This Could Lead To War

By Ochereome Nnanna

 ON Wednesday last week, I was at the Enugu State High Court to attend a session. Shortly before 10am, a large number of prisoners, accompanied by their wardens, arrived. 

President Buhari The prisoners’ warden who came to our own courtroom with his wards stood with us in the corridor as the court was packed with lawyers, plaintiffs, respondents, court staff and other interested persons. After a while, a discussion naturally came up about the menace of Fulani cattle herders all over the country.

The prison warden who obviously hailed from Enugu State opened up and said the situation in the state was “horrible”. “I went to my hometown last weekend. I was just resting in my room in the afternoon when, all of a sudden I started hearing ‘hm-hm-hm’. I looked out of my window into my garden. I was shocked at what I saw: cows everywhere! They were eating everything in the garden. I came out and saw three young Fulani men. They were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, the type that we in the Service never have the opportunity to touch. The boys just looked at me and continued to mind their cows. There was nothing I could do because I knew they were ready to shoot at any slightest opportunity”.

Barely five days later on Monday, 25th April, there was breaking news all over the Internet on an outbreak of fighting between Fulani herdsmen and indigenes in Nimbo, Uzo Uwani Local Government Area, a northern precinct of Enugu State. According to the news which was later confirmed, seven villages in Nimbo (Nimbo Ngwoko, Ugwuijoro, Ekwuru, Ebor, Enugu Nimbo, Umuome, and Ugwuachara) were attacked by the herdsmen, leaving between 40 and 48 people dead (many with their throats slit, Boko Haram style) and over 60 injured. 

Residential homes and a church were razed. Indigenes of the community fled to nearby Nsukka town. Can I hear you say: “Agatu Season 2”? Come to think of it: Agatu is not far from Uzo Uwani. Benue and Enugu share a common boundary. It would seem that, having “conquered” Agatu, the Fulani militia deployed to take over the South East. News had it that days to the attack, there were rumours that 500 heavily-armed Fulani militiamen were camped in the bushes ready to attack. The Directorate of State Service (DSS) under Director General, Alhaji Lawal Daura, did nothing about it. DSS could not re-enact the speed and expedition with which they allegedly discovered fifty corpses in shallow graves in Abia State, five of which they identified as being those of people of Fulani stock, though they did not tell us the ethnic background of the rest forty five dead men. 

It was not until these vandals had despatched innocent and defenceless villagers to their early graves that we got reports of police and military deployment to the area. Perhaps, they were there to shut the stable door after the horse had escaped. That is the type of “law enforcement” the security agencies of this country are very good at providing. Before now, people were asking who these “herdsmen” really were. For me, it is not just who they are that matters the most, as that is now obvious. What interests me more is: what really is their mission?

Grazing Reserve Is Ethnic Imperialism

By Ochereome Nnanna

 The All Progressives Congress (APC) Federal Government led by President Muhammadu Buhari appears hell-bent on imposing the establishment of grazing reserves across Nigeria in spite of the many unpalatable implications it will unleash on unsuspecting Nigerians. On Thursday, 31 March 2016, I wrote an article on this column entitled: “Ranching, Yes; Grazing Reserves, No!” The article called attention to what was then speculated as intentions of the Federal Government to launch this obnoxious policy aimed at handing over lands belonging to indigenous communities to Fulani cattle owners in the guise of establishing “grazing reserves”.

Now, the masquerade has been unmasked: the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Audu Ogbeh, has disclosed that President Buhari has directed him to implement the programme. According to him, he will start it from the North, where he will establish 50,000 hectares of grazing reserves. Then, he will import his beloved Brazil grass to feed the cattle. When he is done with that, he will, in his own words: “move South”. With the Fulani herdsmen now settled in their newly-acquired grazing lands, perhaps without paying a kobo or even negotiating with landowners and obtaining their express permission to use their land, the herdsmen will stop invading communities, destroying the farms of poor villagers, killing, maiming, kidnapping, raping and dehumanising innocent Nigerians.

Nigeria will become self-sufficient in animal and dairy products, and everybody will live happily ever after. That is the picture Ogbeh and his paymasters are painting for us. However, we have very strong reasons to suspect that the establishment of grazing reserves is an ancient agenda of ethnic imperialism which dates back to the Fulani Jihads that Islamised the North about two hundred years ago.

I read an interesting article by one Dr. Gundu of the Department of Archaeology, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He gave a useful insight into the grazing reserves phenomenon, which should jolt our complacently ignorant countrymen, especially those from the Southern parts of the country. Gundu’s article is entitled: History Class On Grazing Reserves: Why Fulani Herdsmen Want Your Land.

Was Lai Mohammed The Man For The Job?

*Lai Mohammed

By Ochereome Nnanna

In 1996, when the first phase of the Liberian civil war was ending, one of the warlords, Brigadier General Yormie Johnson (who personally killed former dictator, the late President Samuel Doe) wrote a pamphlet where he recorded his random musings about the war and his philosophical attitudes to some issues connected thereto. He titled the book: The Gun That Liberates Should Not Rule.

His argument is that a liberator’s role is to remove the problem and then give way to those who have the capacity to correct it. If the gun that liberates mounts the throne, it will turn the liberator into a dictator. While most of the warlords who drove away Doe from power (such as Charles Taylor) jostled for leadership, Johnson simply came to Lagos to cool his heels, perhaps, his own way of walking his talk. His postulations were later proved right, because Charles Taylor went on to become an even deadlier dictator than Doe and today, answers for his crimes at the Hague.

However, there are those who would fiercely disagree with Johnson’s argument. They would ask: What is the point of putting your hide on the line to drive away the perceived source of a nation’s problems if you cannot pick the courage to show you can do better? The tendency of most people who participate in getting rid of an entrenched ruling class is to entertain the feeling of legitmate entitlement to be part of the government that replaces it. Let’s face it: The 2015 presidential election was historic. The removal of a ruling party from power through the polls rather than through the gun barrel was hitherto seen as an impossibility in our political cosmos. But it happened.

Alhaji Lai Mohammed was the voice of the then opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), which performed the feat of dethroning the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). You and I know that during elections, the truth is usually forced on a compulsory leave by all contestants. What remain are cleverly dressed-up falshood, hyperboles, false promises, false statistics, angelic characterisation of mere mortals and their dressing up in borrowed robes, diversion of attention from things that matter and the playing up of inanities to fool the gullible voter; in short, PROPAGANDA and its sly accoutrements.