Text of a lecture delivered by Chairman, The Nation’s Editorial Board, Sam Omatseye at the Annual lecture of the Faculty of Arts, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti.
Barely ten years ago, the Nigerian geographic sweep did not weep with bumps or deeps, except the physical ones. When we traversed the country’s landscape, death traps were open to the eyes. They were the Lucifer without spirits. The death traps materialised as craters on highways, sharp, precipitous drops like cliffs. We know why. They arose from near illiterate survey works, and corruption that deprived some roads of enjoying the full weight of expenditure, according to the budget. They were unmistakable as gullies, unnatural valleys, potholes, sharp bends, erosions, and more. They accounted for fear on the highways. You didn’t have to drive slow, or speed to the death to die. As a character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night put it, “care is an enemy to life.”
Citizens died from collisions. They were of a variety sometimes craved now as the preferred option in a nation of sanguinary compulsions. Car-to car crashes, car-to-crater tragedies, trailers tumbling over fragile sedans, cars or buses sliding on mud-spattered paths into roadside ditches or bushes, or vehicles ramming into trees accidentally felled across the road, and so on.
A few years back, a certain minister visited the Ore-Benin highway and she staged a rage of public tears. She bewailed the antediluvian atrocity of the structure. Humans – that is fellow citizens – found communion with wounds and fatal finalities on that fabled highway. I am referring to the former minister of oil, then of works, Diezani Allison-Madueke.
Priests and imams prayed for wayfarers not to encounter death by the demons of bad roads or an ancient infrastructure.
Today, it is a different story. Those plying some of the roads encounter bumps and deeps, but not just of the roads but of a vital part of their bodies: the heart. It is called palpitation. Death traps do not appear until you know them. Death traps are ghosts or spirits, bearing deaths and kidnapping. The highway menace is now two-fold. We fear the roads, the gullies, the valleys, et al. Now, we fear something infinitely more deadly: the brigand. We now fear and tremble, with bumps and deeps of the heart.
Ten years ago, in another irony, it was safer when travelling from north to south. The traveller could sleep pacifically in the northern half of the trip, having no premonitions about highway robbers or killers or kidnappers. Now, the fear is more potent in the northern part than in the south. Once the travellers crossed the Middle-belt southwards, and entered such states as Edo, Nasarawa, Kogi etc, the eyes pop out in impotent vigilance. At night, the eyes are owlish. During daylight, the eyes are like owls in daytime. They are wide open but see nothing, until danger, ever lurking, pounces on them from the shadows. It does not pay whether you set out in the morning or at night. The journey will benefit from the prayer of one of Soyinka’s poems, that says, “You must set forth at dawn/ I promise marvels of the holy hour.”
No holy hours now in the land. Demons frisk about at day, and like in Shakespeare play, Hamlet, “we are doomed for a certain term to walk the night.” The brigands who murdered sleep have murder and rapine awaiting the traveller every hour and at any turn.
So, where did we get this problem, how did we become a nation that was not contented with the fatalities of the underdevelopment but now embrace the more spiritual, moral fatalities that some have now characterised as herdsmen clashes.
Some have said it is a problem of ethnic suspicion. Some have chalked it up to poverty. Others said, it is merely the function of porous borders. A few have said it has been coming to us for decades, and the fatal ship only just arrived after a storm-tossed voyage. A few others say we have had religious fervour turned upside down, and that is what we get when we believe because, sooner or later, faith collapses into fanaticism.
For those who say it is an issue of ethnic suspicion. They have their reasons. For instance, the Muhammadu Buhari administration has done little to project itself as an enclave none other than of tribal irredentists. Appointment after key appointment seems to present him as blindsided by his Fulani fidelity. His Kanuri appointees are seen not as Kanuris at heart but Fulani everywhere except in name and origin.
But in spite of the outcry, it seems he hears only what his heart tells him. His heart beats only to the rhythm of his northwest origins, according to many of his critics. But it has been a nation of ethnic disloyalty, a fear of Nigeria as a nation. That accounts for why we hide under what the Yoruba call “Tiwa ni tiwa.” Our is ours. Let us recall an interview published in an online publication called The Niche with Professor Anya O. Anya, on the struggle for the June 12 actualisation.
In the interview, Professor Anya recalled how the Yorubas and the Igbos had a handshake across the Niger, and formed what was known then as the Council of Unity and Understanding. Some of the key players included the great Pa Adekunle Ajasin, Ayo Opadokun, Segun Osoba, Ayo Adebanjo, and others from the southwest. From the east were persons like Ebitu Ukiwe, Professor Anya, and others. The CUU did not anticipate the turbulence of the June 12 struggle and the maelstrom of the National Democratic Coalition or NADECO struggles.
The group adopted Chief M.K.O Abiola as their candidate, and Theophilus Danjuma was also drafted into the field to include the Middle-belt. But once crisis hit the organisation, identity politics threatened to paralyse the body. It had happened when the body metamorphosed into NADECO after General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the June 12 polls in 1983.
But the military had turned fierce and even bloody, clamping down on the media, opposition henchmen, civil society warriors, and students on the rampage. In responding to the annulment, the members of the group wanted to draft a statement to dissociate from the military move to nullify a democracy act. The Yoruba in the group thought that such a statement should include an ultimatum to the military government to reverse its position. The Igbo as well as votaries of the Middle-belt like General Theophilus Danjuma, thought otherwise. They saw such a move as perilous. Here is part of Professor Anya’s account:
“But something happened that was to transform the nature of the NADECO that was formed. At one of our meetings, it was agreed that a statement should be issued, in that statement, there was one sentence that looked like an ultimatum to the government, I remember that Danjuma asked that the sentence be removed, Ukiwe also said the sentence should be removed and our argument was quite simple: that you are dealing with a military government and an ultimatum to a military government is a declaration of war. If they now decide to take you on, do you have the armament? Have you made the preparations?
“So unanimously we agreed that the sentence should be removed but one of those things that happens in history, when the statement was published in The Punch, that sentence was still there. Of course, it upset some of us. I knew it upset Ukiwe and Danjuma.
So, what happened? Why was the statement not expunged as agreed?
“It turned out that after we had met, three people met again, all Yoruba, and decided that the sentence must be there.
“I can’t speak for Ukiwe and Danjuma but I speak for myself. For me, it was a dangerous signal because what we were involved in, we were now going into a situation where any of us could be arrested, where it is even possible that any of us could be executed, the least you expect is that those people you are working with you can trust them, that whatever was agreed as our collective wisdom will be obeyed. That was dangerous because it means that you can get into an understanding and you go away doing certain things that was agreed and then the results will be different because some people are doing something else. So it undermined trust.”
By this account, Professor Anya delineates what he saw as the metamorphosis of NADECO into a predominantly Yoruba force. This is the sort of suspicion that has eaten deep into the fabric of cooperation of the matter. In his recent book titled Battlelines, former Ogun State Governor Segun Osoba referred to the group, but he romanticised its virtues as a model of inter-ethnic harmony. But Anya saw it as a paragon of fear and distrust.
All our stories of disaffection in Nigeria often start with the story telling. Who controls the narrative? Who is the better spinmeister? It is all about class and tribe and interests. The truth often is a casualty. The political scientist Harold Laski once asserted that “they think differently who live differently.” Those who describe Nigeria as a mere geographical expression find refuge in such episodes. The statement is credited to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, also echoed by one-time foreign minister Okoi Arikpo. But the expression is not original to the great Yoruba sage. The leading European Statesman Count Metternich said Italy was a mere geographical expression in 1814. It comprised a series of principalities occupying a space then known as Italian peninsula. This changed in 1870 when it became a single, harmonious nation.
So what happened to the Igbo and Yorubas in the CUU that harmony melted into mistrust? It is the story of Nigeria. If we believe Professor Anya’s narrative, what shall we say? Was it that the Yoruba in the group thought the Igbo were cowards and did not understand the peril of June 12? Did the Igbo not understand that you cannot fight the military with kid gloves? Was it what the Yoruba were thinking? Were the Yoruba thinking in line with what Nobel Prize-winning novelist and absurdist philosopher Albert Camus enjoined when he said, “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees?”
If that was the position of the Yoruba, what was the need cohabiting with the Igbo? Why meet if they did not think there was a nexus for any such dialogue? Was it a case of Achebe in Things Fall Apart who turned Okonkwo as a tragic failure, who insisted on dying on his feet and lose rather than Obierika who insisted on living on his knees and compromise and ultimately surrender?
Were the Igbo not right not to distrust a group that agreed during a meeting but went under cover to portray the wrong conclusions of the meeting? Does that portray the Yoruba in the group as capable of any sort of trust, or what the Yoruba call omoluabi? How, as Professor Anya noted, could the Igbo go into a fight with a person or group who jettisoned agreements. Did the Yoruba think the others were lackadaisical about the cause because Abiola was not their son, and so decided early on to conduct the duel with the military without the emotional or intellectual investment of the other tribes?
At the bottom of this distrust is our perception of history and identities. So, it is such suspicion that has played out even in the resolution of the problem of resolving banditry in the country. But what is more important in the herders crisis is that it began, according to many analysts, in the ungoverned spaces. According to those who know, it is actually a battle between the Hausas and Fulani. This is a duo that have worked as two peas in a pod for over two centuries. It happened in the Zamfara State area where the Hausa, having been oppressed by the more prosperous Fulani, decided to lash back. It became a case of the Hausa who had since 1804 laboured under the lordship of the Fulani now taking back their pints of blood.
Again we can also take our minds back to when the issue became a debate between those who wanted the herdsmen everywhere and those who did not care if they remained in the north. The argument was that they should be given ranches. You see, the argument for ranches could have been ordinarily unimpeachable. If the herdsmen had ranches anywhere, they would not wander into people’s farms, they would not have a reason to clash with locals because there would be no locals. But the question is not in the ranches. it is in the ranchers. That is our problem. We trust ranches but not the ranchers. If we don’t trust the ranchers, why would we live with their ranches?
This takes us to our original sin? Distrust. We cannot work together even if we propound the best of ideas. In Plateau State, the Fulani arrived to the gusto of the natives’ welcoming arms. They were few then and that was decades past. They lived in harmony, but the population of the settlers grew. Then came the era of Ibrahim Babangida. He gave them a local government. They crowned their king, and suddenly, the concept of settler versus natives became a question of even constitutional dimension. They now had electoral legitimacy; they could vote and be voted for with enough numbers to tilt the election results against their hosts.
Again, ordinarily, if we saw each other as neighbours, what was wrong with a people of so large a population seeking electoral legitimacy? After all, they came with their own culture and historical idiosyncrasies. How could they assimilate if the locals welcomed them while each maintained their individual characteristics? Each group has their own values they compress to form culture. According to French writer and astronomer, Jerome Lalande, values “most often represent a transition from facts to rights, from what is desired to what is desirable.”
Remember this is the same Plateau where the popular Cock Crow at Dawn drama series flourished. The executive producer, Peter Igho, an Urhobo from Delta State, noted that the halcyon days that produced the drama no longer exists today. The same hosts now live in adversarial relationship with their hosts and claim proprietary rights over the landlords. That is what Governor Lalong has undertaken to douse by setting a template of harmony among the groups. To his credit, it has worked for most part, although we cannot rule out the eruptions of fifth columnists from time to time as we have seen.
So, it was not that the Fulani could not have prospered without let. It was that suspicion grew when hegemonic forces came into play. Hegemony also comes because of a consciousness of a different identity from the host, and vice versa. The distrust of the Fulani by the locals grew because of the sense and perception that they (the Fulani) had grown proprietary wings.
When the concept of RUGA took centre stage, many in the south said no. RUGA means the same as ranch. But it meant, according to those who know, a village in Fulani. It is a semiotic assault. They – that is the southerners – are not seeing them as merely a ranch but as a Fulani ranch. That killed the concept on arrival. The Plateau State Governor, Simon Lalong, tried to defrock it of its ethnic origin, by saying that a ranch by whatever name is a place where you breed animals for meat. That was clever but the politics of it puts semiotics over reality. Semiotics can also be its own reality.
Yet there is a strong part of the narrative often downplayed in all these. It is the economic imperative. The herdsmen crisis has been posted as an economic issue. After all, the herders are selling animals, the customers are buying, and money keeps changing hands.
Its supporters say the herder is not just an economic entity but a cultural one. Herding is their way of life. The herder has an almost ineluctable spiritual connection with the cow. So, the cow is not a totem; it has close to a totemic bond with its owner.
But the economic factor stands. They have to eat to live to care for their animals. The reason the south has to accommodate the crisis in the first place is that if they hate the herdsmen they still love the cows. They need it for meat, for protein, for the big parties and assurance of a healthy life. They love the meat, if they think the herdsmen mean. If they must beef the seller, they must not beef the beef. Here lies the economic dilemma.
cont’d – ‘To secure, we have to love: herdsmen, kidnappers, Boko Haram and the climate of fear’