By Moses Ochonu
I don't envy my brother, Samuel Aruwan, his job
as Press Secretary to Governor Nasir el-Rufai. It is becoming increasingly
impossible to defend and rationalize the tyranny and erratic dictatorial
tendencies of the governor. As governor, he seems to think that the state he
governs is his private estate to control and dominate, and that he is beyond
reproach.
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| *President Buhari and Nasir el-Rufai |
And now, it is safe to say we can add the crime of insensitivity and
incompetence to the governor's list of infractions. I couldn't believe the
headline when I saw it: "How I Paid Fulani Herdsmen to Stop Kaduna Southern Kaduna
proves that the Vanguard report, which copiously quotes the governor's own
words verbatim, faithfully reflects what the governor said. The quotes are
completely accurate. You can question the obvious sensationalism of the
headline, but el-Rufai practically cast that headline for them with his words.
So here is what the governor scandalously confessed to:
1.
The governor said Fulani herders from Niger, Cameroon, Chad, and other
neighboring West African countries are responsible for the massacres, which he
claims are revenge for the loss of their cattle and kinsmen during the 2011 post
election crisis.
Perhaps this is true. Perhaps he is merely trying to externalize the
problem. It is always very convenient to blame foreigners. Even Buhari did the
same when Agatu happened. What el-Rufai does not realize is that blaming
foreign Fulani herdsmen is self-indicting. It also indicts our security
services and the administration of President Buhari. For how is it that these
Fulani from neighboring countries are able to breach our borders at will while
fully armed and make their way deep into the Southern Kaduna hinterlands,
murder women and children, burn down whole communities, and melt away
unchallenged to visit the same genocidal treatment on another community? At the
very least, it indicates that we've totally lost control of our northern
borders. The way the governor said it indicates that he doesn't see this breach
of our borders by armed herdsmen as a problem. Rather, for reasons known only
to him, he sees it as a normal seasonal migration by herdsmen. Does our border
not mean anything?
2.
The governor said they sent emissaries to these neighboring countries to plead
with the murderous, invading Fulani clans to stop the attack. According to him
some of the attackers accepted the plea and promised to halt attacks while
others asked and were paid compensation for lost cattle in order to stop.
This is the most scandalous part of the governor's revealing
statement. El-Rufai has just confessed to paying off murderous, genocidal
Fulani herdsmen attackers, who are foreigners, and who crossed our country's
border fully armed and proceeded to massacre, maim, and destroy communities in
the Southern Kaduna sector. He has confessed
that, instead of working with the said neighboring countries to apprehend and
punish these self-confessed murderous herdsmen, he in fact begged some of them
and paid off others. This tells every Nigerian all they need to know about (a)
the governor's and the government's utter helplessness or unwillingness to
frontally confront the Fulani herdsmen menace confronting Nigeria; (b) the
treasonous propensity to treat the murderous herdsmen as victims deserving
coddling, cajoling, and payoff; and (c) the tendency to blame the real victims.
What kind of precedence does paying off and begging foreign Fulani
herdsmen mass murderous set? Completely missing from the governor's statements
is an acknowledgement of the root of the problem – the ability of these foreign
herdsmen to breach our borders and invade communities everywhere, who are then
massacred with AK-47s when they object to the invasion. An unwillingness to
acknowledge this root of the problem is precisely what authorizes the desperate
and counterproductive resort to payoffs, which focuses on the symptom rather
than the disease.
And yet, the same Governor el-Rufai has the temerity to threaten
with prosecution sympathetic patriots who are asking the endangered Southern Kaduna peoples to defend themselves against the
attempt by these murderous herdsmen to exterminate them. Here are the
governor's own inexplicably asinine words:
"There are
people that are sending a message, defend yourselves, we will get them; defend
yourself is hate speech. You can’t defend yourself if there is a government. We
are going to arrest and prosecute all those that pass that message."
Nonsense!! A government has proved incapable of protecting you
against genocide in your ancestral homeland; it has proved incapable of
preventing the invasion of foreign killer Fulani herdsmen who threaten your
very existence as a people; the same government proceeds to pay off the mass
murderers, with the possibility that some of them could even use this money to
buy more arms to attack you; meanwhile, the attacks have continued almost on a
weekly basis, targeting new communities. I guess the governor wants you to be a
sitting duck and wait for your turn to face the bullets of the said murderous
herdsmen instead of defending yourself, your land, the honor of your women, and
the existence of your community. What a callous and vicariously murderous
position for the chief executive of a state to take. In what society and by
what logic is self-defense a crime? Blaming the victims and appeasing the mass
murderers do not constitute hate speech but calling on a beleaguered people to
defend themselves against murderous herdsmen that the government has proved
incapable or unwilling to confront is hate speech?
Away with this tyranny!! If el-Rufai cannot protect the people of Southern Kaduna and cannot work with Buhari to secure the
border against the armed invasion of killer foreign herdsmen (assuming he is
right that the murderers are foreign herdsmen), he should at least refrain from
further insulting the communities being decimated.
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