‘Clamping Down on Fulani Criminal Agitation’: Yoruba, Obasanjo and Democracy in Nigeria

By

Abdullahi Bego

[TEHRAN]

abego5@yahoo.com

Ordinarily sentiments such as those expressed by Femi Awoniyi in Stoning, Impeachment: Obasanjo, Ironsi and Fulani Agitation should be left, for what they are, for the consumption of those Nigerians diseased by the plague of ethnic chauvinism which has became the sad commentary of politics in Nigeria since the beginning of the current democratic dispensation. But the sweeping generalizations in Femi’s diatribe, his crude, hitleric assumptions and his discourse in fanning the embers of hatred in a country so much in need of pacific modifiers make some intervention necessary.

I begin from the position that, in what has transpired so far in the drama that is Nigeria’s politics, the vocal Yoruba elites are the most undemocratic group of Nigerians. Their ‘democratic intervention’ through NADECO, NALICON and sundry platforms during the locust years of Abacha, it now is clear, was but a diabolic contraption to lure donour dollars from abroad and to use same to achieve an ethnic agenda, an agenda reminiscent of the 1994 barbarity in Rwanda. But I digress.

In a travesty of rhetorical strategy, Femi Awoniyi wrote of the president’s incessant Foreign trips as being ‘not only inappropriate but, sometimes, they, like the most recent ones to Jamaica and Barbados, amount to indifference to the fate of the country’. And the president who is so indifferent to his country as to engage in over a hundred junkets in his three years in office, according to a Thisday editorial, and who has ‘alienated many constituencies in our polity’ according to Femi Awoniyi, must not fail to react decisively to his detractors. These detractors, in Femi’s thesis, are the Fulani, including Obasanjo’s ‘Fulani advisers and ministers’.

It is needless to state the contributions of the ‘detractor’ Fulani ministers in the defence of the Obasanjo administration from the barrage of criticisms daily heaved on it from all nooks and crannies of the country for the same indifference that Femi was writing about. Nor is it necessary to ground the support given by ‘many legislators who normally would have been expected to back the president’ in the ‘impeachment joke’ whose script was ‘written by the Fulani establishment’, or in the political economy of the tenuous relationship between the Presidency and the National Assembly. 

But it has to be stated that the Fulani, like other Nigerians, have equal rights to voice concerns over matters that affect them as a people especially in a polity priding itself democratic. In Kano, as Jerry Gana, Obasanjo’s suave information minister, stated, the President was received well and accorded the respect deserving of the leader of the country and a statesman. That some insignificant number of youths came out to  demand  for the release of Mohammed Abacha should not gloss over the outpouring of welcome, support and attention accorded the President’s visit. The youth’s action should be seen for what it was: Demand for equality before the law.

Obasanjo could well have attended the launching of a ‘worthless book’ in Kano, as Femi mischievously stated. But rather than belittling anyone, Femi was in fact making a mockery of Baba’s intelligence. Femi was saying that President Olusegun Obasanjo is a deft political calculator who is either unaware or out rightly ignorant of his political needs in a polity facing elections. Like his foreign junkets, Femi was saying that Obasanjo visited Kano because he had nothing doing at Aso Rock. I wonder what Femi sought to achieve in this rhetorical suicide.

But it is all the more indication of the evil intentions of the vocal Yoruba elites as they harangue to entrench an ethnic agenda. It was the same people who strongly opposed Obasanjo for the presidency after Providence snatched him away from the claws of death. The same people who continue to use the OPC ethnic militia to cause mayhem in order to drive away or scare potential investors from accepting the incentives offered by the Obasanjo administration to invest in the country. The same people who continue to soil the image of Nigeria abroad through their fraudulent business practices… 

No, detribalized Yoruba, Igbo and other Nigerians living in the north and prospering for years in business practices know too well who their true enemies were. They also know that the Fulani, for whom Femi harbours so much hatred, are very accommodating. That is why more and more Yoruba and others are staying in and trooping to the north. Femi can check out anytime he was in Nigeria. 

In today’s Nigeria, in my view, the accurate problematisation of the country’s numerous socio-economic and political dilemmas should be grounded in the government’s inability to put to practice sound economic policies, to fight corruption as truly as it made public its intention to do when it was sworn to office over three years ago and to embrace the political philosophy that accommodates opposing viewpoints. The solution to these quagmires should be the concern of all Nigerians who have the love of the country at heart.

As 2003 inches closer and Obasanjo eyeing to remain in Aso Rock for another four years, the Femis of this world will do him enormous good by either holding their venomous pens or by writing objectively.

ABDULLAHI BEGO writes from Tehran, IR Iran (email abego5@yahoo.com).