Alarmed by the escalating bloodletting, kidnapping and destruction of farmland perpetrated by Fulani herdsmen almost everywhere, prominent Nigerians have warned of the rapid descent into anarchy if the current nonchalance of the Federal Government persists. Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, is the latest concerned statesman to express grave misgivings about the unserious manner the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), is handling the killer herders’ menace. Strict enforcement of the law is needed to protect innocent and law-abiding citizens. But stricter enforcement is required to prevent crime, arrest criminals and bring them to justice. The Buhari regime has failed on both counts.
The criminal Fulani herders’ campaign of cruelty and horror across the country must be arrested by all legal means. Soyinka pointedly declared that the current situation across the country, particularly in the South-West, might develop into a civil war. “What do they expect of us now that the war is on our doorstep? Of course, there will be mobilisation and if we keep waiting for this to be centrally handled, we are all going to become, if not already, slaves in our land. That to me is personally intolerable. It is not an acceptable condition…whatsoever it takes, I stand ready to contribute in any way and I have made my governor understand this; that we are here not just to live in, but to live in dignity. Right now, our dignity is being rubbished.”
Truly, the right to be valued and respected for their own sake and to be treated with dignity is being serially violated by a regime that does not care a hoot whether people live or die. “My forest is being taken over, it’s been shrinking, and my normal hunting ground is shrinking. My family tells me that if I go in depth again, they will have me institutionalised,” Soyinka cried out. And this captures the daily existence of millions of citizens who live in fear of being kidnapped or slaughtered by murderous Fulani militants, both those locally sourced and those mobilised from the West and Central African sub-regions, apparently bent on a sinister mission in the country.
According to the International Crisis Group, the Fulani herdsmen have killed more Nigerians than Boko Haram has done since 2018. Under the pretext of herding, they are now entrenching themselves in the South-West forests from where they launch what the Afenifere group rightly describes as “guerrilla attacks” on all and sundry. Over the past weekend, these attacks have produced torrents of blood. The killer herders wreaked havoc in Delta, Ogun, Kaduna, Taraba, Edo, Sokoto and Abia states. Bandits slaughtered 19 people in two local government areas in Kaduna. Dele Olowoniyi was butchered in front of his farmhouse in Imeko Local Government Area of Ogun.
With Buhari looking lost and decidedly reluctant to act against the marauding herders, the awful spectre of civil war looms over the country, as Soyinka said. In the South-West, which is the new killing field of the herders, the citizens are unanimous in saying they can no longer accept the impunity of the killer herders’ invasion of the land of their birth and the humiliation. This is right and legitimate. Some non-state actors, like Sunday ‘Igboho’ Adeyemo, are taking on the murderous invaders in a manner that depicts a state of anomie. A cleric, Tunde Bakare, has argued that with the level of killings in Ibarapaland, “there could be 10,000 Sunday Igbohos” rising up to defend their people soon. In March 2018, a former Defence Minister, Theophilus Danjuma, had also called for self-defence, accusing the security forces of colluding with the Fulani herders to overrun the North-Central region.
This is the time to mobilise all segments of the South-West population to use all legitimate and legal instruments to defend their land, their lives and their property. It is not about politics, it is about self-preservation. Stakeholders should not allow the region to descend to the level of horrors in the North-Central or North-West regions where bandits seize territories, dictate to the government and openly attend meetings with senior government and security officials totting sophisticated arms.
The world has long accepted the principle of self-preservation as essential for human survival and coexistence. “The first law of nature,” said the famed British author, Samuel Butler, “is self-preservation.” It is the “strongest human instinct” and the “central aim of all life activities”, declared Boris Sidis, an American philosopher. The law recognises the right of every person to protect his life and property, including using reasonable force.
The right to free movement quoted by the Presidency and enablers of the herdsmen does not translate to the right to rapine. The constitutional right does not confer on anyone the licence to encroach on private or communal property, destroy others’ livelihood or run businesses outside the law. The UN Human Rights Committee recognises justifications for restrictions on free movement — such as terrorism, national security concerns and public health protection. The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Nigeria is one of the 74 signatories, acknowledges such exceptions within the law.
The Buhari regime should take a keen interest in Ethiopia’s affairs where ethnic crisis is charging at the very existence of the country. There are increasing fears that Ethiopia could break up. Bloomberg reports that violence increased in recent months following the killing of Hachalu Hundessa, a songwriter and activist from the Oromia region, the nation’s largest and most populous, and home to the capital Addis Ababa. In September, unidentified gunmen in the Benishangul-Gumuz region of western Ethiopia killed dozens of people and displaced hundreds. Nigeria, worse than Ethiopia, is still a very fragile country and should be handled with utmost care.
The killer-Fulani atrocious invasion is threatening to derail the country’s democracy, devastate the people, inflict lasting harm on Nigeria’s social fabric and economy and heighten communal tensions across the land. And as Soyinka warned, there are structural reasons to be fearful that the current situation may inadvertently trigger a civil war. This is not alarmist or separatist—it is, in fact, the only sensible way to avert it.
So what is to be done? The six South-West states’ governors and other centres of influence should ensure that the unprecedented violence unleashed on the region is stopped. The various anti-open grazing laws and other policy measures to maintain law and order in the region should be strictly enforced. The Amotekun project should not be politicised, but empowered properly to curb the menace of banditry.
Buhari must demonstrate that he is aware of the gathering storm; he can arrest the drift by an even-handed response to stop criminality anywhere in the country. “In a time of tension,” declared the late John F, Kennedy, “it is more important than ever to unite.” Buhari should not allow narrow vested or sectional interests to destabilise the national order. He should immediately order the disarming of herdsmen across the country. Foreign herders who have taken over Nigerian forests and groves should be tracked down, dislodged and sent back to where they came from.
Nigerians need more than ever before to collaborate to combat insecurity. Policing should be decentralised and practical steps should be taken to restructure and reorganise the country into a truly stable, competitive federal system.
