Tag: Again

It’s testy, grouchy time in the Yoruba country — and for good reasons.  Some Fulani dregs have turned Yoruba forests into a vast kidnappers’ den.

The land seethes with anger and resent.  That is why President Muhammadu Buhari, and his security chiefs, must act — and act fast.

But that is no reason to tar every Fulani with the criminality of a few.  Or suggest a “Fulani” presidency spurs Fulani banditry.

That would profane legitimate anger with reckless politicking; and could plant more potent ethnic danger, long after the current security crisis is history.

It all appears a throwback to May 2015, though.

Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani had defeated President Goodluck Jonathan, a Niger Delta minority; and just got sworn in as president.

Buhari’s winning All Progressives Congress (APC) coalition comprised the Bola Tinubu-led Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), in a rare North West-South West entente.

The Jonathan losing coalition had the Afenifere, led by Chief Reuben Fasoranti, but whose most vocal voices were Chief Ayo Adebanjo and Chief Olu Falae, though these partisans were formally no members of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), dominant in the South East and South South.

So, for the losers, the after-loss strategy was heightened anti-Fulani hysteria.

Because a Fulani just won power, the entire Fulani must be new — or more appropriately, renewed — Judases of the Federal Republic, docked, tried and guillotined, in the emotive courts, holding in the southern media!

The Niger Delta Avengers, in a reckless staccato, fired the opening salvos, to make the country “ungovernable”; blowing up off-shore oil fields, blighting their home environment and sabotaging oil exports.

Nnamdi Kanu, of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), later weighed in with his scalding tribal-hating; explosive ethnic-baiting; and reckless faith-ranting.

That tanked with some so-called northern “youths” giving the Igbo an ultimatum to quit the North, in a grim echo of the tragedies of 1966.  Kanu himself would later scram out of town to emerge unfazed fugitive, but with scaled down mischief.

Afenifere’s own contribution to this sour grape “war” was, on the surface, “restructuring”.

But really, its twin-headaches were Tinubu (who masterminded a North West-South West entente) and pushed Afenifere into some political Coventry; and Buhari (the first chief beneficiary of that realignment). That twin-migraine has persisted, with the way the 2019 elections went.

This 2015 back-grounding should illuminate the interpretation, as a Fulani ogre, of a grave national security challenge, that must be smitten in the South West, with all ethnic venom possible.  That is a tragic distraction.

Along that line, however, the Yoruba Summit Group (YSG), claiming to act on behalf of the Yoruba, just weighed in with a diktat; and called whoever disagrees with it “traitor” to the Yoruba cause.

While banding into pressure groups could be the summit of pressing democratic rights, YSG must know that branding contrary voices “traitors” is the very nadir of common sense.

You can’t claim a democratic right with recklessly undemocratic swagger.  That is the very traitor to common sense!

But having done with the body’s inanity of democratic fatwa (with all its violent contradictions), YSG is right, like everyone, to be gravely concerned about the dire security situation.

This is more so when the South West, hitherto a safe oasis, in a national desert of unrest and violence, seems now captive to kidnappers.

The state must go after and punish those criminals — and fast too!  But when you ethnicize a crime, you replace seasonal angst with perennial pain.

That is the folly of the present hysteria, over Fulani kidnappers come to subdue the South West; shortly after the national hysteria of the Fulani herdsmen come to slaughter the rest of the country.

It is a ringing and tendentious fallacy that might just plague the polity, long after Muhammadu Buhari must have retired to Daura.

You blame the “Fulani president” for “Fulani banditry” today?  Fine!  Tomorrow, a “Yoruba president” would be roasted for Yoruba robberies; and an “Igbo president”, guillotined for “Igbo crime” – and a new bout of Nigerian national banality is born!

O, the very inanity of “Fulani”, “Hausa”, “Igbo” or even “Yoruba” kidnappers (which of these ethnics doesn’t harbour own criminals?), compels the background to the current plague of kidnapping — the Zamfara security crisis.

In southern Nigeria’s political lore, the “Hausa-Fulani” are one and indivisible; yoked in eternal and hideous power plotting.

Yet, from a research finding, the Zamfara crisis started with a spectacular Hausa-Fulani blowout!

According to research findings by the Abubakar Mohammed-led Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, Zaria, armed robbers, suspected to be “Fulani boys”, were robbing local Zamfara farmers.

A local vigilante, a Hausa answer to the local criminality, faced down these criminals.  In its moral fervour, however, it not only vanquished the criminals, it killed and drove almost every Fulani in sight into the bush.

That provoked a counter Fulani reaction, birthing a Hausa versus Fulani ethnic show down — a classic “Gambari pa Fulani” (northern elements neutralize one another) Yoruba sneer, in full tragic Technicolor!

That crisis, of killings and counter-killings, got traction from earlier Ahmed Yerima governorship land reforms, which allegedly grabbed Fulani ancestral lands and shared them among Hausa farmers.

In the equal-opportunity bedlam, a third but overwhelming Leviathan swooped on the scene: rustling the Fulani herdsmen of their cows; robbing the Hausa farmers of their cash.

A new anarchy just came upon the land!

With rustled cows located among rustic robber barons, but with the robber Leviathan protected by AK47-totting toughs, kidnapping for cash, by the dispossessed but equally fiercely armed, joined the explosive mix!

Four years down the line, kidnapping and banditry had become a national emergency; with the violence seeping down to pierce the serene South West, resulting in the current angst.

These Zamfara dregs could be the Fulani plaguing Yoruba forests; extorting millions of Naira as ransom; killing and maiming; and worsening the security situation.

So, instead of escalating their crime as “Fulani invasion”, is it not more logical to isolate the criminals as the soulless bandits that represent no one but own greed; and offering the security agencies the intelligence to bring them to heel?

Should there be suspected criminal collusion and cover-up by the security agencies, specific lights must be beamed on the guilty; and everything done to punish and root them out.

That would be a better strategy, than the current combustible hell-raising and ethnic-baiting.

That way, Yoruba forests would have been rid of Fulani bandits, without stirring any ethnic slur. In any case, if these bandits devastated the Zamfara Hausa folks, why would they suddenly become crime ambassadors, of the Fulani, in the Yoruba country?

Forget the tribe. Tackle the criminal. Then comes the pleasant epiphany: Nigeria has only two tribes: the good and the bad – and maybe, more clear-headed thinking; and certainly less “Fulanization” political mischief!

Get rid of the bad; and every other thing would be added.  Nothing could be more liberating.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s first term started with the bogey of rule of law.  It is ending with the bogey of rule of law.

Just how taut can you stretch that bogey, faced with nation-threatening decay?

Nigeria, at independence, didn’t quite put its best leadership foot forward.  Still, it wasn’t all doom, for not a few projected its huge potentials, which they linked to the fortune of Africa.  If Nigeria soared, Africa would not sink.

But then, decadent leadership, with indifferent followers, all but sank all that.  The endless debacles saw the eventual collapse of the 1st Republic (1960-1966).

Then came the era of military rule, even with the civilian interregnum between 1979 and 1983.  With or without the rule of law, the military era too, witnessed progressive decadence.

The surface of that decadence was crippling corruption.  But its core was the total collapse of the value system, such so that there was hardly any sense of right and wrong.

Then came the 1999 re-entry of democracy.  While leaders mouthed rule of law and citizens’ economic rights, governance itself collapsed into a den of robbers.  Its sole business appeared the sole pleasure of those garrisoned in there and their cronies; not the welfare of the collective that put the government there.

The nadir of this dysfunction, a logical pile-up from the Olusegun Obasanjo years, was the Goodluck Jonathan presidency; and the rot that oozed from it at its fall, after its 2015 election loss.

That rot provoked an outrage that many times threatened mob justice, by a good segment of the population that counted themselves cheated.  But that would have been a tragic extreme.

Still, how do you rein in such putrescence, when those who pulled off the great heist, courtesy of an illicit trove, now wave “rule of law” at your nose, not because the rule of law is undesirable but as a bogey to escape justice?

So, at the sight of that bogey, do you just surrender, knowing full well it is disaster assured?  Or you tweak things a bit to make the rogue class far less comfortable?

How was it done in other climes? Ancient Greece, since it shaped modern Western thinking, remains a classical guide.  Of course, France and Britain also offer some clue.

Athens, which under Pericles (495-429 BC) became the best of everything in antiquity, much earlier in 7th century BC, was buried in decadence.  Yet with progressive reforms, by a triad of lawgivers, Draco, Solon and Pericles, Athens reinvented itself.

At its nadir of decadence, when Draco became lawgiver (7th century BC), it was shock therapy.  Draco, riled by the paralysis wrought by the old oral laws, wrote down the laws, for the first time in Athenian history.  The Draco codes were decidedly severe, just to stamp out the decay.  Hence, the English word, “draconian”.

Then came Solon, in another epoch (6th century BC).  His was an era of liberalization, toning down the harshness in the law of Draco.

Considered among the seven sages of antiquity, Solon’s liberalism laid the foundation for democratic Athens.  Still, without Draco’s severity, Solon’s liberalism would have been impossible, for liberalism, built on decay, is foundation for further decadence.

For Athens, all came together for good under Pericles (495-429 BC). That was the Athenian Golden Age, otherwise called Periclean Athens.

During that epoch, Athens was the clear leader in democracy, philosophy, the theatre, mathematics and the sciences — thus fore-shadowing what the Western Hemisphere, led by the United States, would look like in the modern era, even if Athens’ key rival, Sparta, would also offer some prototype for modern USSR (now defunct).

Indeed, no thinker of note considered himself complete until he bench-marked his mind against peers in the great Athenian academies, forerunners of today’s universities; or working in affiliation with them.  To boot, Athens had become a great naval power!

So, an Athens that was practically buried in own decadence, before Draco applied his shock therapy in severe laws, had, under Pericles, soared to become the exemplar in everything — democracy, scholarship, liberal thinking and even military might.

Yet, irony of ironies: all these were grounded in Draco’s severity!  Just imagine, how might Greece have panned out if, given the decay of Draco’s time, someone was still pussy-footing with “rule of law”?  That is a lesson for Nigeria of today!

But leaving the ancients for the not-so-ancient: England and France.

England’s rebirth came with the reformation of Oliver Cromwell, “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland” (from 1653 to 1658, when he died), after the execution of Charles I (1649).  The monarchy was restored with Charles II, from 1660.

Unlike England that regained its monarchy, thanks to Cromwell’s bloody reformation, France lost its monarchy forever, after the French Revolution (1789-1799).

Though Napoleon Bonaparte would later impose some imperial throne, as Emperor and head of the French Empire (1804-1814), the French monarchy never really made it back.  Charles Dickens, in his A Tale of Two Cities, captured the mood of revolutionary France.

So, apart from Athens, England and France also endured some meltdown, no thanks to a decay in the monarchy, at a stage in their history. That jolt shaped the rebirth that made them the countries they are today.

Again, at these times, would anyone have been crowing about the rule of law?  When you rape the rule of law, the rule of the mob takes over.

To Nigeria, the nasty experience of England and France is instructive: mouthing the rule of law, without linkage to the sad realities of the moment, even as some shock therapy, could just bait a future disaster.

Nigeria must be careful not to tilt just into that cauldron.

Now, this submission in no way backs or excuses citizens allegedly languishing in DSS cells, without trial.  That should have no place in a democratic setting, particularly after decades of military rule.

The government should therefore move fast to either try all those involved, or free them, if there is no valid case against them.

It is rather to impress it on everyone, not the least the “rule if law” campaigners, to realize the country, no thanks to past bad choices, is going through a very painful era.

A clique of robbers, ensconced in past governments, had stolen the country blind, causing mass poverty, no thanks to the greed of a few.

As double jeopardy, this ensemble has enough cash to buy the most unscrupulous and unconscionable of lawyers, who for a fat fee, think little of getting these crooks off the hook, even if they are not in doubt about their culpability, if not outright guilt.

It is such brazen social injustice that ruptures the tiny thread that holds societal trust; and sends the state into a whirlpool of catastrophe.

So, this cynical “rule of law” lobby is up to no good.  It is nothing but another rogue rally to escape justice, and further embitter the cheated and the dispossessed.

Something must give in a society in free-fall decadence, transiting to some form of accountability.  Any departure from this natural path might just be a danger to everyone.

Every people have to tweak their laws, at a time of high decadence, as redemptive tool.  That is what Athens’ rise from decay to glory has taught the world.