Femi
Awoniyi
The
latest impeachment scare might end up teaching our president a good lesson, if
his aides would let him learn from it. For the impeachment is only the latest in
the unceasing attempts to frustrate this government. Political shariah,
political assassinations, terror attacks, riots, etc. This government, or better
said, this country has been under siege for the past three years.
Foreign
trips
The
president is encouraged to continue to travel around the world; to sell Nigeria
to the international investment community, they say. But,
investors, hard-calculating business people, do not reach a decision to go to a
land simply because its president came visiting. The reality on the ground in
Nigeria is what will determine the decision of an investor. And that reality is
very uninviting. That much has been shown by the cold attitude of trans-national
companies to the country’s privatisation programme.
The
president’s incessant foreign trips are not only inappropriate, but sometimes,
they, like the most recent ones to Jamaica and Barbados, amount to indifference
to the fate of the country. A German journalist, correspondent in Nigeria for a
news organisation here, described them as an ”act of abuse of office”.
The
reality is that no serious investor whose activities would bring us benefits
would come to Nigeria now. If the president is not indulging in a private hobby
of globetrotting at our expense, he should stay at home and face our problems
squarely.
The
recent Kano stoning incident shows that the president is a victim of bad advice.
The president’s PR men would like us to believe that nothing untowardly
happened and the visit was a resounding success. However, if the media reports
of the activities of our security forces in the ancient Hausa city during the
president’s 3-day visit are to be believed, then all was not well.
That
helicopters were hovering in the air over the city, that thousands of policemen
and soldiers were deployed in it and that it was under de facto state of
security emergency during the president’s visit show that there were official
apprehensions about the personal security of Obasanjo in Kano.
The
drama that surrounded the presence of elements deemed hostile to Obasanjo, such
as Abubakar Rimi, Wada Nas and Muhammadu Buhari, at the launching of the book in
honour of Ado Bayero is simply funny. The deputy governor of Kano State is said
to have made frantic overtures to the Fulani men, pleading with them to stay
away from the event. Yet they were invited by the emir, who was the celebrant
and Obasanjo’s chief host. The Fulani lord of the ancestral Hausa city did not
deem it fit not to invite the three men as a sign of respect for his august
visitor!
At
the end, the deputy governor was unsuccessful, and Rimi, Nas and Buhari were
present at the event, which youths shouting obscenities about the president
attempted to disrupt. The emir is said to have lost his prepared speech during
an earlier presidential courtesy call during the visit. That says it all.
Why
did President Obasanjo choose to attend the launching of a worthless book? one
is tempted to ask. Who advised him to go there?
The
truth is that there is a grand Fulani conspiracy of which Ado Bayero and other
Fulani lords of Hausaland are part and parcel. The truth is that the youth
protest was planned and carried out with the blessing of Bayero.
The
statements made by Obasanjo’s Fulani advisers and ministers are dishonest
because they seek to hide the real cause of their people’s grievance from
their boss.
Hear
our foreign minister and supposed Obasanjo’s loyalist, Sule Lamido, describing
the Kano incident as a "small storm in a small tea cup," and the city
itself as "a very open society" which "abhors violence, respects
leadership and promotes peace," and whose people are "warm and
peaceful".
Yet
Kano is the epicentre of Fulani-instigated genocidal violence in Nigeria.
It
was in Kano that hundreds of Southern Nigerians were massacred in May 1953
during the infamous Kano riots. The first incident of genocide, that is,
violence specifically targeted against people from particular ethnic or cultural
groups, in modern Nigerian history.
It
was in the same Kano that Igbos and other Eastern Nigerians, in their thousands,
were killed in various bestial ways in 1966; it was in the city that the Fulani
man Mohammed Maitasine Marwa and his murderous followers wantonly killed
thousands of Southerners and Christians in 1981.
It
was in Kano that Yorubas were massacred in 1999, and it was in the Fulani-ruled
Hausa city that Christians and Southerners were again made victims of senseless
bloodletting in October last year, in the name of protesting against American
attacks on Afghanistan!
How
could such a city be described as a ”warm and peaceful place”?
Who
is fooling who?
Fulanis
are taking us for a ride in Nigeria!
Impeachment
Those
criticising Ghali Na’abba for masterminding the latest attempt to embarrass
the president with an impeachment threat are missing the point. The president
has not been paying enough attention to the task for which he was elected hence
the success of the Fulani upstart. In fact, the president’s sycophantic
supporters including the latter-day Yoruba nationalists such as Akinjide, are
doing him a great disservice by not telling him the truth.
Although
the script of the latest impeachment joke was written by the Fulani
establishment, it is being supported by many legislators who normally would have
been expected to back the president.
The
truth is that the president has alienated many constituencies in our polity in
his three years in office. And, paradoxically, he did it in the course of
seeking to pacify his Fulani detractors: He trivialises the issue of resource
control to satisfy ”the North”; he insults Ojukwu publicly, displaying gross
insensibility to the feelings of Igbo people, to assure his Fulani friends of
his ”commitment to a united Nigeria” and his ”abhorrence of secession”.
Simply
because Fulanis are against it Obasanjo continues to ridicule the aspiration of
Nigerians for a much-needed constitutional reengineering of our polity, treating
the issue of national conference as a political football.
He
has refused to emphasise the authority of the Nigerian state by protecting our
peoples from Fulani terror. In the last three years hundred-thousands, if not
millions, of Southern and Christian Nigerians have been migrating from Hausaland
and other areas in the North for fear of Fulani-inspired ethnic and religious
violence. An international organisation will soon release a report of its study
of this ”massive internal migration” in peace time (?). For example, the
population of Offa, Kwara State, has increased by nearly 25 percent within the
spate of three years. The number of the town’s inhabitants has been swollen by
returnees from Kano, Kaduna, Jos, Sokoto, Katsina, etc.
Minister
Lamido would like us to believe that Obasanjo’s detractors are antagonising
him because they are a class ”which is used to a culture of patronage, a
culture of sharing, a culture of taking from where they have not saved, a
culture of appropriating national resources ....."
The
president‘s Fulani detractors are not against him because they can no longer
get access to easy money, like we are made to understand by the president’s
Fulani men, such as Lamido. The president is being deceived, the truth is being
hidden from him. Obasanjo’s
detractors are murderous devotees of Fulani dominance and they include the whole
Fulani establishment, including those serving in the security forces, at the
highest levels of the federal judiciary; the emirs, academics, etc.
Firstly,
the president must recognise the similarity between the agitation against him
today and that against General Aguiyi Ironsi in 1966. Then, Ironsi was accused
of siding, or of being part of the January 15 coup, during which ”Northern”
leaders were killed. Then, Fulani anti-Ironsi agitators campaigned to fellow
Northerners, saying they wanted the deaths of their leaders to be avenged. In
reality they wanted power back from the Igbo general.
Today,
they claim Obasanjo is marginalising ”Northerners”, that he is anti-Islam,
that he allows the OPC to ”massacre Northerners”, etc. But the only thing
they want from him is power. And they won’t stop at nothing if he allows them.
Secondly,
the president is making a mistake that might turn out to be suicidal like
Ironsi’s. He attempts pacifying Fulanis which shows that he does not
understand that the objective of their opposition is his removal from power and
the reversal to status quo ante, especially in the security forces.
Fulanis are against Obasanjo because he is seen to be clipping their power and
the president can only buy off their hostility by vacating his office. That is
the cold truth.
The
president must stop his dangerous politics of appeasement because it only
emboldens his Fulani enemies to raise the stakes in their murderous gamble for
power.
The president must clamp down hard on Fulani criminal agitation in Nigeria. The truth is that the life of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo is in danger. The Fulani men behind the Kano incident have names and are known. If the president fails to react decisively to the challenge of these his detractors, he would be digging his own grave and probably that of Nigeria.