“The report is about 70 pages. I gave a breakdown which is from 1999 till date, of places where a Fulani man or herdsman pointed a finger at a farmer and vice versa and what followed. I gave the analysis state by state and local government by local government and Guma and Logo was (sic) part of my report”. Alhaji Sale Bayari, Member of the Board of Trustees, Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, The Nation, Sunday, January 14, 2018, Page 4
“The documents are here, I will hand them over to you. I wrote to him (Buhari) on the planned attack by Fulani herdsmen because these threats were on the streets. I intimated Mr. President and it was put in writing. On the same October 7, 2017, I wrote the Inspector General of Police. I told him of a planned attack on our people when there was no response (from the President).” Governor, Benue State, Samuel Ortom, to Visiting Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Security Infrastructure, as published in Sunday Telegraph, January 14, 2018, Page 3
As the reader will easily perceive, the two quotations above are respectively from representatives of the two opposing sides in the tragic killings of farming communities of the Logo and Guma local government areas of Benue state on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2018. On one side – the side of the herders – is the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association. And on the other – the side of farmers – is the Benue State Government. Incidentally, Governor Ortom is from Logo, one of the two communities about which representatives of both the herders and the farmers had warned the Buhari administration that things were so far beyond boiling point that, sooner or later, deaths on a mass scale could happen anytime.
From the surfeit of accounts, speculations and commentaries on the killings of the farming communities by armed, rampaging herders, I am drawing special attention to these two particular accounts for two very closely connected reasons. Here’s the first reason: the government was warned – desperately and passionately warned – by representatives of both herders and farmers that killings were about to take place in specifically identified communities. Please take note: the warnings came from both sides. And here’s the second reason: the warnings were driven by an astonishing attentiveness to details of where killings would or could take place, together with the number of very highly placed government security and administrative personnel to whom pleas for saving intervention were addressed.
In this essay, I wish to explore these two factors because, in my opinion, they go to the heart of the crisis that we face now and in the months and years ahead in the aftermath of this tragic standoff between herders and farmers. In what follows, this is the bottom line of the discussion: why did the government not act in time and with determination on the warnings it received thereby condemning the communities of Logo and Guma of Benue to needless deaths? And across the length and the breadth of the country in diverse states of the federation, those that may be consumed by failure to resolve this crisis, what must we do to prevent them/us from dying the deaths of the doomed and the foretold?
In an article published in Premium Times on January 17, 2018 and titled “How to end violent clashes between farmers and herdsmen”, Femi Falana, SAN, with his usual thoroughness and perspicacity, gave some very thoughtful suggestions on how to resolve this crisis to the satisfaction of all sides and for the survival of the nation. All well and good. And moreover, there are many other articles like Falana’s outstanding piece in Premium Times, all brimming with ideas for the resolution of the crisis. I have no quarrel with these articles or their authors. Indeed, I applaud and endorse most of their ideas and suggestions. However, I do have a fundamental question for them, based on the complete nonchalance with which the administration and the security agencies treated the warnings that representatives of both herders and farmers gave to the government about the looming massacres of Logo and Guma. This is the question: why would the government and the security agencies listen to you and follow your advice when they did not heed the warnings of representatives of herders and farmers? I repeat: why did the government ignore the warnings, why?
These questions arose in my mind and have remained as gnawing, even terrifying fixtures on my consciousness because the two warnings from the representatives of herders and farmers are extraordinary in the desperation with which they tried to get the government, the security agencies and personnel to act to avert the deaths in Logo and Guma in Benue and other communities in other states in the North. Dear reader, if you think I exaggerate in making this observation, this claim, please go and read the accounts of Governor Ortom and Alhaji Bayari of Miyetti Allah and judge for yourself; I have given the citations where their accounts can be found. To their credit, the two men did everything humanly possible to pique the conscience, the humanity and the patriotism of the president and many other highly placed officials, to no avail. As a matter of fact, to underscore the point I am making here, permit me to quote briefly from the account of each man.
First, from Governor Ortom: “I intimated Mr. President and it was put to writing. On the same October 7, 2017, I wrote to the Inspector General of Police. I told him of a planned attack on our people when there was no response (i.e. from the president)…Of course, I wrote to the Senate President for (his) information and the Speaker. On the 7th October when I was to the Acting President and the Inspector General of Police, I also wrote to the National Security Adviser on this planned attack against Benue people. I also wrote to the Director General of the Department of State Security (DSS). And when there was no action, I followed it up with a reminder on 27th of October. There was no response. Of course, the National Security Adviser invited us for a meeting two times but it was put off”.
Secondly, from Alhaji Bayari of Miyetti Allah: “I did (warn) him since May 2015 before he (President Buhari) was sworn in. I took it to his office in Maitama when the present Comptroller of Customs, Hameed Ali, was his Chief of Staff, and after one year when I didn’t get a response, I wrote another cover letter and went to submit that one in the Villa and it was acknowledged and nobody replied till date. Even as at that time, because of the series of crises, I suggested that government should start looking at the creation of a ministry of livestock and associated services so that these problems would be addressed and if they had heeded, this problem would have been addressed long ago. I gave him (the President) a breakdown of likely explosive areas that we have in terms of herdsmen and farmers’ restiveness. Yes, in 21 states and about 75 local governments. The places include Oye Local Government Area and two other local governments in the northern part of Ekiti, I gave him a breakdown of the problem there; in Oyo State like Shaki area, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Rivers, Delta, Edo, Bauchi, Gombe, Yola. I treated them and gave the breakdown because they are the boiling spots… I gave the analysis state by state and local government by local government and Guma and Logo was (sic) part of my report”.
Against the background provided by these testimonies, I suggest that until we know the reason or reasons why the government and the security agencies completely failed to respond to the detailed, dire warnings given to them about the killings in Guma and Logo, we cannot realistically expect that this crisis will be resolved soon or at all before, heaven forbid, far worse things happen to other communities and, indeed, the nation itself. Since we cannot know for certain why the government did not act but can only make intelligent guesses fueled by a genuine desire for a just, equitable and honourable solution to this crisis, it is important for me to emphasize the fact that in the following closing paragraphs of this piece, I am narrowing down the answers to our question to three possibilities, only three out of at least half a dozen answers or explanations that one could think of.
First of all, it is probably the case that President Buhari’s now quite legendary slowness or laziness in responding to any and all crises has infected the entire edifice of governance and security in our country, so much so that this indolence, this sloth has become systemic. This means that the presidency in Nigeria being so enormously powerful and influential, it follows that the whole apparatus of governance depends on the character, will and disposition of the incumbent. That being the case, it means that whatever the president is the government will be and there is no way of getting around this fact. Remember, dear reader, that in medieval Christianity, sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. Islam, the President’s religion, also frowns on sloth, considering it a disease of the spirit and the psyche that prevents the faithful from the mental and psychological agility needed both to strenuously observe the injunctions of Allah and his prophets and to attend to the great demands and exertions that human life makes on rulers and the elite. Indeed, in the Yoruba language, there is a mental and psychological ailment known as “oledarun” which roughly translates into English as “laziness has become a disease”. This means that, with a few exceptions, the administration of Muhammadu Buhari is an “oledarun” government. In the refracted light of this “explanation”, the people slaughtered in Guma and Logo would be alive today if we did not have this “oledarun” administration controlling the conditions of our lives and the security of our individual and collective existence.
Beyond the “oledarun” factor, it is possible that the administration, together with the security agencies, did nothing about the warnings because the looming specter of mass killings pertained more to farmers than it did to herders. I wish to be absolutely clear and unambiguous about this point: the warnings indicated that the victims of the killings would be farmers and their communities, rather than the communities of herders; and because of this, the administration was content to do nothing at all. As a matter of fact, if you read between the lines of the testimony of Alhaji Bayari of Miyetti Allah, you will find the unmistakable intimation that herders were going to strike and strike all over the country if their grievances were not addressed, in particular the grievance of the anti-open grazing law of Benue State that seemed about to be duplicated in other states of the country.
Our third and final probable explanation is the worst, the most unconscionable of our three conjectures: the administration and the security agencies deliberately ignored warnings because they intended to “use” the killings in Guma and logo as a wake-up call to farmers and farming communities everywhere in the country to the determination of Fulani herdsmen not to be economically and existentially wiped out by laws and practices inimical to their survival. I have no evidence for this scenario and I do admit that there is an element of paranoia about it. But this is Nigeria, Buhari’s Nigeria where the dream, the hopes that brought him to power have in many respects turned into a nightmare for millions of the Nigerian masses.
Which of these three “explanations” – or a combination thereof – seems the most plausible? I leave the answer to this question to you, the reader!
