The first and most elementary duty of the state since Aristotle is to protect the lives and properties of its citizens. Any government that fails its people in that fundamental will sooner or later lose its legitimacy.
Nigeria, I’m afraid, is one of the most insecure countries in the world. For one thing, we are the kidnap capital of the world. There is a spate of kidnapping going on throughout the country, the most notorious being along the Abuja-Kaduna highway. On a daily basis, women and men are being kidnapped by hooligans, many of them from foreign countries. Nihilistic violence has become a way of life in our country. While the insurgency has been ongoing for the better part of a decade, herdsmen militias have been on a rampage with the ferocity of a Himalayan tiger. They have killed and maimed and destroyed without anyone able to call them to order.
Nigeria is a multiethnic, multi-religious country. As is to be expected of any fledgling democracy, the dynamics of domestic politics often reflects existing ethno-religious fissures. Ordinary people, whether urban or rural, often live peacefully with one another. It is usually the elites who stir up ethnic and sectarian divisions for their own selfish ends. And the victims are always invariably the poor.
This morning I want to dwell on the herders-farmers conflict which has become a nightmare for millions of defenceless peasants in the Middle Belt. Conflicts between Fulani herdsmen and sedentary peasant farmers in Nigeria have been perennial in West Africa. They often begin with allegations of trespass into farms by Fulani and their cattle, resulting in destruction of crops. There are typically disputes over such things as pasturelands and water resource over which local communities have evolved effective dispute-resolution mechanisms.
Herder-farmer relations were defined not only by conflict. On the contrary, they were mostly symbiotic. A farmer would invite a Fulani after harvest to bring his cattle to rummage the remnant while depositing much-needed manure on the farm. Fulani rarely eat beef; being also allergic to goat meat. Their preferred source of meat protein is sheep and chicken. Whenever a cow or bull broke down they would normally donate it to the local farmers.
Their women sold milk and butter to the local farming communities while buying from them millet, corn, fruits and vegetables. There was always the occasional kerfuffle between a farmer and a herdsman, but inter-communal clashes between them were virtually unheard of. In fact, inter-marriages were common and many Fulani were often fluent in the local languages. The primeval savannah of my birth was a peaceful and orderly world. The highest a herdsman would have on them was the traditional stick and perhaps a dagger to stem off leopards and other wild beasts.
Today, a new breed of herdsman has emerged: an aggressive and murderous terrorist bearing sophisticated firearms. Bob Dylan sang that “the times they’re a changing”. This rings true today.
The phenomenon of the firearm-bearing herdsman is partly a response to the new phenomenon of cattle rustling which was quite rare when some of us were growing up. But it is also because of the militarisation of politics and the rise of religious fundamentalism and the culture of violence in general.
In 2014 the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) categorised the Fulani herdsmen militias as the 4th deadliest terrorist organisation in the world, just coming behind Boko Haram, Isis and al-Shabab.
Whilst it is true that the herdsmen militias have also attacked Muslim communities in Zamfara and Birnin Gwari, their key targets are the non-Muslim population. We are led to believe that Boko Haram and herdsmen militias are acting out a script written by powerful elements within and outside government. Indeed, their backers may well be far as afield as Arabia and the medley of terrorist organisations from Afghanistan to Somalia and Iran.
What is even more troubling is the silence of many of the prominent leaders of the North and the indifference of so many people whose voice could have made a difference. For example, when a Coptic Church was attacked during Christmas Eve of 2010 in the ancient city of Alexandria in Egypt, Muslims and Christians throughout country came en masse to say No to such sacrilege. The silence of the Muslim Ummah is the loudest of all!
The attitudes of some of the authorities smack of complicity. A few years ago, a prominent Governor from one of the major northern states confessed that they had to go to neighbouring countries to pay appeasement money to restrain those behind the Fulanis killing people in the Middle Belt. He alleged that they had been on a mission to avenge the killings of their kinsmen who had been caught in the crossfire of political violence following the 2015 elections. So we are led to believe that they know who the masterminds are.
The truth of the matter is that no herdsmen have been brought under the judgement for the killing of innocent people. Non-Muslims, on the other hand, are being hounded and imprisoned under the slightest pretext.
A tragic example is the recent case of Kaduna State where government appears to be in complicity with the militias in destroying the Adara community in Kajuru Local Government. Official government policy swings between denial on one hand, and appeasement, on the other. The federal government has announced a plan to create “cattle reserves” for herdsmen throughout the country. It has met with a lot of resistance for several reasons. First of all, all land in Nigeria is communally owned, with ancestral usufructuary rights going back since time immemorial. Government can appropriate land on occasion for projects of a public nature, so long as adequate compensation is made to the affected communities.
Other critics believe that, through their current policies of appeasement, the administration are only trying to spread by stealth the Fulani emirate system throughout the country through the mechanism of the so-called “cattle reserves”. They also wonder why a private business should be so expensively subsidised by our government at the expense of the rest of the citizenry.
The reality of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of those killed or dispossessed are non-Muslims. There are often reprisals killings on both sides, of course, but the majority of the victims are the local farming communities. It is their lands that are often expropriated and it is their people that often found in overcrowded internally displaced refugee camps.
The government, which controls the police, the army and the security services, often tends to systematically disarm the communities. They go from house-to-house in search of arms which they summarily confiscate. Only herdsmen are allowed to openly carry firearms in Nigeria. And they do so in very brazen ways; using them at the slightest opportunity as the spirit moves them.
I am one of those who sincerely believe we would somehow have to accommodate genuine Nigerian pastoralists. But it would have to be part of a fair and just settlement anchored on confidence building, fairness and social justice. Forcing people to surrender their ancestral lands out of fear of bloodthirsty hounds can only lead to a graveyard peace. History shows incontrovertibly that appeasing murderers never works.
Since Hugo Grotius, international law and custom prescribe that people who face a direct threat to their own existential survival have both a duty and right to engage in legitimate self-defence. The long-suffering peoples of the Middle Belt have a right to defend themselves if there is no one to defend them and if the government of their country has decidedly thrown its lot with genocidal murderers.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said that the greatest evil in the world arises not from lack of love but from cold indifference. We shall be killing our democracy and indeed our country if we allow such iniquity to continue to gain ascendancy. If there are still men and women of conscience left in Nigeria – as I would like to hope there are — they cannot allow such evil to prevail. When the history of our age is written, let it not be said that we genocide to take place in our country by looking away and playing the ostrich.
- Being the Text of Remarks at a One-Day Seminar on Insecurity in Nigeria, Fraser Hotel, Abuja, on Thursday 4th April, 2019
Obadiah Mailafia
