The onset of a primordialised Nigeria held captive by a retrograde strain of theocratic Fulani armed insurgency should offer us a broader discursive narrative of the fiction of our indivisibility.
By Taju Tijani
The dog and baboon would all be soaked in blood – Muhammadu Buhari
People who had lived through Rome’s Carthaginian struggles, the Thirty Years War in Europe, Napoleon campaign in Russia or the 1916 Somme battles to the 1975 fall of Saigon would marvel at the capacity of man to inflict ghastly horror on a barbaric scale. War entails brutalities, grief, hardship, cruelties, looting, rape, devastation, casual violence against civilians, taking of prisoners and massive bloodbaths.
The morality, enthusiasm, and necessity for an open warfare stare us in the eyes on daily basis. From a low-level whisper of the possibility of war, Nigeria is now showcasing an exceptionally ugly manifestation of the nightmare and tragedy of war. We are now at war. Wole Soyinka too bemoaned the same reality. In anger, Pastor, and Televangelist Paul Adefarasin in shedding his pastoral garb recently referred to Nigeria as a scam. There is no more bifurcation. No more delusion. Nigeria has fallen like a stricken airship from the sky and crashed to earth.
As the inferno of ISWAP scorched earth pogrom rages, Buhari is twisting the knife deeper by his stubborn refusal to act and save an imploding Nigeria. More sinisterly, his action reminded us that those dictators from Adolf Hitler, Idi-Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko to Sanni Abacha owed a good deal of their tragic end to this genetic fault line: inability to listen to other contesting stakeholders in the struggle for the soul of their nations.
In over seven years, President Muhammadu Buhari has morphed from being Nigeria’s expected Messiah to the most pathologically and shambolically misfit president this nation ever had. Nigerians in their worse omniscient mistake never bargained for the unfolding shenanigans coiling around their polity like poison ivy. President Muhammadu Buhari is rowing backward badly in the rough waters of Nigeria politics. The Abuja interloper, oh no, cipher, can neither bonk Boko nor harass the Haram clawing savagely at his credibility as a competent commander- in- chief. Enough is enough!
His political promises are disappearing into a plughole of amnesia. Our hope that Buhari will remoralise a demoralised and broken society is but now a sinking, wishful thinking. Our impulse has now shifted from hope to despair, from an excess of trust to an excess of suspicion; we exalted his integrity but he has shamed us by his failure. The huge sense of his own political impotence is hurting millions of trusting lives who gave their votes to him.
Our raving anxiety is shipping into a kind of despairing wail at the loss of an irreplaceable opportunity. The seed of our collective peril is frighteningly imminent. We are entering the zone of a tragedy of which Buhari alone must be the villain. Consider this. An apathetic public now watch the erosion of a great nation into global nonentity. Mr President has unplugged from the immediate priorities besetting this nation to embrace the fantasy of Fulanisation. His 2015 pre-election popularity which rose to 85 per cent showed just how much we needed to believe in his change agenda to provide us with the relief and protection that his election rhetoric commanded.
Today, Nigerians are now being forced to consider that Buhari cannot give insulation from the harm of ISWAP and Fulani terrorists. Well, there is a huge gain in this. Fulani terrorism has aided us, no, accelerated our quest for a more dimensionalised perspective of our relationship with one another. That is, the president is presented with a fresh opportunity to rethink the dimensionality of the fragile relationship between the north and south. We are faced with a stark choice. Our unity is a fraud. Separation is the answer. This nation must stem the tide of its evolutionary leap backwards. Fulani violent insurgency, herdsmen menace, banditry and armed kidnappers have all signposted our future and the incompatibility of our oneness.
The onset of a primordialised Nigeria held captive by a retrograde strain of theocratic Fulani armed insurgency should offer us a broader discursive narrative of the fiction of our indivisibility.
Rather than uproot the thorns and briars of Boko Haram theocratic rebellion, Abuja is fighting a proxy battle with the IPOB in Eastern Nigeria. For over seven years, there had been no proactive pathway for addressing the proliferating brute-luck risks facing Nigerians in the North. Our Fulani, Jihadist-embracing leader only accommodates the logic of the herd mentality by tolerating Isa Pantami, a fellow terrorist-loving bedfellow in his cabinet. A man who, in true accountability should have been sacked for the horror of his past!
One of the intellectual catastrophes of a post-colonial but primitive Nigeria is that a tiny band of cabal from the north can continue to exert power, dominion, and control over the destiny of Nigeria through violence-driven ideology of theocratic illiteracy.
A band of satanically energised rag-tag cowards masquerading as Boko Haram continues to claim bloody victory after bloody victory over the might of our armed forces. Christians in the north are being shocked and awed while Buhari embraces an over-cautious, timid, cumulative process of unacceptable placidity. Right under Buhari’s watch, Christian worshippers face gruesome genocide in the Northern Caliphate of Boko Haram that is daily emerging in the North. There is a thorough absence of a more capacious sense of millions of struggling Nigerians, those unseen others who inhabit the other side of the political divide. I mean those unseen others who are daily mired in poverty, helplessness, decay, and pessimism – the very victims of the insecurity and kidnapping blighting this nation. Helpless and innocent Nigerians are routinely kidnapped and held as captives in terrorist dens scattered across our forests.
Buhari’s politics of isolating the public through intransigent Fulani elitism presents the greatest danger yet to our tattered democratic renewal. The ongoing dialectics of double jeopardy – Boko Haram insurgency and Fulani kidnappers – are enough fodders to ignite social and political revolution. How can Nigerians remain suppliant in the face of mass insecurity, poverty, the demonization of popular protests, starvation, stupidity, incompetent leadership, tyranny, armed kidnappers, herdsmen genocide and police impunity?
These national calamities have brought Nigerians to a defining moment. The once sleepy citizens of Nigeria long subdued by Fulani incompetent governance and tyranny have woken up from their amnesia. The struggle now is for the actualisation of different nations in a balkanised Nigeria that had gone to the dogs of Fulani recalcitrant hegemony.
Yoruba nation project is nearing actualisation. The intellectual push from Professor Banji Akintoye, the grassroots support from Igboho Oosha and other Yoruba collectives are potent synergies made from heaven. The valorous IPOBians under the leadership of the jailed Nnamdi Kanu are getting ready for their final push for a Biafran homeland. Nothing is going to stop these self-determination trains until they get to their destination. If necessity is the mother of invention; desperation is the stepmother.
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However, going by the voices of the Fulani slave drivers, self-determination is demonised as treasonable felony and harbinger of chaos, confusion, and violence. Lie from hell! If dissolution will bring in chaos and violence, has twenty-three years of unbroken democracy not delivered Nigeria into the deeper end of chaotic charade and violence never seen in our peacetime?
Are we not paying dearly with our blood for Buhari’s incompetence? Should we, as a nation, continue to hibernate perpetually in the daily darkness of death, decay, confusion, and stagnation?
Nigeria is today ranked as the third most terrorised nation in the world. Blimey! The nineteen states of the North should, as a matter of urgency, cede away their land to Boko Haram and allow the Fulani hegemony its own Islamic, sharia-governed entity for the sake of peace. Abu Zaid, the one-time Boko Haram spokesman while rejecting dialogue with the government said, “It is mandatory for Islam to have a sovereign land where Sharia is being practiced in the strict sense so that the dialogue will be between the Islamic country and the country of the unbelievers.”
This is a language of secession. This means that the Northern Nigeria should become a sovereign Islamic country and its future dialogue, if any, will then be with the secular Southern Nigeria from which it formally seceded. Since Buhari is not ready to guarantee Boko Haram a sharia homeland and coupled with his inability to offer protection to Southern Nigeria, it is morally right and politically pragmatic for Southerners to vigorously chart their separate nationalities from a nation that is bleeding from many cuts.
The old articles of faith in one nation have suddenly dwindled by the terror and conceit of classic Fulani hubristic over-reach that had become obstinate, oppressive, deaf, and dumb to voices of restraint, caution, and reason. Buhari is guilty of Vietnamisation of Nigeria. Buhari is guilty of the bloodbaths cascading across Nigeria. He is guilty of kidnapped Nigerians. He is guilty of every ransom paid to kidnappers. He is guilty of aiding, abetting, and defending the Northern armed Fulani barbarians against other Nigerians. He must hear these charges loud and clear. The election of 2023 is a delusive trap to further Fulani shameless boast that they own Nigeria and that the rest of us are slaves. The disruption of normalcy has just begun. Yoruba ile ya! Forget 2023 election. Fulani war is here. Are you prepared?
