Salle Bayare, my friend and a fellow journalist, as I earlier indicated, is a Fulani man. These days, I read in the newspapers – with shock – his inflammatory statements about the Fulani martial superiority and his own justifications of the herdsmen attacks and massacres in the Benue valley. He is in good company of one Mr Gololo, a leader of the Miyetti Allah, the association of herdsmen in Benue who shocked the whole civilised world when he declared in a BBC Hausa interview that the herdsmen carried out the attacks that led to the massacre of women and children in Guma and Logo Local Government on New Years’ day because their cattle were rustled by the villagers. Another unrepentant irredentist of the Fulani is one Professor Muhammad Labdo of the Maitama University in Kano, who provoked a controversy with his comments in an interview with The Punch in February, this year that Benue belongs to the Fulani by right of conquest.
Such comments are very unhelpful and have tended to promote the crisis from what it was originally-demand for arable land-to an ethnic and religious one.
What has made matters worse is that the current President Muhammadu Buhari is a Fulani man. The crisis started long before he was elected President. The mere fact that his ascendancy to the presidency has coincided with a new aggression on the part of the Fulani men makes him suspect in the eyes of the victims. Worse still is his reaction to the new aggression.
Last year, he as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces formed a special army squad to tackle the menace of cattle rustling in Zamfara State. At that time, he donned on his army uniform and went to launch the squad in Zamfara. Whereas, there had been massacres all over Benue and particularly in Agatu area of the state where a whole local government was sacked and occupied by herdsmen who murdered hundreds of people. The situation in Benue did not attract anything near the attention he gave Zamfara. In Benue, this was perceived as a discriminatory act; that the President cared more about his kinsmen and their cattle than the Benue people.
Amazingly, the same President who admonished Benue leaders to go home and accommodate their compatriots now accused the late Libyan leader, Muhammar Gaddafi, of training the murderers who invaded Benue. Nigeria has no borders with Libya. Even if it had, Benue is a landlocked state with no international boundaries
Other actions by the President and his government have not helped matters. When the massacre of villagers took place in January this year, many people thought the President would rush there and sympathise with the people. He did not. When Governor Samuel Ortom led a delegation of Benue State leaders to see and cry over his shoulders, he sternly told them to go back home and accommodate their compatriots. Indirectly, the President heaped the blame of the crisis on the Benue people.
When the news first broke out about the massacre, the President issued a public statement that he had directed the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to move to Benue and ensure the return of normalcy. The IGP went there and spent a few hours and left. When the President went to Benue two months later and was told that the IGP he instructed to come and restore peace in Benue had only paid a flying visit to the state, he feigned ignorance that the orders he gave had been ignored.
On a recent visit to the United States, the President exonerated herdsmen of the massacres. He said herdsmen do not carry guns but sticks and cutlasses. Amazingly, the same President who admonished Benue leaders to go home and accommodate their compatriots now accused the late Libyan leader, Muhammar Gaddafi, of training the murderers who invaded Benue. Nigeria has no borders with Libya. Even if it had, Benue is a landlocked state with no international boundaries. So how did Libyans become compatriots of Benue citizens that the President wants accommodated?
If the President has no clear view of the ongoing killings in the Benue valley, the babel of voices coming from his top security aides is even more baffling. After news broke of the New Year massacre, Ibrahim Idris, the IGP, waved it off as a mere communal clash. Later he blamed the crisis on the anti-open grazing law that was passed into law by the Benue State House of Assembly and assented to by Governor Ortom. It did not occur to the Inspector General that the killings had been going on before the passage of that bill and were still going on in states where anti-open grazing laws were not in effect.
His Minister of Defence said Fulani herdsmen did it because the grazing routes created for them by colonial government were blocked and that the massacre was a logical consequence of the blockade. A spokesman of the Department of Security Service said the massacres were carried out by foreign mercenaries.
The President’s close security aides have remained a source of distrust between the President and his critics. The fact that all his service chiefs but one-the Chief of Naval Staff-are practising Muslims has opened him to accusations that he has a secret plan to Islamise the north and the whole country. These suspicions have become more persistent with his decision to keep them in office even when their tenure of office has expired.
The suspicion that Buhari plans to Islamise Nigeria became most pronounced when suspected herdsmen in the early hours of 24th April stormed St. Ignatius Catholic Church, Ukpor-Mbalom Parish, Gwer East Local Government area of Benue State, killing two Catholic priests and 17 parishioners. This charge is further reinforced by the fact that most of the communities under the herdsmen’s attack in the Benue valley-Southern Kaduna, Plateau, Nasarawa, Benue, Taraba and Adamawa are-predominantly inhabited by Christians. It is difficult to convince Christians who are at the receiving end of these attacks that the President means well especially when his security agencies fail to secure their lives.
The claims of turning Nigeria into an Islamic state reached such a pitch that that when President Buhari went to see President Bush at the White House in Washington recently, the US President said he had heard about the killings of Christians in Nigeria and that his country will not sit back and allow such a thing to happen.
Thus, a crisis that had nothing to do with religion and ethnicity has been allowed through the incompetence of people in government to fester and become a major threat to our national security. The most unfortunate development is that even as the country moves closer to the 2019 general elections, no solution appears to be found to this frightening national menace.
(Concluded)
*Yawe, a veteran journalist and public affairs analyst, is Member, Board of Advisers of The Point.
