Whether he likes it or not, and notwithstanding the subtle or direct messages his body language projects, President Muhammadu Buhari will have to grapple with ethnic and regional misgivings over his policies and programmes. For instance, miffed by what seemed on the surface to be an anti-graft war directed at some top Ijaw leaders who served under ex-president Goodluck Jonathan’s government, the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) last week spoke unequivocally of bias against Ijaw people. Also, chafing at calls by Yoruba leaders for herdsmen to be banned from grazing in the Southwest on account of the economic and social damage occasioned by their nomadic lifestyle, leading Fulani politicians have risen stoutly in defence of their people, apparently oblivious of the national security crisis the clash between farmers and nomads might predispose the country to. It will, therefore, require first-rate wisdom, courage and diplomacy to tackle what is likely to be four years of turmoil for the Buhari government, a turmoil certain to be compounded by economic paralysis and political stalemate.
If the Buhari presidency appreciates the huge security risk constituted by the activities of herdsmen in some parts of Nigeria, especially the Southwest, none of his officials has spoken on the subject. The government has neither condemned the herdsmen nor denounced the new separatist predilection of some Yoruba leaders. But what is even more worrisome is the almost unanimous opinion of top politicians of Fulani extraction. A few days ago, human rights activist and senator, Shehu Sani, spoke glowingly of Fulani herdsmen’s rights almost to the total exclusion of the rights of farmers who are bearing the brunt of the excesses of the herdsmen. “No ethnic group in Nigeria can rear cattle but the Fulani and there is no ethnic group in Nigeria that doesn’t eat meat,” he argued glibly and fallaciously. “Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ijaw, Tiv, Urhobo, Itshekiri all eat meat but none of them can rear cattle except the Fulani. This country should appreciate the Fulani because they have to move around with cattle through very dangerous locations and people are not talking about the hazard these people face to rear cattle.” Is cattle rearing now superior to farming, and meat to food crops?
Pushing what is apparently the Fulani sense of entitlement to the most intolerable limit, he further snorted: “All that we (i.e. meat consumers) do is simply to buy cows and slaughter them for our naming ceremonies, wedding ceremonies, birthdays and so on, prepare barbecue and buffet, but nobody thinks of how Fulani herdsmen rear these cattle before people see them to buy.” In the interview in which he made these astonishing statements, and in which he declaimed vigorously on the rights of the Fulani herdsmen, he avoided giving an opinion on what he thought farmers whose livelihoods were threatened by grazing should do, or how they should protect their crops and rights from the unbearable expansion of the rights of the herdsmen. Though he agreed a clash between herdsmen and farmers was inevitable, considering the refusal or inability of the federal government to establish and protect grazing reserves, he seemed to think that until the needful was done, every victim would probably remain helpless. It did not occur to him that if the herdsmen embraced self-help, farmers could do likewise, even at the risk of stereotyping every herdsman as a potential kidnapper, farm destroyer and security risk.
What is most puzzling, therefore, is the silence of the Buhari administration. A spokesman of the Department of State Service (DSS) had recently warned Southwest leaders to see the September 21 abduction of Afenifere leader and former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Olu Falae, by Fulani herdsmen as nothing but a petty crime. It was, however, clear that he spoke to deaf ears, not to say he seemed insensitive. While it seems sweeping to stereotype every Fulani as a kidnapper and farm destroyer, it does not obviate the fact that most of those who perpetrate the crime of crop destruction in the Southwest are herdsmen, nor does it assuage the hurt the farmers and the victimised political and cultural leaders feel. This is clearly a contentious issue. What would help are deliberate measures by the federal government to ameliorate the problem before everyone embarks on self-help. So far, the presidency has said nothing, and the problem will not go away simply by wishing it.
In fact, rather than the problem abating, other leading politicians of Fulani extraction have prejudicially waded in. Former Kano State governor and senator, Rabiu Kwankwaso, denounces the stereotyping of the Fulani and defends the right of herdsmen to graze across state and national boundaries. He also bemoans the inability of the federal government to educate nomads and establish grazing routes and reserves. But for a politician of his repute, especially one with presidential ambition, he implausibly said nothing about the inalienable rights of farmers to nurture and protect their farmlands and crops. No one could ban or banish the herdsmen, said Senator Kwankwaso in a note of finality, as faulty and curious as Senator Sani mocking the meat-eating propensity of those who grumble against the harmful corollary of unrestricted grazing.
If President Buhari feels unnerved by the pressing danger his government faces in the looming herdsmen/Southwest farmers conflict, he has not betrayed it, perhaps because that kind of conflict had suffused the northern landscape for decades without triggering any apocalypse. But another perhaps more potentially dangerous conflict is brewing in the South-South. Sooner or later the president will have to grapple with it and free himself from the illusion of regarding the presidency as an end in itself. Going by the opinion of the Ijaw Youth Council, a feeling and frustration given fillip by the death of former Bayelsa State governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, President Buhari’s anti-graft war is nothing but sectional.
Speaking to reporters in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, the IYC president, Udengs Eradiri offers an incandescent and alarming opinion of the anti-graft war. “Much as we support the war against oil theft,” said Mr Eradiri, “it must come with an economic plan as an alternative so that as you are going in to stop them from their way of life, provide an alternative.” He added: “Engage, employ the youths who engage in illegal refining of crude in the creeks. But when you do otherwise, there will be effects. That’s why you are seeing the increase in crime rate, robbery is going up, kidnapping is on the increase, they are kidnapping even ice fish sellers now. It is because when you destroy their means of livelihood and you don’t create any alternative, it is a deliberate ploy to destabilize the Niger Delta so that businesses would not come here…They say oil theft is economic sabotage, what of the illegal mining that is going on in the North? Is that not worst economic sabotage?”
In the same way herdsmen and their apologists view the destruction of crops and farmlands as collateral damage to their grazing rights and sense of entitlement, the Ijaws deliberately fail to subscribe to a moralistic view of illegal bunkering, illegal refineries and other activities that sabotage what they describe as the nation’s unfairly and unjustly structured economy. To the IYC, every crime in the creeks is justified on the grounds of economic and, increasingly, political alienation. Nor do they feel apologetic. Instead, they have even gone ahead to warn the Buhari government against mistreating their daughter and former oil minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke. Said the IYC: “The UK government should stay away from Diezani. This was how they muscled (Diepreiye) Alamieyeseigha, and now he is dead. Now they have started with Diezani. They should leave Ijaw people alone. Are there no other governors that have stolen? Go to UK, almost all the streets are owned by northerners who stole Nigeria money. So why are they just on Goodluck Jonathan’s men, just to demonise Goodluck? As far as we are concerned, the anti-corruption fight is a fight against the Ijaw people. Goodluck should have won Nobel Prize for peace. Goodluck deserves a Nobel peace prize, Goodluck deserves respect from Nigerians.”
The IYC’s views may be shocking and not even unanimous in the Ijaw country, but it is a dangerous manifestation of the complex nature of Nigerian politics, the differing and conflicting assumptions and definitions of moral values and principles in Nigeria, and the ethnic prejudices and isolation that war against a sense of nationhood. If the feelings of alienation and persecution are not arrested, they will grow until they compound the herculean efforts to tackle the country’s monumental problems. No part of Nigeria must be allowed to create a political exclusion zone within the purview of the current constitution. Yet the budding national crisis of confidence represented by the herdsmen/Southwest farmers conflict and the insular view of morality by the Ijaw epitomise the worrying lack of coherence in President Buhari’s anti-graft war. If he is to stave off a far more dangerous blowout in the near future, it is urgent for the president and his team to conceive and enunciate a unifying national ideology for the country within which social, economic and political justice can flourish, and Nigeria’s sometimes fractious and competing ethnic nationalities can find anchor and expression.
