Will Herdsmen Plunge Nigeria Into Food Crisis?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

One of the most worrisome developments in today’s Nigeria is what appears like a firm resolve by the Muhammadu Buhari regime to continue circulating the very distressful impression that it does not know how to solve the endless aggression being unleashed in different parts of the country by Fulani herdsmen who move and operate as if there are no laws in the land capable of containing the menace of troublesome people.

The soft targets of these herders are usually harmless and toiling farmers whom they gruesomely slaughter in their farms, and innocent villagers, whose homes, according to reports, they invade mostly in the middle of the night and set them ablaze. When the people are suddenly roused from sleep by the raging inferno and run out in confusion, they are mowed down by the waiting assailants.

And despite the volume of media reports on the gory occurrences, nothing usually happens: no one will be arrested, tried and jailed. With no one raising a hand to protect or  seek justice for them, the traumatized people will weep and get tired, quietly bury their dead, that is, if they are able to find their corpses and mourn them silently, probably, fearing that any noise from them might offend their killers and bring them back for more bloody exploits. Then they will leave their village and move elsewhere in the neighbouring communities to seek shelter since their homes have been destroyed. They have become refugees in their own country for no fault of theirs.

Nigeria Is On The Boil Again

By Dan Amor

There is a lamentable and disturbing magnitude of violence in Nigeria. So is crime. The country is constantly on the boil. The atmosphere in the country has been nothing but a tawny volcano. The situation conveys at once the chief features of the Nigerian spirit: it is vertical, spontaneous, immaterial, upward. It is ardent. And even as tongues of fire do, it turns into fire everything it touches. What we are experiencing today is induced by poverty, hunger, frustration, apathy, desperation and sectional or tribal expansionist ambition.

In the midst of the misery and lack that is the lot of our youth and other Nigerians, a few Nigerians are still swimming in affluence and under the best security system and protection one can think of. What has indeed compounded the Nigerian misfortune is the sheer bravado, if not braggadocio with which Fulani herdsmen are butchering other Nigerians on a large scale across the country. This is even happening without the sitting government raising an eyebrow against it. Many Nigerians even believe that the Federal Government of President Buhari is culpable in the mass hysteria afflicting the country. It hardly seems a time for timidity and restraint.

President Buhari And The Herdsmen

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

In a seeming bid to douse his increasing credibility crisis, President Muhammadu Buhari has now belatedly realised the need to absolve himself of killings by herdsmen. No longer does he find comfort in his practised silence in the face of the citizens’ outrage at the atrocities being committed by herdsmen.

*Pres Buhari and Gov El-Rufai

But Buhari’s newfangled disposition has failed to prove the fast-expanding camp of the naysayers wrong. Rather, what has become clear is that Buhari has bungled another opportunity to shore up his credibility. Thus, Buhari’s defence of himself ended up being a reinforcement of his history of incapability to meet the demands of his high office.

Nigeria: Now An Abattoir Under President Buhari

By Reno Omokri

In July 2012, clashes between natives and herdsmen reached a head in Plateau state leading to tens of deaths on both sides. Then President Goodluck Jonathan, when briefed about the situation insisted that there wouldn’t be such impunity under his leadership and immediately ordered the army to go to the affected communities and fish out the perpetrators and bring them to book.

The military immediately obeyed the then President’s orders and sent troops to Barkin Ladi Local Government Area. They ordered all residents to leave their residence for temporary accommodation provided for them so they could conduct a joint air and ground operation to flush out the armed herdsmen who had been suspected of killing innocent Nigerians. 

As Wicked As The Nigerian State

By Dan Amor

Anyone living in Nigeria especially since the 2015 general elections and the subsequent emergence of General Muhammadu Buhari as President would have known that politically the nation is sitting on the keg of gun powder. There is a regime of palpable fear in the land as the political thermometer cannot easily be interpreted by analysts no matter how discerning they might be. The situation is compounded by an unnerving weight of mayhem that appears to have engulfed the entire geo-political space like a cankerworm. Rampaging Fulani herdsmen on killing spree have turned many states in the North West and North Central, and many parts of Southern Nigeria to killing fields thereby sentencing thousands of armless Nigerians to their early graves without a blink of an eyelid from the government.

*President Buhari 

In fact, the quality of democratic practice in the past two and a half years has been abysmal, with public functionaries at all levels of government consciously exploiting the weaknesses of the system to advance interests that run counter to the common good. Within the same administration, the Directorate of State Services and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission are at daggers drawn just as the Ministry of Justice and the same EFCC do not see eye to eye. There is a huge disconnect in the security architecture of the country. Aside from Boko Haram and herdsmen insurgency, there are still pockets of mockery killings and kidnappings across the country. In spite of all this, the government does not care any hoot about the survival of the average Nigerian amidst the total collapse of social infrastructure across the country.

The Bestiality In Southern Kaduna

By Dan Amor

Irrational impulses are not surprising in the stress and tension that characterize a demented society. In an atmosphere of violence, reason is sometimes abandoned and humanitarian principles forgotten. The inflamed passions of the time lead men to commit atrocities. But the concern here is not with the psychological pathology of those who commit atrocities but rather with what has turned our nation into a slaughterhouse where human beings are daily killed with intimidating alacrity. 

*President Buhari and Gov El-Rufai

Throughout modern history, atrocity propaganda has often mesmerized readers thousands of kilometres from the scene of the crime. Often, the improbability of the actions described suggests that the stories were little more than fantasies concocted for diverse reasons from even more diverse sources.

But the reading public in Nigeria has invariably evinced a morbid absorption with the most nightmarish aspects of this national aberration. It is indeed fashionable to observe that material which should create a moral aversion to the cruelty of our present times often produces a perverse fascination instead. There is, candidly speaking, an alarming rate of mockery killings in Nigeria, especially under the Buhari administration. There are gruesome stories of rapes, mutilations, perversities and child and mother murders. An extremely partisan and sympathetic public is willing to read and believe almost anything, if it were tinged with sadism. It is hard to explain why the change promised Nigerians by Buhari and his yea Sayers has come with enormous burden including death. Much of the savagery connected with our current bloodletting could be explained in the violence inherent in the characters of the buccaneers who have misruled us for all these miserable years.

If truly democracy is preferred to military rule all over the world, why are Nigerians going through this hell of experience in a democratic dispensation? Why is the government turning a blind eye to the holocaust and pornography of violence going on in Southern Kaduna? If Governor Nasir el Rufai of Kaduna state's revelation that: "the Fulani herdsmen who are killing Nigerians are from other West African States", is true, why are his government and the Federal Government allowing militants from other countries free access to slaughter other ethnic nationalities and the Christian communities in Southern Kaduna? Why are Nigerians objects of intimidation, genocidal massacre, annihilation, rape and abysmal extermination in their country? Why is the Federal Government exonerating itself from responsibility and complicity in the bestiality in Southern Kaduna while claiming that the state government is capable of managing the situation in Southern Kaduna? If the marauders are invaders from other countries, why did el Rufai pay them ostensibly to halt the killings?

El-Rufai’s Blunders And The Christmas Killings In Southern Kaduna

By Moses E. Ochonu

For the people of Kaninkon Kingdom in Southern Kaduna, this was a bleak Christmas. On Christmas Eve and on Christmas day armed Fulani herdsmen attacked and destroyed Goska village, killing, maiming, and burning. This attack occurred in spite of the area having been put under a 24-hour curfew by the state government, an indication of the brazenness and sense of impunity on the part of the well-armed attackers.

*Nasir el-Rufai

The attack is part of a broader genocidal war against the people of Southern Kaduna, a war that is in its fifth year and has killed thousands of people in their homes and farms and destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands more. As we speak an estimated 53 villages lay in ruins, some of them occupied by Fulani herdsmen and their cattle, a forceful annexation that recalls the similarly forceful displacement in Agatu.

Let’s be clear: the crisis predates the administration of Governor Nasir el-Rufai, so he cannot be accused of causing it or of being behind it as some people are insinuating. However, his utterances and actions in the past and the present have exacerbated the problem and emboldened the attackers. An ill-tempered man given to incendiary, inciting, and divisive outbursts, el-Rufai has made several egregious errors in dealing with the crisis. Some of these errors are errors of approach, thinking, and mentality. The errors have inspired actions that have wittingly or unwittingly transformed what was a low level series of massacres into a full-blown genocide.

To understand some of the governor’s current failures in dealing with the killings, you have to understand his past utterances, his incendiary character, his insensitivity, and his inability to moderate his thinking and resultant public expressions, all of which offer clues about why he has no credibility or political capital to solve the problem and why he is widely perceived as part of the problem, not its solution. Let’s consider the governor’s many problems in this regard.

El-Rufai is widely regarded as a Fulani supremacist, and with good reason. On July 12, 2012, he tweeted the following: “We will write this for all to read. Anyone, soldier or not that kills the Fulani takes a loan repayable one day no matter how long it takes.” The governor’s response to the killings in Southern Kaduna has been eerily consistent with this mindset. In a recent chat with newsmen in Kaduna, the governor made three statements that substantiate this Fulani supremacist statement from four years ago.

First, he said when he became governor, he traced the attackers to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger and sent a message to them that one of their own, a Fulani like them, was now governor. This statement displays a spectacularly parochial mentality. A governor of a Nigerian state was basically making appeals based on ethnic kinship and brotherhood to a group of foreign killers of people in his own Nigerian state! In other words, he was appeasing his murderous foreign kinsmen at the expense of indigenes of his state who are not his ethnic kinsmen but whose safety and interests he swore to defend. The governor’s shocking statement indicates that ethnic solidarity trumped his constitutional obligations to protect Southern Kaduna citizens from the external threats of foreign Fulani herdsmen.

Second, the governor told the journalists that the crisis began in the aftermath of the 2011 presidential elections when foreign Fulani herdsmen passing through Southern Kaduna were attacked, with some of them killed and their cattle stolen. The governor claimed that the ongoing genocidal killings are revenge for the 2011 attacks.