By Jide Oluwajuyitan

Youths across the nation protesting against police brutality, extra-judicial killings and unfair profiling  embarked on a protest to demand the scrapping of the dreaded SARS outfit in October last year. They also wanted justice for victims of police brutality and a total reform of the Nigerian police force. The protest in Lagos was anchored by Yoruba and Igbo youths. Northern youths however organized a counter protest to denounce the EndSARS protesters in the south. This was followed by public expression of support by their northern governors who insisted SARS was needed because of criminal activities of bandits, kidnappers and cattle rustlers in majority of states in the north.

One of the first to take to the streets was the 22-year old Rinu Oduala, an activist. Armed with a letter for President Buhari, she and her group had set up a camp outside the Lagos governor’s office In Alausa, Ikeja on October 7, 2020.  Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu demonstrated his solidarity with the youths not just by calling for the disbandment of SARS but by promptly taking the youths’ letter to President Buhari in Abuja.

While this was going on, another group led by some musicians ignored Ikeja seat of government and Gani Fawemi garden in Ojota where many protests had taken place in the past opting for Lekki toll gate as the epicentre of the EndSARS protest. Although the protest was not against Lagos State, economic activities in the whole of the Lekki axis was paralysed for 12 days the siege on the toll gate lasted. Intervention by the military according to Amnesty International claimed 10 lives, a figure disputed by the military and the state governor who directed those who lost loved ones to present evidence before the judicial tribunal of inquiry set up to look into the youths protests.

However, following the judicial commissions of inquiry ‘s recommendation that the toll gate be reopened , some aggrieved youths who felt it was ill-timed issued statements threatening to take over the toll gate with the police also  declaring the place a no-go-area for protesters. Some 17 youths including Jay D Boy, a comedian, who dared the police were arrested on Saturday night. Calling attention of journalists to his predicament from inside the Black Maria, he had said he was there “for human rights”, adding “three of my friends were killed here last year. And we are not hearing anything about it.” Many will however argue the right place for such submission is at the on-going tribunal and not the toll gate.

Lekki, a high-brow area, is a pride of Lagos. The opening up of the area was said to have been initiated by Alhaji Lateef Jakande, governor of Lags State (1979-1983) who died few days ago. But like the Metroline project, derailed by the late President Shehu Shagari and buried by Buhari’s military regime, the project could not start because of funds until the administrations of Tinubu and Fashola. The toll gate, one will assume, was one way of recouping  the huge investments in forms of loans and taxpayers money that have turned Lekki into an exclusive preserve of the wealthy.

Events have since shown, the obsession with Lekki toll gate by some youths was all part of Lagos State PDP politics. In the heat of the protest, Chief Olabode George, former deputy national chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had called for the dismantling of the Lekki and Ikoyi toll gates at a press conference attended by PDP party chieftains and members.

And finally his ill-will against Lagos and its current temporary power holders became obvious when he tried to justify the curious choice of Lekki toll gate by a section of the Lagos protesters. According to him “the choice of Lekki toll gate as the epicentre of these legitimate protests was very symbolic about the massive aberrations in the state”, adding for effect: “Lagos was gutted from within and outside”.

From the above, one can draw a parallel between a telephone conversation of two ill-informed young girls with Bola Tinubu the morning after the military assault on the protesters.  They accused Tinubu of inviting soldiers to shoot protesters at the toll gate because of the losses he was incurring as a result of the toll gate lockdown. The two girls were not convinced by Tinubu’s argument that he was not in government and could not have possibly influenced deployment of soldiers to the toll gate in which he had no personal stake. Curiously, the conversation was aired live by Channels.

Later that morning, those who tuned to Channels and Arise could observe well-dressed young men leading  mobs to torch business concerns  including TVC and Channels suspected to belong to APC stalwarts in Lagos State. The palace of Oba of Lagos was not spared. So were the Lekki toll gate and many Lagos State’s newly purchased buses. Assets replacement cost for the 12 days siege on Lekki toll gate and destruction of Lagos state assets was put at N1.1 trillion.

Surprised at the extent of damage to lives and properties in Lagos, chairman of the Southwest governors, Rotimi Akeredolu, said during their visit to Lagos State governor: “We will be right to say Lagos was turned into a war zone. We are deeply concerned with the ease with which public buildings, utilities, police stations and investments of our people have been burnt despite the proximity of security agencies to those areas”.

It must however be of interest to Nigerians that while TVC and The Nation owned by an APC stalwart were torched by arsonists, Lagos-based media concerns of PDP stalwarts such as Silverbird, AIT, Arise, Daily Independent and Daily SUN were all spared . And with TVC off the air and The Nation off newsstand, it was nothing but a sardonic humour that the narratives and views of the above papers on honour, integrity and patriotism became the dominant view.

And for the Yoruba youths that joined other groups to destroy Lagos, and their patron, Bode George, whose only known legacy in Yoruba land was selling of public enterprises he and his fellow Yoruba military administrators inherited to non-Yorubas, they must be reminded that Lagos is no more Nigeria’s federal capital city and for her pains in providing for the millions of immigrants, she does not enjoy special federal subvention.

They must also understand that those driven by forces of competitive federalism to take refuge in Lagos are fortune seekers. They have no stakes in Lagos. And if a proof is needed, it would be recalled the other day when the Oba of Lagos threatened to curse those who would work against the interest of Lagos after making their fortunes in Lagos, not a few groups protested openly.

Finally, the Yoruba youths must be reminded that the Yoruba nation has paid dearly for waging other peoples wars including supporting the self-actualization quest of some Nigeria middle belt groups who Ahmadu Bello insisted were his great grand-father’s slaves  and the marginalized Ijaw, Efik, Anang and Ibibio minority groups of the old Eastern Region. The elites of the former have since the collapse of the First Republic behaved like slaves until the current revolt by the likes of Theophilus Danjuma; rather than be identified with the Yoruba aspiration, they have always aligned with the Hausa/Fulani of the north.

By Jide Oluwajuyitan

To be sure, the herdsmen had acquired a notoriety for mindless killings that earned them an unsavoury reputation as the fourth most deadly terrorist group in the world long before Buhari became president.  But there is no doubt the irresolute deportment of President Buhari on whose desk the buck stops contributed to the arrogance and unconscionable language of Miyetti Allah and emboldened the criminal elements among the herdsmen to carry their deadly trade of kidnapping, banditry and killing of innocent farmers to the southwest region after sacking and confiscating farmlands of victims who were reduced to candidates for IDP camps in the middle belt region.

In a December 2018 report titled “Harvest of death, three years of bloody clashes between farmers and herders”, Amnesty International claims over 2000 Nigerians were killed in 2018 alone because “the authority’s lethargy has  allowed impunity to flourish and the killings to spread to many parts of the country inflicting greater sufferings on communities who already live in constant fear of the next attack”.

Not much has changed. Many Nigerians now believe government’s apparent indifference or inadequate response to the activities of unrepentant killer herdsmen poses greater threat to the survival of our nation as resorting to self-help tactics by aggrieved groups could lead to chaos, anarchy and civil war. Those who however swear by the president’s patriotism and integrity put the blame squarely in the court of the president’s ‘loyal gate-keepers’  who  appear to shield him from knowing the truth by trading in insults, ethnic stereotyping and sometimes outright lies.

With periodic harvests of death inflicted on Benue people by herdsmen expelled for not obeying the state rules, Governor Samuel Ortom last week took the battle to the president’s loyal gatekeepers. He urged them to tell the president that all is not well with Benue State and indeed the rest of the country where kidnapping, raping and killing have become the mainstay of many communities.

Wole Soyinka who, while not supporting self-help approach of some individuals believes the war  was brought to the door steps of the Yoruba people  who want to live in dignity and not as slaves in their own land, challenged the president to publicly denounce the herdsmen, Miyetti Allah and those fraudulently using his name as Saint Christopher’s barge for good luck while engaging in  banditry, kidnapping, murder and illegal occupation of other peoples land. So far, it has been a deafening silence from the president.

Mindless killings of farmers and some prominent indigenes of Igangan and the whole of the Oke Ogun area  by suspected Fulani herdsmen have been going on since 2015.  The killer herdsmen are believed to be shielded by Seriki Fulani, Alhaji Saliu Abdul Kadiri,  the godfather of  migrant herdsmen and who according to governor Makinde’s  special adviser on security, also doubles as chief ransom negotiator  in many kidnap cases. The indigenes insist that most of the kidnappers disappear into the Seriki’s sprawling enclave while the police treat him with kid gloves after each report.  Failure of government forced Sunday Adeyemo and his groups to react the only way they knew – self-help.

On their part, the people of Ondo State have had enough of criminal herdsmen who after each act of violence against the people disappear into Ondo forest reserve they illegally occupied. The state governor hearkening to the cries of his people, ordered the vacation of reserve forest and an end to open grazing in the state. He also took the first step in bringing sanity to his state by ordering those who want to live and do business of cattle grazing in his state to register.  I am sure governors of Kebbi and Jigawa and Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) who were with Akeredolu at the meeting anchored by Nigeria Governors’ Forum would readily admit that no Ondo indigene can convert any of the parks in their state to living quarters or other people’s land into rice-farm without permission or registration of their businesses with government.

Besides kidnapping and destruction of farm and farm products, for Ondo State, there is much more at stake.  For instance, while following the 2007 Nigerian Conservation Foundation  recommendation, the state stopped logging, hunting, farming and human settlement on the 829 km2  Oluwa Forest Reserve whose 40 per cent  natural forest harbours elephants and chimpanzees, rampaging herdsmen with respect for neither law nor authority had no regard for forest bio-diversity. Neither they nor their cows similarly recognized the Idanre Forest Reserve designated ‘nature reserve’ by International Union of Conservation of Nature and its elephants and chimpanzees habitats.

The  Osse River Park, formerly known as Ifon Forest Reserve established through a 1951 Gazette for the protection of Wild Game such as many wildlife species recognised by many international treaties and conventions including the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species was similarly not spared.

The way forward is for the governments of Southwest to clear its forest of all herdsmen including those that take delight in nocturnal grazing. They must be made to key into modern pastoral practices as obtains elsewhere in the world. Experience from the middle belt has shown that as long as there are vestiges of herdsmen left behind, unforgiving Fulani who lust over other people’s land will always invite diaspora Fulani to visit violence on those who refused to be driven from their land. Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna not too long ago confirmed those visiting violence on southern Kaduna farmers are trans-border Fulani immigrants. The besieged farmers of Igangan in Ibarapa part of Oyo also recently accused  the Seriki Fulani in the area  of inviting trans-border herdsmen through Benin Republic.

Southwest governors whose citizens like Epicureans consume 10,000 head of cows every day should pull resources together or take part of the federal government surplus RUGA fund to establish ranches that should  be run as a public enterprise just as Awolowo’s administration did in the first republic. Herdsmen who are ready to embrace modernity should be encouraged to buy into the business.

Those who however insist open grazing is part of Fulani culture including Miyyeti Allah and  Shehu Garba , the president spokesman who also doubles as  herdsmen’s spokesman  are at liberty to condemn children of the poor among them to nine months in the  Kebbi and Jigawa forests or  Zamfara and  Runka reserve forests established  in 1919 by the British colonial regime and later converted  into a grazing reserve to prevent seasonal migration of pastoral Fulani from north to south and vice versa.

A former PDP chairman now APC chieftain while celebrating his 70th birthday last week narrated how the north encourages influx of Fulani immigrants from the Sahel region into the country during elections. This perhaps explains why most of those who kill, kidnap and rape in the north and now in the southwest are hardly found to face justice after their heinous crimes.

Governor Akeredolu has started well. If we intend to seriously address the problem of insecurity, states must register her citizens and those they host. It is hoped those serving other tendencies in President Buhari’s government who after rejecting state and local policing  derailed Fashola’s first initiative will not sabotage Akeredolu’s current efforts but have it replicated in all the states.

By Jide Oluwajuyitan

President Buhari had while on a visit to Katsina on January 20, accused Nigerian elites of harassing his person and administration without taking into consideration the serious crisis of nation-building he inherited in 2015 and his heroic efforts at addressing them these past five years. Before this, he had on December 12, 2020 during the graduation ceremony of 78 participants of the Senior Executive Course 42 of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), blamed the elite for the nation’s intractable social-political problems.

Playing the victim, the president  wondered why the elite  would not acknowledge  his efforts at rehabilitating our collapsed infrastructures including roads, rail lines health facilities and  providing monies to the states to clear backlog of unpaid salaries by states piled up by his predecessors at a time the nation was selling a barrel of crude oil for over $100. If they were not impressed by that, how about his government plan to lift  100million out of poverty in 10 years which took off with N30,000 grants for taxi, bus, okada, Keke Napep, Uber, Bolt drivers, and cart pushers across the country?

I don’t think the president needs to lose sleep over elites’ opposition to his government. A journey through memory will clearly show the elites, because of their greed, intrigue and conspiracy against Nigeria, have always been the scourge of the nation. The bitterness that accompanied their struggle for elective position in the 1920s was what probably forced Oliver Stanley to conclude that “through the greater part of the colonial empire, it is the British presence alone that has prevented a disastrous disintegration and the British withdrawal today would mean for millions, a descent into turmoil of warring sects”.

Many of the nationalists were also believed to have been driven not by altruism but by personal ambition and were prepared to set Nigerian ethnic nationalities against each other in other in the pursuit of power. It was also perhaps for this reason Hugh Clifford, the then Nigerian Governor-general in an address to the Nigerian Council on December 1920 articulated a British policy designed to produce a ‘regional government that secures for each separate people, the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality and its own chosen form of government which have been evolved for it by the wisdom and by the accumulated experiences of generation of its forbearers’.

On his part, Chief Obafemi Awolowo observed as far back as 1945 that “given an option to choose between our educated elite, the traditional rulers and the colonial masters, Nigerians would choose in reverse order”.

The constitutional success the nation achieved between 1914 and 1958 was therefore in spite of the Nigerian educated elite for whom democracy was just a means to an end.  It was therefore not a surprise the new value system collapsed in less than five years of independence.

And little lesson was learnt as the elite regrouped in the fourth republic under what John Campbell, a former US ambassador to Nigeria described as, a “cartel with no ideological or programmatic basis but as essentially a club of elite for sharing oil rents and political spoils” who in the name of election, between 1999 and 2015, reduced Nigerians to periodic participants in a selection ritual of those a British court also described as “thieves in state houses’.

It was the same elite who according to BPE’s one-time chairman, Nasir El Rufai, that presided over the sale of Unipetrol, AP/National oil, Ashaka Cement, WAPCO, CCNN, BCC, Calabar Cement, Capital Hotel, Abuja Sheraton, and FESTAC 77. Others include Ikoyi residential houses, Tafawa Balewa Square, Ikoyi Federal Secretariat, 1004 residential flats, Abuja legislators’ residential quarters, vice president’s guest houses, senate president’s residence, etc. to their cronies who had access to state resources at 0.5% of $100b government invested on these public enterprises between 1970 -1979.  Lawan, the committee chairman, speaking on the killing of Daily Times which he said was ‘one bad example of privatization” concluded that “In most cases, most of our enterprises were dashed out”.

Unfortunately, President  Buhari still does not realize that it was because of elite betrayal Nigerians saw  a messiah  in him; that the  northern poor (talakawas) massively voted  for him in spite of his de-marketing by the northern establishment  who said he was not ‘pure Fulani’ and the  southwest that led a crusade to remove him from office because of his human right abuses during his first coming as a military head of state  also supported him believing he was better placed to resolve our political problems.

The Southwest was not alone. Late Maitama Yusuf Sule, two-time minister and former Nigerian Permanent Representative to the United Nations also shared those sentiments. At the head of the northern leaders delegation to congratulate him on his victory in 2015, he had described him as “a great Nigerian nationalistic compatriot…It is the same Buhari that gave Nigeria a sense of direction when he was a military leader, this time around I’m sure Allah has brought him to correct the ills of the past, to reform”.

In power, President Buhari who listens only to himself also pretends he knows what Nigerians want without asking them. He is committed to rehabilitation of roads even when motorists for fear of kidnappers dare not drive through them.

What Nigerians, who understand very clearly that lack of elite consensus, corruption and infrastructural decays are but symptoms of a dysfunctional political system want is solution to their political problems made intractable by political, economic and military elite, the main beneficiaries of the nation’s nightmare. As Kwame Nkrumah put it “first seek the kingdom of politics, every other thing will follow.

Majority of federating nationalities want state and community policing to protect themselves from rampaging herders. The polluted oil producing Niger Delta that can no more support fishing or farming and whose resources are being used to build bridges over land in Abuja want justice.  Lagos with the same population as Kano and Jigawa that whimsically allocated over 80 LGAs as against her own 20 wants justice. The Kogi and Kwara Yoruba which constitute about four per cent of the northern population want to join their kith and kin in the southwest.

In an age of competitive federalism driven by market forces, while it is perfectly normal for Lagos, the fifth biggest economy in Africa to attract immigrant from even across West Africa, the state must be able to take control of those who live within her territory including thousands of non-Nigerian okada riders

Justice is the foundation of peace. Justice rather than guns, bombings and other forms of violence has better prospect of ending banditry, kidnapping and insurgency.

The late Nigeria elder statesman, Maitama Yusuf Sule believed resolution of our political crisis through institutionalization of justice is a task not beyond President Buhari.  “With justice”, he had told him, “you can rule Nigeria well, justice is the key. “If you are going to judge between two people, do justice irrespective of the tribe, religion or even political inclination. Justice must be done to whosoever deserves it.”

President Buhari still has two years to decide whether he wants to be remembered as a statesman or as an ethnic irredentist.