In late nineteenth century Russia, a dozen men were once lined up to be executed for high treason. As the executioners got set with their guns, an emissary from the Tsar’s royal palace turns up to announce a pardon. When the prisoners were untied from the stakes, several were already dead. When a government forms the habit of taking its people to the very edges of the Niagara Falls of history, there comes a time when something snaps. People are traumatised beyond endurance. The anger seething among Nigerians today is unprecedented.
Although the Ruga fiasco has officially been “suspended”, the red lines of history have already been crossed. The recent execution of Mrs Funke Olakunrin, daughter of Afenifere elder, Pa Reuben Fasoranti, has further brought the country to boiling point. This is the denouement of an unfolding scenario in which more than 60,000 Nigerians have been slaughtered by shadowy foreign herdsmen militias.
The Land Use Act 1978 reposes ownership of land on those who live on it. Communities hold all our lands in trust on behalf of our ancestors and children yet unborn, in line with the customs of the African peoples as they have existed since time immemorial. The State Governor is merely an overseer of those communal lands. In war and peace, government can commandeer such lands for projects of a public nature. But they are required to adequately consult the communities and to offer adequate compensation. Beyond FCT, the Federal Government, by law, has no land anywhere to hand-over to anyone, let alone murderous alien bandits. Only those who are ignorant of jurisprudence and the first principles of sound public administration can play with fire in such a reckless and offensive manner.
The state since Hobbes and Montesquieu has existed only because people hand over their rights to the sovereign in exchange for protection and security. When the state fails in that elementary deontology, it forfeits the right to be obeyed. Indeed, St. Augustine of Hippo taught that an unjust law is no law. People reserve the right, according to the English political philosopher John Locke, to rebel against immoral and unjust laws. The right to rebel against injustice, illegality and oppression is a sacrosanct right of all peoples under the imperatives under all the precepts of natural law, equity and good conscience.
We suspect that the secret agenda is to effect a massive population influx that would change the ethnic geomorphology and demographics of our country to ensure that power permanently resides in one side of the country to the detriment of all the others. It is an evil agenda that is capable of violently dismembering our country. In the Middle Belt, murderous herdsmen militias have razed down hundreds of villages and systematically repopulated them with their own people. It is a brutal strategy anchored on military conquest, land dispossession and hegemony. Government at both federal and state level has turned a blind eye to these genocidal atrocities.
The Adara community in Southern Kaduna, for example, have been on the receiving end of severe ethno-religious persecution in recent years. Last year their king HRH Dr. Maiwada Galadima was assassinated by the faceless herdsmen. It was heartbreaking that this royal father, much respected for his wisdom and gentleness – a retired educationist and a knight of the Catholic Church – perished in this brutal manner. When the elders raised their voices against this calamitous injustice, they were rounded up and imprisoned. They were only released recently after spending several months in detention. Hundreds of people have been killed in Adara land. Farmers can no longer attend to their farms because of the fear of being killed. Poverty and incipient famine are the grim reality of daily life. Meanwhile, soldiers have been sent into those communities, confiscating their pathetic den guns, bows and arrows and denying them of any means of defending themselves against a murderous enemy.
Throughout much of the Middle Belt, foreign bandits have taken over the roads and forests, springs and lush farmlands. They are the new owner-occupiers of primeval savannah homeland of a people who built the legendary Nok civilisation that is traceable back to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. We who were never conquered in history have become a conquered people through subterfuge and the classic Islamic warfare strategies of taqiyya, fitna, and savagery. The same expansionism is gradually being extended to the southern part of our country.
The federal government recently announced a six-month ultimatum to all irregular migrants to regularise their stay. If we were living in sane times, that decree would have a meaning. But it is meaningless in the context of aliens who arrived our shores with guns and bayonets. ECOWAS protocols patently do not cover those who cross the border bearing illegal arms. They must be flushed out!
I cannot believe that in our twenty-first century, people in authority can behave with such wanton disregard for law, ethics and social justice. The law of karma is universal and unforgiving. Those who live by the sword will, sooner or later, perish by the sword. Those who sow to the wind, will, by the slow and inexorable arc of justice, reap the whirlwind. Do not fear those who can kill the body but not the spirit. God still rules the universe, let the earth tremble!
History has a way of settling accounts with those who shed the blood of innocent women and children. They may have all the arms and all the money and power, but the curse they have brought upon themselves will be visited be visited on their children to the seventh generation. We shall overcome. Nigeria will rise again. And the glory shall be the Lord’s.
Obadiah Mailafia
