On a Monday in
September 2015, former finance minister, Chief Olu Falae was on his farm in
Ilado near Akure when some armed men came looking for him. At gunpoint, they
abducted him and held him until the following Thursday. At the age of 77,
he was made to walk several kilometres. He was made to sleep in the rain.
According to his own account published in some national dailies, every half an
hour, his armed abductors threatened: “Baba, we are going to kill you. If
you don’t give us money we are going to kill you.”
 |
| *Cardinal Okogie |
By 2018, herdsmen were wreaking havoc in the
states of the middle belt of Nigeria. Then, a retired Chief of Army Staff, a
veteran of military intervention in Nigerian politics, General Theophilus
Danjuma, warned that there was ethnic cleansing in the middle belt. Having lost
confidence in the government’s willingness or ability to deal with the
situation, General Danjuma called on the people of the middle belt to take
responsibility for their own security. The reaction of aides to the President
of the Federal Republic was to insult him and call him names he did not deserve
to bear.
