to substitute the name of Chief Deji Fasuan, the Ekiti State governor’s nominated leader of delegation, with that of somebody they believed would be more amenable, thus selfishly arrogating to themselves, greater knowledge of the state than its elected governor. They would further tighten their grips on the conference’s proceedings by scheming to have Senator Okunrounmu flag off the entire process as well as have the respected  Professor Bolaji Akinyemi  positioned within its commanding heights. That was the group which pretended to represent Southwest interests even though it is patently the political minority in the region as has been attested to by several elections in the region.

Nor is that all.

It is fascinating that even Chief Clark is well aware that many of their Confab recommendations could have been acted upon via executive action. If we may ask, when did Chief know this? Did he alert his son, the president, or Afenifere, his collaborators, to this fact? What then did the president do to progress the Confab’s recommendations? Will Chief Clark like to know why nothing happened after the jamboree? The Jonathan Confab was conceived at all, because Afenifere chieftains were eager to, once again, flow into political reckoning in a region where we used to swear by their names while the trade off was either to get an additional two years for the incumbent president, or at the very worst, ensure he wins massively in the Southwest, if it came to an election. Nothing proves President Jonathan’s subsequent total disinterestedness in the Confab than his failure to move, executively, on the recommendations, or for him, or even the PDP, to make restructuring a campaign issue in the 2015 election.

That became the Afenifere cross to carry with hardly any success Confab.

So are the recommendations which the convener himself disdained, and which the APC, of course,  disavowed off, ab initio, what Chief Clark now wants President Buhari to embrace with both hands? Knowing now – thanks to Chief Osoba – the totally inescapable role the constitution ascribed to no one, besides the National Assembly, I sincerely believe that the time has come for every group interested in the absolutely inescapable restructuring of Nigeria, to go back to the drawing board and rejig their recommended path towards achieving a restructured Nigeria.

What is most fascinating in all these, however, is Dr Fayemi’s incredible equanimity.

“Theoretically, the Ruga policy does not pass the policy trajectory litmus test. While the insecurity associated with farmers-herders conflict has been discussed extensively and various panaceas sought, arriving at the Ruga scheme as the singular and one-size fits-all solution, overlooks and indeed, ignores the essential stages of good public policy making, namely; agenda setting, policy formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation. It seems clearly that the federal government somersaulted forward – in a hop-step-and jump fashion – from agenda setting to implementation. Such policy rigmarole does not conjure confidence. It undermines trust; it raises more questions than it proffers solutions.” – Oseloka H Obaze in: Folly and Falsities of Ruga Settlements.

What have I not heard? How many times have I not been stopped, right in my track in the course of a discussion, or elsewhere, and be told: se bi enyin ni Baba Fayemi who is about to, if he had not yet, sold us to the North. E je ba soro, meaning you had better talk to him. Not once, and God is my witness, have I raised these asinine accusations with governor Fayemi.

Why?

Simple. I know this object of their cynicism like my palm and I know that, of a million Yorubas, he needs lectures on the history of the Yoruba the least. He will, indeed, lecture you. So, when some exponents of the Yoruba PhD (Pull Him Down) syndrome come hallucinating in my ears about Afonja, I just laugh.

Years ago, and for a very long stretch of time, some senior editors at The Nation, interestingly, dubbed me the Ekiti Editor. For that very long time, two things were happening. Fayemi was in court for upwards of three years battling the powers that be for the mandate Ekitis, as would later be affirmed by the Appeal Court, had given him as far back as 2007 but was vitiated by a former president using two of his Ekiti subalterns who worked with a few others we know very well, to change a peoples’ history- but only for a short while since it was God-ordained.

For all of that period and with the privilege of having a column that actually preceded The Nation itself on that same stable – having been writing for The Comet since two years earlier – I considered it a divine responsibility, not only to tell the untainted story of happenings in, and around the many tribunals, but indeed, and this was far more important, to encourage the millions of Ekitis, home and abroad, who daily agonised as to whether  Fayemi had a ghost of a chance against the Abuja “constituted authority” and his party.

One such group were the Port Harcourt-based Ekitis who would never fail to call me after morning service on Sundays to discuss the day’s article and it was always expressions of  agony any Sunday my article was not about their beloved  Ekiti. I believed then that there was a particular place in Port Harcourt they always met to socialise on Sundays.

I committed myself so much to that assignment that it led to a very interesting incident which birthed a long lasting friendship. One Sunday, I got a very scathing reaction to my article and I replied in like manner. We exchanged similar messages and in the last one the gentle man accused me in words to this effect: Look, I am a member of the Fayemi legal team and you just keep spoiling our work since you write in your column almost everything the team was going to do at the tribunal during the week. I could barely control my laughter as I wrote back asking if he’d ever seen me at any of their meetings?

He didn’t reply but phoned Dr Fayemi to report the old man who was playing the spoiler to their efforts at the tribunal. It was then he was advised to call that old man who, in Dr Fayemi’s words, as Mide would later tell me: “has committed his life to this struggle”.

Dr ‘Mide Ayeni, the highly cerebral Ogun State’s immediate past Attorney -General and Commissioner for Justice, has since become my brother. Indeed, my very good aburo.

The other reason I couldn’t stop writing about Ekiti then was the stupendous work Dr Fayemi was doing. Apart from literally turning the state to a construction site, he left not a single one of Ekiti’s 131 towns and villages with anything less than two or three projects on leaving office. In almost all the palaces to which I was on his campaign team during the 2018 election, nearly all the Kabiyesi’s reminded him he built the palace where he was being hosted.

So when in the aftermath of the thoroughly flawed 2014 election stories went viral about how he was far from the people, I could only pray for forgiveness for those peddling such lies. Here was a man who, apart from being the first ever governor to  institute monthly stipends to the state’s elders, as state policy, established several agencies like the Youth-in Agriculture programme, to specifically cater to the needs of the youths of the state. Nor can I ever forget that his budgets were bottom up; first  going round all the local government areas which  then indicated their preferred projects for inclusion in the next budget. How more people friendly can any leader get?

As happened shortly after he became minister, political opponents and their sympathisers are at it again trying to call Governor Fayemi what he certainly is not, arrogating to him ambitions which nobody, besides God, can make possible in the life of any human being. These are the ones who never stop telling lies about how Ruga is Fayemi’s, or the Nigerian Governors’ Forum’s baby,  even if his becoming Chairman of that body happened many weeks after the Federal Executive Council discussed Ruga  at its meeting.

Before that, there was the issue of a government official in Ekiti who made an unauthorised announcement and was, therefore, justifiably punished. But how did detractors not frame that incident in the public space?

What is most fascinating in all these, however, is Dr Fayemi’s incredible equanimity. Try whatever you will, you cannot easily unnerve him or make him fret. I have severally seen him demonstrate this peace of mind to a point I have come to know what underpins it and explains his reaction to several spurious allegations like him, and the wife, being rumoured as having a University in Ghana ahead the 2014 election. It is simply the fact of his innocence. In other words, his conscience; a word which a foremost Nigerian politician once described as “an open wound which only truth can heal”.

The leitmotif for this article today is governor Fayemi’s address at Orin – Ekiti while visiting the bereaved family of Mr Ilori, the hunter who was allegedly killed by Fulani herdsmen this past week.  Despite the fact that not a few would have wagered that Ekiti must be one of the earliest states where Ruga would spring up eternal, the governor shamed them and emphatically said the following:

“Nobody is coming to take our land in Ekiti. The governor of Ekiti State has power over the land of Ekiti and it is who the governor gives land that can use land of Ekiti. “If there are negative comments being peddled around that some people are coming to take over Ekiti land, it’s mere hearsay. It cannot happen except I am no longer the governor of Ekiti State and, indeed, there is no governor in Ekiti who will ever cede Ekiti land to outsiders when it is not even enough for our use.

“Adequate security of our people is what concerns me most, both here in Ekiti and in Nigeria and our people should just ignore the lies some individuals are spreading around. There is nobody that will be governor in Ekiti that will allow outsiders to take over our communities from the people here or say that people coming from elsewhere should come and take over Ekiti land. Those saying this are only playing politics. This is no politics, security is an issue that concerns all of us. Some individuals have been peddling baseless rumours to cause disaffection because they are no longer in power and it is their wish that Ekiti should be consumed by anarchy.

“I want to assure you that our government has not stopped working on security. No single individual or group can provide security; our hunters know their terrains much more than the security agents and it will serve the people well if they work together.”

Can anything be more emphatic, or need I say anything more except to add that he who the Lord has made, nobody can un make?

Forests have names in Yoruba land: they must go and speak to the forests in the language they understand to vomit those vermins.

I doubt if these rampaging killer Fulanis tender any herds again. They have turned professional kidnappers and since you fight fire with fire I think OPC, Agbekoya  and our hunters who hunt in the densest of forests  should be  dispatched, as first responders, to clean up our forests.

Were Yoruba leaders, especially, traditional and political, reticent in their response to the new wave of insecurity in the region? Yes, without a doubt. Indeed, the word ‘reticent’, is very respectful in describing their response to what has become not only scary, but excessively rampant, in a region that used to be the most peaceful part of Nigeria.

That,  of course,  was  not the case with a  particular section of  the region’s political leadership which has graduated into  making  political capital out of every issue in their attempt to  exit  the political Siberia some younger elements sentenced them a little over a decade ago. For them, every kidnap, every armed robbery incident, was an opportunity to lampoon President Buhari even if they won’t offer a word as to how to end the menace. For them, it couldn’t have been more divine that Buhari is both a Fulani and cattle owner. There was always no remembering that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is also Fulani and a patron of Miyetti Allah.

My observation above should not be seen as a slur on state governors who have been trying to moderate herdsmen’s/farmers’ clashes in their respective states. I am therefore saying, in essence, that the new wave of insecurity that engulfed Yoruba land in the recent past is not the same as the herders’/ farmers crisis.

In other words, it is different from what Olugbenga, Ebenezer Olatunji described in: Peace By Pieces: The Politics Of Herdsmen’s Attacks as “incessant attacks by itinerant  herdsmen on farmers and host communities in different parts  of Nigeria  which have claimed many lives, destroyed farm crops and sacked entire communities”. He went further to observe that these attacks are dangerous to peaceful cohabitation and can threaten national peace, unity and progress”. Writing further, he posited that only a few of our politicians who are genuinely concerned about lasting peace, security and national unity have been pushing for legitimate means of bringing the attacks under control”.

In my view, however, given our present circumstances in Nigeria, the federal government’s

idea of  Ruga Settlements for herdsmen  is not one of such legitimate means.  It should, therefore, be considered dead on arrival as it ignores lessons from Nigerian history, especially, that of the Hausa –Fulani.   Fortunately, it has already been rejected by Benue and Southeast governors, as well as Taraba and Ondo.  It beats imagination that the federal government could think that a group whose activities have become so dangerous to society should be so preferentially treated.  It must, instead, go and seriously seek ways out of a problem that has everything in it to completely destroy the country.

What then is the status of the current insecurity in Yoruba land?

Put simply, it is Fulani bandits, rogues and kidnappers, doubling down on Yoruba land and this conclusion is the fartherest  thing from ethnic profiling, as some of my Yoruba compatriots are always eager to brand it. I do not dispute the fact that our own local criminals kidnap and steal, but certainly not in cahoots with these non-Nigerian Fulanis who show no mercy, whatever, and were, initially imported by top Fulani herd owners to protect  their cattle against rustling. They have since discovered that they could make millions, if not billions, and have since abandoned their employments.  We must thank the Emir of Anka, Zamfara State, Alhaji Attahiru Ahmad, who, like the new Zamfara governor, has called on Fulani leaders to call their people to order following the spate of crimes involving Fulani herdsmen all over the country.

Concerning them, below is the relevant portion of the startling research findings by Professor Charles Adisa, published by the Chinua Achebe Centre for Leadership and Development (CACLAD): “Our fact finding team visited “Ama Hausa and Garki” camps in both Enugu and Abia States. They also interviewed neighbours from the local communities living within and around the Hausa communities in both states. Both the northerners and the local community were very open and volunteered valuable information to our team. There seems to be a willingness and eagerness for the violence to end.

Below, are our findings.

1. The Fulani herdsmen terrorists are Fulanis but mostly NON-NIGERIANS. About ten percent of them are Nigerians and they live within the Hausa Fulani communities in Ama-Hausa and Garki’s in the South East and South-south regions.
2. They do not own cattle: This is one revelation that may come as a surprise to many. Fulani herdsmen killers’ major job description is just to kill. Most of them are employed by the cattle owners as “security men” whose job is strictly to protect the cattle. They do not however follow the cattle around, but move in separate vehicles along a defined route within the states where cattle are being reared.
3. The Ama-Hausas and Garkis harbour 80% of the Fulani herdsmen killers: This is a very important revelation. The Garkis consist mostly Hausas and other minorities from the north, but within them, the Fulani herdsmen killers reside. The northerners were able to show us these Fulani herdsmen “security personnel”, and they were dressed differently from the normal Northern Nigerians within these settlements. They were young, less religious; most of them use drugs, and consume alcohol. They are mostly migrants from Chad, Niger, and other Fulani enclaves outside the Nigerian state”.

Yoruba leaders, in particular, must realise that what these killers are beginning to do now is infiltrating our forests to establish those ‘Ama- Hausas and Garkis’. They should leave President Buhari and his government, the council of state inclusive, to face up to finding solution to the Fulani herdsmen/farmers problem which is common to all parts of Nigeria but squarely face how to rid  our forests  of these stranger elements who though ,  were imported as  cattle guards, are now professional kidnappers.

In none of the reported cases of kidnapping, especially where victims were lucky enough to tell their story, were we told of these kidnappers tending any cattle. They differ from the Bororos who are mostly found in Oyo and other Yoruba states, but with their flock. With these genuine herdsmen, our leaders must continue to engage to arrive at peaceful means of co – habitation but not so with these other outright criminals whose primary motive is to make kidnap to money. They are in no way different from those the Nigerian armed forces are battling in Zamfara and other northern states, killing in droves. These killers, for that exactly is what they are, move in dozens, armed with the most sophisticated weapons, seizing highways, farms and communities, raping , killing, and yet  receiving millions in ransom. But confronted with a well prepared colony of Yoruba hunters, I am sure they will be the ones to surrender.

If Yorubas successfully fought the Abacha war – thanks to our thinking leaders and their subalterns who brought NADECO about, I haven’t the slightest doubt that we will beat these stragglers.  With their guns, hands down. But to successfully do this, our political leaders must give our traditional rulers and the communities, a wide canvass, and sufficiently mobilise them to press into this ‘war’, every Yoruba group, whatever name called, that has the ability to help save our land from this epidemic. O ni oruko ti igbo nje nile Yoruba. Forests have names in Yoruba land: they must go and speak to the forests in the language they understand to vomit those vermins.

Yes technology, as in drones, should help but we should not forget that their minders would instruct them to use leaves to camouflage. After all, there are allegations out there of choppers being sited, dropping things in the Southeast forest area of Akwueke community, Enugwu, Enugu South. I am completely taken aback by our leaders’ reliance on a state police that is yet to be legalised, not to talk of being in place, as the panacea to a rampaging pestilence we should have exorcised from Yoruba land like yesterday.

We must know that we are in a war of survival to free us from some uncircumcised criminals intent on hemming us in, turning our women to widows and making orphans of our children. These people, who show no mercy, deserve none. Whoever reads this must remember, however, that I made a distinction between genuine Fulani herders who continue to stretch southwards because of climate change, and the need to locate lush vegetation for their herds, and those non Nigerians who are here to kill and make money. But even the Nigerian Fulani herdsman must respect the local farmers who daily toil on the farms they routinely vandalise.

The fate that has befallen Nigeria since that date  is far worse than what befell June 12

“Even before the Annunciation of June 12 as Democracy Day, the “same nihilist voices” were already primed to degrade it and ridicule what should be a potent signpost for future generations. Such voices even made desperate efforts to annul its history, no different from the original act of annulling an event “universally acknowledged as the fairest, the most orderly and peaceful election ever conducted in Nigerian history”. – Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka in Democracy Day Primer (1).”

Your Excellencies,

I crave your indulgence to stand on existing protocols.

The  acute  shortness of the notice to me to participate in this historic event  was happily mitigated  by the fact that, and I am not exaggerating,  given the suffocating conditions under which he was   undeservedly  incarcerated , not even Chief MKO Abiola can tell the JUNE 12 STORY, like some of the distinguished personalities on the high table here today. By the time you add the likes of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Professor Wole Soyinka, Femi Falana SAN, and Olisa Agbakoba SAN, and a few others to those of the personalities amongst who I am privileged to sit up here, you would have put together, a cast of the most qualified Nigerians to tell the June 12 story. Advance for recognition, Sir, the incomparable Lt. General Alani Akinrinade, who shone like a thousand roses throughout that entire story. So important , so crucial and respected,  but eternally feared by  General Abacha and his goons,  was the retired  general,  that only military ingenuity  saved him from being  fire-bombed to smithereens. Unfortunately, his imposing house, somewhere in Ikeja, Lagos, did not escape that fate. It was literally bombed out of its physical presence. Step forward, distinguished Hon. Wale Oshun – Member and Chief Whip, House of Representatives in the Third Republic, Secretary of NADECO, home and abroad, and now, Chairman, Afenifere Renewal Group. Whoever appreciates how critical the secretary is in any organisation, and knows that NADECO, home and abroad, was the vehicle that drove June 12, would know how critical Hon Oshun was to the event we are celebrating.

The man who, under God, pilots the affairs of Ekiti State, the LAND OF HONOUR today, and anchors the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, Dr Kayode Fayemi, our CHIEF HOST today, was that young ‘PIRATE’ whose voice you heard at the most unlikely of  hours on RADIO KUDIRAT. He is the man who, but for God, would have had his body fed to the fishes  of the ocean had the battalion of Abacha killers looking for him, all over the world, laid their filthy hands on him.

Needless to say, every one of this trio had to flee Abacha’s Nigeria lest the entire June 12 miscarry. They became refugees for Nigeria, but more importantly for the Yoruba nation to survive an ordeal that was primarily targeted at extinguishing it, whilst our compatriots further South, were junketing home to observe rollicking yam festivals. Professor Soyinka recently alluded to that fact when he warned against ethnicising June 12. He wrote: “After the annulment, I recall that when we tried to mobilise opposition to that sadistic impostor, fanatic voices of ethnic irredentism informed us bluntly, verbally and in print, that the Yoruba should go and solve their problems themselves, since we had let them down in the lead-up to the Biafran war of secession, and should seek no collaboration from that side of the Niger”. One recognises, in today’s renewed voices of ethnic denigration, the same chant of a hate chorus, the fanning of divisive embers. It is gratifying, therefore – and here we come to some cheering news – that this tendency has become a source of concern to many of the leaders of that former secessionist state. It led to recent counter efforts under themes such as Hands Across The Niger, later followed by Hands Across The Nation encounters that have taken place both within the nation and outside her borders. It is crucial that those laudable initiatives continue in the same spirit of civic responsibility and nationally craved closure. We must, however, sound a warning: these high-minded efforts are increasingly vitiated by the fanatic and obnoxious voices of an irrepressible handful. No, we are not speaking here of organised protests and demonstrations to keep Biafra alive – for those of my school of thought, these are both legitimate expressions of the democratic will, and cannot be suppressed”.

Distinguished ladies, and gentlemen, with these men on the podium today, I am sure  I need  not tell you that my job is already more than half done.

But then, not so fast.

Therefore, please  permit me a little excursion into  that watershed event in our national history; one  which the statesman in President Muhammadu  Buhari has now effectively cast in stone even if only as a stepping stone to greater things to follow as he promised in his Democracy Day speech.  Nation building is, after all, a marathon, not a sprint.

God bless him, for who can ever forget that for the eight straight years that MKO’S fellow Egba, President Olusegun Obasanjo, was in office, not to mention those of the minions he inflicted on the country in succession to himself, it was taboo to mention Abiola’s name. Jonathan was, of course, immediately shut down when he ineligantly sought to name the University of Lagos after him. Nor  would it be a surprise either to note that a few weeks ago, with the June 12 anniversary approaching, we started hearing the gospel according to Fulanisation. That exactly is what bitterness can do especially when the object of your jealousy is being appropriately canonised in your very eyes.

WHAT THEN IS JUNE 12?

Another of the major dramatis personae of June 12 , Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu  recently put  June 12  in perspective when he said as follows in a press statement he  titled: ‘June 12: The Truth that Sets Democracy Free in Our Land. “Observing May 29 as Democracy Day delinked the country’s democratic experience since 1999 from the protracted and bitter struggle against military dictatorship from June 12, 1993, till the forced exit of the military in 1999. According to him, “without those who stoutly stood on June 12 and sacrificed life, limb, freedom, economic ruin, psychological devastation and more, in the battle against tyranny, there would most certainly not have been any May 29, 1999 handover to commemorate. He therefore urged Nigerians not to take the democracy enjoyed today for granted or do anything to threaten its existence, explaining that it was not won on a platter of gold.

As first and foremost a historian, it behoves me to say something about that historic day, itself. June 12 is the culmination of several years of General Babangida, no, the military’s, theatrical politics of lies and chicanery, during which they dribbled Nigerians to no end. On June 12, 1993, Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola, a Chartered Accountant, business mogul and philanthropist, won the Nigerian presidential election. He ran on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) with Baba Gana Kingibe as his running mate. For the first time ever in our history, Nigerians voted without regard to religion or ethnicity, voting two Muslims as president and vice president, respectively. It was one occasion Nigerians spoke with one voice, in all parts of the country; North, South, East and West, voting into office, a man they believed would represent the interest of all Nigerians and make Nigeria truly the “Giant of Africa”.

Unfortunately, the election results were nullified, for no cogent reasons, by General Ibrahim Babangida, who would be forced to step aside only to be succeeded by a worse ogre, General Sani Abacha, after a sham of an Interim Government headed by Chief Shonekan, another Egba man.

The fate that has befallen Nigeria since that date is far worse than what befell June 12. Nigeria has been crawling ever since but nothing could be worse than the greatest beneficiary of June 12, Olusegun Obasanjo, willfully doing everything to bury the day, as well as dance on Chief Abiola’s grave. But God, not man, is the Almighty, and He has more than  proved himself through the instrumentality of the very last man you could ever  have adverted your mind to –President Mohammadu Buhari, a northerner and a Muslim, and certainly, not an old student of Abeokuta Grammar School, like Abiola and Obasanjo.

Rather than Abiola being allowed to usher in an era of peace and concord, development and growth in Nigeria, it has been instability, terrorism and unprecedented insecurity; the saving grace now being the hope of every Nigerian that President Buhari would quickly restore sanity, maximally reduce insecurity, and pretty soon, translate his professed love for true federalism into reality.

Your excellencies, my Lords, spiritual and temporal, members of the state House of Assembly, members of the State Executive Council, Body of Permanent Secretaries, gentlemen of the press, distinguished ladies and gentlemen,

I thank you.

• (being contribution as a discussant at an Ekiti State Government event to mark Democracy Day on Friday, 14 June, 2019)