Homicide as culture
My soul creeps at the sight of the gory photographs from the killing fields of Benue where over 30 persons in Guma and Logo local government areas were gruesomely hacked to death. Images of half-decapitations, maimings, savage stabs resulting in gaping holes, skull-crushing machete cuts …. It was a throwback to Rwanda all over again; or Kenya at the height of post-election fratricide. It was a unique kind of butchery executed with the vilest form of hate from the pits of hell.
In my view, the murderers can’t use ethnicity to cover their true identity terrorists. The Fulani man that I know is not some fiend sneaking into your bedroom under the cover of darkness to kill and dismember you and your family. In Lagos of the 50s, we had the “Agunmu-dada-ni” Fulani medicine hawkers who also doubled at times as marabouts and magicians. After selling off their cattle, they went round town peddling those aforementioned tricks to make some extra cash. They were fun to be with.
At times like this, I wish I was Fulani so that I could, in righteous indignation, climb the rooftop and denounce those murderers the same way I denounced the perceived excesses of the OPC some years ago. In a country where tribal sentiments run deep, it is very easy for mischief makers to read ethnic motives to everything, including Logic 101.
There is nothing in the Fulani blood that predisposes him to homicide. All those who are trying to mystify a clear case of criminality had better separate the tribe from the crime. An OPC member from the Southwest can’t use a tribal cover to justify murder in whatever form. A MASSOB member in the Southeast can’t wave his Igboness as toga to kill non-natives nor can a Tiv, Idoma or Igede person do the same. Murder is murder.
Last year, there was a communal clash between some locals in Ile-Ife and Hausa settlers in the Sabo area of the town. Lives were lost. The police swiftly swooped on some Ife indigenes and chiefs, and took them to Abuja for interrogation. The Ooni of Ife reportedly shielded over 1,000 northerners from attacks during the crisis and donated relief materials. Later, he and Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi visited the area to restore confidence in the victims and mend fences between them and their hosts.
Nobody at that time dismissed the Ife crisis as just one more instance of communal clash as the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, did last week while briefing journalists after a closed-door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari. Mr. IG, where are the suspects? How come nobody has ever been charged in any of the killings by murderous herdsmen all over the country, whether in Abia, or Shaki or Kaduna or Enugu or Agatu or Akure? The police haven’t shown any interest even in the recent admission by one Garus Gololo that his fellow Fulani pastoralists carried out the killings. Where does that group derive the extra-judicial power of life and death?
Significantly, the spokesperson of Miyetti Allah, Alhaji Yusuf Ardo has reiterated his people’s commitment to peace: “We are peace loving people, we believe in love for one another. Any Fulani pastoralist that doesn’t believe in peace is not part of us.”
It has been the habit of every IG since the military overthrew our parliamentary constitution in 1966 to justify the centralisation of policing in Nigeria. The bigger the empire the fatter the budget. There is nowhere in the world where a country as large and complex as Nigeria is centrally policed. It has never worked and it will never work.
During the First Republic, there were federal, regional and local government police services. The cooperation among the three led to the solving of the Apalara murder case which would have been impossible to solve with the current structure of the police.
When the Agatu killings happened, the police said, never again. Since then several killings have happened. They will continue to happen as long as we continue to call murder or instalmental genocide by another name.
In his paper titled “The Great Unravelling: The Disintegration of the Nigerian State”, Chris Ngwodo notes as follows: “In the Middle Belt, farming communities have been plagued by militant pastoralists in raids that have claimed several thousand lives in the past five years. These incidents have been recorded most notably in Southern Kaduna, the Jos Plateau, the Benue Valley, the Mambilla Plateau and in Adamawa … In 2015, the Global Terrorism Index ranked pastoral Fulani militias as the fourth deadliest terror group in the world, exceeded in blood-thirst only by Boko Haram, Isis and al Shabab….”
He argues further that, “The endorsements of vigilantism by state governors indicate their own lack of confidence in the formal security apparatus of the state … Hollowed out by graft and incompetence, the Nigerian State no longer has a monopoly of violence. It can no longer project its will across the length and breadth of the nation. Violence has been privatized by a host of non-state actors many of which are anti-establishment in character and anarchic in orientation.”
Where next? And when? The sight of a defenceless populace crying out to their equally helpless governor who in turn is crying out to God because although Nigeria calls him an executive governor, he is but a ceremonial chief security officer - must be the saddest photo in circulation.