Combatting Fake News

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Combating Fake News and the Emotive Pathway to Self-Destruction

 

Jibrin Ibrahim, Friday Column, Daily Trust, 20^thJuly 2018

Over the weekend, I participated in facilitating a workshop by CITAD and its indefatigable executive director Y. Z. Ya’u for young people on understanding and responding to fake news and hate speech, which have become some of the most serious problems of our time. In 2016, Oxford dictionaries have picked post-truth as the word of the year after Trump won the American elections in spite of the fact that 70% of what he said during the campaign was false or misleading and the voters knew that. In the post-truth world, objective facts have been shown to be less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to personal belief and emotion. If you are able to strike the right emotional pitch with people, they will disregard any fact that challenges their belief and as the saying now goes, will seek out the “alternative facts” that comfort their belief. 

A whole new science has been developed on how to use “alternative facts” to produce desired political outcome and its practitioners have been very busy. Cambridge Analytica, thedata analytics company had over the years designed the weaponization of political campaign information to “destroy” political enemies by portraying their political positions as evil using stirring negative emotions. We now know that a Goodluck Jonathan campaign backer recruited them in 2015 to fabricate and spread negative stories about the then opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari. As the Observer newspaper revealed, they produced video content that was: “Dark. Scary. And very uncertain - Sharia for all” era was coming they screamed. They emphasized the question: “What would Nigeria look like if Sharia were imposed by Buhari?” They provided the answer in a graphic, violent one minute 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria’s troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack with scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in. If Buhari wins, the film warned: all women would be forced to wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced immediately Buhari comes into power. 

Today, the social media are inundated with images of allegedly “Fulani herdsmen” carrying sophisticated weapons, which they use to kill innocent farmers in the Middle Belt and seize their ancestral land. In a fascinating session on the Middle Belt facilitated by Dr. Yima Sen and Chom Bagu, they addressed the fact that the purveyors of these images have been told repeatedly that they are fake and most of them are not even from Nigeria but what do facts matter when people have over time been made to believe they are true. With every community conflict, the same fake pictures of mutilated bodies are circulated as evidence of the killings and people believe them while it’s so easy to check when and in what countries those images first appeared. The strategy of weaponizing political campaigns is to use the fact that conflicts are occurring and people are being killed to construct a narrative of one-sided killings and raising the barometer of hate by accompanying the narrative with pictures that enhance the level of hate. I know that some Nigerian newspapers who have been shown with evidence that the pictures they are showing are fake but they persist in continuing to use them because they know it achieves the objective of multiplying hatred against the political leader they want to send out of office. Our problems are many and serious, but they are being deliberately being made worse by agents of discord. 

During the workshop, simple internet tools were used to show that many such images are fake and their origins could easily be traced and some of the participants were quite shocked at how they have been consistently misled over time. The lack of balance in media reporting was also discussed extensively because fake news is not just about truth versus lies but also about whether the entire truth is being told. When herders kill farmers and farmers kill herders and only one side of the story is reported by the media, then people feel justified in the judgment that’s it’s not a conflict, its simply genocide. It was in this context that the workshop focused attention of how fake news is instrumentalised to increase conflict and the killings rather that the desired goal of seeking peace and engaging in conflict resolution. As the 2019 election approaches, many players are simply interested in spilling more blood to facilitate their access to power. 

The social media, Dapo Olorunyomi of Premium Times told the workshop, has become the largest newsroom in Nigeria. Facebook alone has 25 million users in Nigeria, each acting as a journalist who makes and distributes media content. With no notion of the veracity or falsehood of content that they are spreading, they are able to impact greatly on the emotions of those that they communicate with. Facebook algorithms aggregate people who share the same views, emotions and fears and the same fake news and false images are circulated among people who have made up their minds and are continuously being comforted that their ignorance is the truth and woe unto anyone that seeks to question the evidence they have “seen with their own eyes”. 

The outcome of this process is the near collapse of trust and the massive circulation of conspiracy theories. Facts are recounted, the Jihad of 1804 tried to conquer what we now call the Middle Belt and failed. Surely, the only reason Buhari would have sought power was to complete the objective of his forefathers. Self-help then becomes self-fulfilling prophesy. To stop the Jihad, herders are killed and their cattle stolen. When they retaliate, it becomes evidence that the objective of the Jihad is being pursued with vigour. When Muslim farmers are killed in Zamfara State, there is a rational explanation, its banditry and criminality. When Christian farmers are killed in Benue, its Jihad and religious war. No one wants to know if criminality and banditry has spread into Benue as well. As for the herders, no one remembers their history, that in the past five hundred years, these headers have never tried to settle on a specific piece of land.

Fake news does not exist in a vacuum, it thrives in a gullible environment where people have been trained to accept emotive single narratives. Of course, the lack of effective response to growing insecurity by government and its security agencies provides the empirical basis for conspiracy theories. If government is not stopping the killings, then it means they want the killings to continue and grow. They may be even the ones funding it. Few people are ready to consider the alternative explanation of simple incompetence of President Buhari and his security team. The President knows fully well that the security team he has appointed are not performing and he has stubbornly retained them. He therefore has direct responsibility for the growing belief in the conspiracy theories. The Government tells Nigerians on a daily basis that they will end the insecurity facing the country but we are not told how and when so citizens are compelled to explore alternative sources of information and explanation.

The reality on the ground today is that the combination of fake news, hate speech and poor governance have deepened the polarisation of Nigeria along ethnic, religious and regional lines.  The crisis of pastoralism has been re-written as communal and religious war. Reassurance from government is necessary to dispel fears within certain communities that the Buhari “Deep State” is targeting them. Government policy must be clear that no livestock production models would be imposed on any community. Competent leadership must be sought to improve the security situation in the country. Above all, all of us Nigerians must seek to be less gullible. The spirit and the skills of the verification of what we hear and see must improve if we are to get out of the trap of mutual self-destruction. It will take time to rebuild trust but let’s begin by fact-checking what we are told so that the fear that the other has plans to destroy us can begin to recede. Let’s start resisting profiling the other as the incarnation of evil that we must destroy by pre-emtive moves. The task of combatting fake news and hate speech is every body’s responsibility.

 

 

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Toyin Falola]

Jibrin:

Is the State consistent in telling the truth to its own citizens?

If there is a void in the release of truthful information, including basic information on stolen wealth, the disease that afflicted the President when he was out of the country for months, excesses and abuse of power, carelessness in the distribution of political offices, etc. Nigerians do what others do all over the world: they fill the space vacated by the State; and they counter state lies with citizens’ lies. If a man does not tell his wife how much he makes, how much he has left in the bank, is the wife not justified to create fake news: “my husband is spending all his money on concubines!” It may not be fake, as you and I see the man at Abacha Barack eating grilled fish and drinking cold Gulder. He even bought one for you!!!

Yesterday, India felt threatened by the danger of WhatsApp and it is dealing with it as it is tearing the fabric of its society.

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Jibrin,

How would Miyetti Allah's self declared culpability in massacres in the Middle Belt  relate to your thesis that the accounts of massacres by Fulani herders is fake news?

thanks

toyin

--

[Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM]

The term "Fake news" is mainly a blackmail tool, designed to silence the free and vibrant news media, made famous by the swashbuckling Donald Trump.

CAO.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

If I hadn't seen the byline I would have thought that this writeup was from Lai Mohammed, the Nigerian government's spokesman, who has deployed the narrative of fake news to deflect criticisms of the Buhari administration's failure or unwillingness (take your pick) to tackle the menace of armed herdsmen militias.

It speaks volumes for intellectual sensibilities--or lack thereof--that at a time when people are being killed in hundreds and thousands and survivors have lost their homes and possessions to this new terrorism, a time demanding moral clarity and unequivocally humane interventions, all Jibrin cares about is fake news. Obsessing over fake news when humans are being killed would be an egregiously elitist preoccupation were it not grounded in a rational, calculated irredentist agenda.

Jibrin has already established a reputation as a rationalizer, denier, and defender of the ongoing herdsmen mass murder. He is merely consolidating that reputation with this bogus and deceptive emphasis on fake news. Those who want to deny, minimize, and deflect from inconvenient realities now find the discourse of fake news to be a handy idiom to invoke, and Jibo is no different. He cannot even sustain the duplicity and deception because his bias is on full display, conveyed by his reference to herdsmen killings as "allegedly Fulani" atrocities. 

His propaganda is however undone by its contradiction. He casts doubt on the Fulani identity of the perpetrators (itself another kind of fake news and conspiracy theory) but contradictorily in the the same writeup justifies the killings as retaliations that he claims the media sensationalizes--retaliations, he claims, for cattle theft and herdsmen murder. Jibo cannot have it both ways, denying that the killings are committed by armed Fulani herdsmen and at the same time claiming that Fulani herdsmen kill in retaliation for cattle theft and murder committed against them by farmers. 

This type of duplicitous analysis that masks its dangerous advocacy for an ethnic cause and gives aid and comfort to terrorists is itself another iteration of fake news, the consequences of which is better imagined than experienced.

It is unfortunate that one has to dignify this distracting narrative of fake news in this depressing climate of killings and the inability or refusal of the government to do anything about them. By the way, with the Buhari government, the boundary between incompetence and intentional neglect or indifference is never clear, which is precisely why there is a proliferation of plausible narratives about the government's motives in acting or not acting in certain ways regarding the herdsmen problem. Someone said "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" or something along those lines. With Buhari, it is difficult to tell where malice and indifference end and incompetence begins, and vice versa. I digress.

Back to the topic of fake news. Jibrin knows the following but is wont to ignore them because they discredit his pro-herdsmen propaganda:

1. It is not fake news that thousands have been killed by armed herdsmen in the Middle Belt. These killings are at least ten years old. Plateau was once the epicenter of this mass murder. Then it shifted to Southern Kaduna. The armed herdsmen militia then migrated to Benue. They've wreaked havoc in Nasarawa and are back to Plateau again. They also operate in Taraba and Adamawa as well, and of course Zamfara.

2. Fake news did not start these decade-long massacres and displacements. They started when fake news was not even a phenomenon, so the focus on fake news is a callous attempt to deflect, deny, and confuse.

3. It is not fake news that thousands of people Benue, Plateau, and Adamawa have been displaced from their ancestral homes and lands and are now living in refugee camps--in their own states. It is not fake news that caused their displacement but rather well-armed herdsmen militias who have since moved into the deserted villages with their cattle.

4. It is not fake news that these herdsmen militias and their cattle (some say stolen cattle) have taken over the rural communities from where indigenous farmers were uprooted through mass killings. Their initial intention may not have been to occupy the land, but they and their cattle have occupied the land in the aftermath of their massacres, a de facto occupation that the government has not done anything to reverse despite the outcry of the victims. Try tell those who have been violently uprooted  from their ancestral land by the armed herdsmen that there is no expansionist agenda behind their predicament and see if you find any takers. You can continue to quibble about intentionality, but the victims are occupied (forgive the pun) with the occupation of their land by armed herdsmen while they, having lost relatives and narrowly escaped the onslaught, languish in refugee camps.

5. It is not fake news that when the armed militia attacked a Catholic Church in Benue, killing 19 parishioners, including two priests, they filmed themselves wearing the choir robes of the parishioners, mockingly singing and dancing and mouthing triumphalist rhetoric in Fulfulde and Hausa while standing and sitting on the pews of the destroyed church with the name of the church clearly visible on the chairs.

6. It is not fake news (if challenged I'll provide links to published direct quotes and interviews that were never repudiated) that Miyetti Allah officials have on several occasions claimed massacres and even described to journalists how they mobilized for attacks on communities they claim stole their cattle. 

7. It is not fake news that the same Miyetti Allah has on several occasions publicly, through press conferences and press releases, threatened attacks on communities they claimed attacked their cattle. In some of these threats, they gave ultimatums and made demands that the "offending" communities were asked to meet to avert the armed herdsmen onslaught. 

8. It is not fake news that after the Agatu massacre, the police commissioner in Benue organized a public forum in the presence of journalists, where the leaders of Miyetti Allah publicly owned up to the massacre and claimed that it was retaliation for the theft of cattle and the killing of one of them. After this public confession of mass murder, they walked away free men.

9. It is not fake news that leaders of Miyetti Allah Kautal Here publicly proclaimed that if the government of Benue State did not repeal the anti-open grazing law, they state should prepare for war, a war which some argue came in the form of the subsequent massacres.

10. That brings me to this: It is not fake news that in all this, no officials of Miyetti Allah or its various splinter groups that have made confessions to murder, boasted of mass murder, or threatened attacks publicly have been arrested.

11. It is not fake news that the IGP, who serves at the pleasure of the President, proclaimed publicly that his men will not implement the anti-open grazing law duly passed by the Benue State assembly and signed by the governor.

12. It is not fake news that the Minister of Defense publicly justified the herdsmen massacre by blaming it on the so-called blocking of their grazing routes by farming communities.

13. It is not fake news that Buhari scandalously told the Benue delegation that visited him after the armed herdsmen militia killed more than 80 people in several villages to "go and accommodate your neighbors," a most callous and egregiously insensitive statement that some people advance plausibly as a smoking gun evidence of the president's complicity in, or at least indifference to, the herdsmen massacres.

14. It is not fake news that the same president has been waffling inexplicably and tragi-comically when it comes to naming the massacres and their perpetrators, absurdly and alternately blaming late Ghadaffi's henchmen and repeatedly exonerating herdsmen whom he says "only carry stick" and not guns--a blatantly false claim that not only contradicts all available evidence but even vitiates his own government's (and Jibrin's) narrative of "retaliation." Pray, if they are massacring people in the Middle Belt in "retaliation," are they doing so with sticks?

15. It is not fake news that this same president Buhari has on at least two occasions minimized the killings in Benue and Taraba states and displayed his perplexing irritation at being asked to do something about them by declaring that more people have been killed in Zamfara than in Benue and Taraba States combined!

16. It is not fake news that in the year 2000, Buhari led a Fulani delegation to former Governor Lam Adesina of Oyo State after a clash between Fulani herdsmen and indigenous farmers and uttered the now infamous words "Governor Adesina, why are your people killing my people?," an instructive question that advertises Buhari's sense of himself as a champion and defender of Fulani herdsmen interests against indigenous farmers he believes are either attacking the herdsmen or accusing them falsely of killing farmers. That encounter in Ibadan is consistent with Buhari's present posturing in the face of this growing menace of armed herdsmen. That event historicizes the president's present indifference to the menace of his armed, murderous kinsmen and establishes a pattern that legitimizes the conclusions people are drawing about Buhari's indifference to, unwilling to solve, and more gravely tacit encouragement of his herdsmen kinsmen, whom he has consistently defended and has NEVER condemned for their killings.

When observers of these non-fake news/trends and realities invent their own interpretations, some of which of course are false or at least far-fetched, such as the narrative of jihadist agenda, do not blame them for constructing and spreading "fake news." And do not blame those who consume and believe these narratives, especially when they are victims of the herdsmen killings and have watched as the government has been unable (or unwilling, from their perspective) to intervene decisively against the roving, murderous herdsmen militias. 

Instead of blaming the victims and their sympathizers, why not blame the government for failing in its basic duty and more crucially for failing to, through actions and gestures, discredit the proliferating narratives emanating from Buhari's own pro-herdsmen biases, from the pro-herdsmen positions of appointees, from Buhari's clear, defensive indifference to the killings, and from his failure to stem the violence? Jibrin and Lai Mohammed would rather blame the victims and concerned Nigerians who are trying to make sense of Buhari's failures, incompetences, and pro-herdsmen provincialism than admit that the aforementioned truths and the absence of a reassuring narrative or gesture from the government will inevitably encourage the proliferation of narratives of conspiracy and complicity that are unpalatable to the government and its defenders like Jibrin. 

It is wicked for a government to allow its people to be murdered endlessly in their ancestral homes by a roving band of terrorists and then lash out out when the victims, stunned by the inactions and justificatory narratives of their government, analyze public information, statements, gestures, inactions, body language, and a fatalistic governmental surrender to terrorists to arrive at explanations that make sense to them and fairly or unfairly implicate the government and its clannish head.

What we're experiencing is not mere incompetence. It is the absence of governance, the absence of practical problem-solving governance as well as the symbolic, reassuring paternal gestures of government in time of crisis. In this void, citizens, especially those victimized in the crisis, have a right to construct their own explanations about why they've been abandoned to the armed herdsmen militias to devour, no matter how outlandish or plausible such explanations may be. The humane and intellectual thing to do is not blame the victims and sympathetic citizens but to direct one's outrage to the government and its failures. The solution to the narrative one finds to be outlandish is to solve the problem by dealing decisively with the murderers, restoring the displaced victims to their ancestral lands, and reassuring them of security and protection.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

The term "Fake news" is mainly a blackmail tool, designed to silence the free and vibrant news media, made famous by the swashbuckling Donald Trump.

CAO.

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[Jibrin Ibrahim]

You know very well that the attribution of those stories to Miyetti is false

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

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[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Moses, historians see all elements of an issue, you choose to see only one and deny the other. You therefore remain in the domain of propaganda and fake news. 

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, Moses Ochonu.

What is jihad?

That term has a number of meanings. Its central meaning has to do with systematic warfare in the name of pursuing a goal empowering to Islam. This warfare may be moral or military. 

Let us take one by one Ochonu's presentations of what is going on.

1. Massacres are tasking place across a swathe of the country, committed by Fulani herdsmen, well armed military groups. After the massacres, the herdsmen move into the decimated communities with their cows and commence occupation. 

2. Miyetti Allah Fulani Socio- Cultural Organisation, the apex Fulani organisation in Nigeria, led by the country's most elite Fulani, of whom the Sultan of Sokoto, the head of  Nigerian Muslims and the Emir of Kano, the most publicly visible Northern Muslim traditional ruler, ex-central bank governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi,  are the most prominent,  recurrently own up to and justify these massacres.

3. Not only is Miyetti Allah never taken to task by the Fulani led govt govt, talk less indicted by the  govt, practically no effort is made to apprehend the troops under the control of Miyetti Allah.

4. My summation on Miyetti Allah-  Miyetti  Allah runs a parallel govt, with its own army and propaganda wing. Note what happened to Apostle Suleiman when he became the first Christian cleric to challenge them, how a vigorous attempt to savage his integrity emerged out of the blue.   Note also what happened to the Catholic priest who challenged them and how he died. 

They are so powerful they are able to defy the law made by a state to defend itself agst them.

5. What do  the security agencies do?

 a. ' ...the IGP, who serves at the pleasure of the President, proclaimed publicly that his men will not implement the anti-open grazing law duly passed by the Benue State assembly and signed by the governor.'

b. '... the Minister of Defense publicly justified the herdsmen massacre by blaming it on the so-called blocking of their grazing routes by farming communities'.

6. What does Buhari do?

a.'... president Buhari has on at least two occasions minimized the killings in Benue and Taraba states and displayed his perplexing irritation at being asked to do something about them by declaring that more people have been killed in Zamfara than in Benue and Taraba States combined!'

b. ' ... Buhari scandalously told the Benue delegation that visited him after the armed herdsmen militia killed more than 80 people in several villages to "go and accommodate your neighbors," a most callous and egregiously insensitive statement that some people advance plausibly as a smoking gun evidence of the president's complicity in, or at least indifference to, the herdsmen massacres'. 

In the light of the mutual enablement btw the Fulani led fed govt, the Fulani led Mtetti Allah and the Fulani herdsmen militia, mutually reinforcing orientations that enable colonisation through massacre by the Fulani herdsmen, in what sense may this military/civilian pressure group and political operation not be called a jihad?

Any military operation that empowers a group of Muslims while disadvantaging  others, is a jihad. A jihad, as attested in Islamic history, is not necessarily directed at converting people to Islam. It can be waged, as the Moorish invasion of Spain was, simply to assert Muslim rule over non-Muslims.

thanks

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

EDITED

Thanks, Moses Ochonu.

What is jihad?

That term has a number of meanings. Its central meaning has to do with systematic warfare in the name of pursuing a goal empowering to Islam. This warfare may be moral or military. 

Let us take one by one Ochonu's presentations of what is going on.

1. Massacres are taking place across a swathe of the country, committed by Fulani herdsmen, well armed military groups. After the massacres, the herdsmen move into the decimated communities with their cows and commence occupation. 

2. Miyetti Allah Fulani Socio- Cultural Organisation, the apex Fulani organisation in Nigeria, led by the country's most elite Fulani, of whom the Sultan of Sokoto, the head of  Nigerian Muslims and the Emir of Kano, the most publicly visible Northern Muslim traditional ruler, ex-central bank governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi,  are the most prominent,  recurrently owns up to committing 

these massacres 

and justifies them.

3. Not only is Miyetti Allah never taken to task by the Fulani led govt govt, talk less indicted by the  govt, practically no effort is made to apprehend the troops under the control of Miyetti Allah.

4. My summation on Miyetti Allah-  Miyetti  Allah runs a parallel govt, with its own army and propaganda wing. Note what happened to Apostle Suleiman when he became the first Christian cleric to challenge them, how a vigorous attempt to savage his integrity emerged out of the blue.   Note also what happened to the Catholic priest who challenged them and how he died. 

They are so powerful they are able to defy the law made by a state to defend itself agst them. After the massacre by them in Benue in defiance of that law, Sanusi not only did not deny they carried it out, he simply referenced the spurious claim of a massacre of Fulanis in Taraba, declaring that when people are pointing to killings by Fulani they should also point to killings of Fulani.  A declaration from a former principal officer of the nation. An emblem of Northern Nigerian Islam.

5. What do  the security agencies do?

 a. ' ...the IGP, who serves at the pleasure of the President, proclaimed publicly that his men will not implement the anti-open grazing law duly passed by the Benue State assembly and signed by the governor.'

b. '... the Minister of Defense publicly justified the herdsmen massacre by blaming it on the so-called blocking of their grazing routes by farming communities'.

6. What does Buhari do?

a.'... president Buhari has on at least two occasions minimized the killings in Benue and Taraba states and displayed his perplexing irritation at being asked to do something about them by declaring that more people have been killed in Zamfara than in Benue and Taraba States combined!'

b. ' ... Buhari scandalously told the Benue delegation that visited him after the armed herdsmen militia killed more than 80 people in several villages to "go and accommodate your neighbors," a most callous and egregiously insensitive statement that some people advance plausibly as a smoking gun evidence of the president's complicity in, or at least indifference to, the herdsmen massacres'. 

In the light of the mutual enablement btw the Fulani led fed govt, the Fulani led Miyetti  Allah and the Fulani herdsmen militia, mutually reinforcing orientations that enable colonisation through massacre by the Fulani herdsmen, in what sense may this military/civilian pressure group and political operation not be called a jihad?

Any military operation that empowers a group of Muslims while disadvantaging  other people, is a jihad. A jihad, as attested in Islamic history, is not necessarily directed at converting people to Islam. It can be waged, as the Moorish invasion of Spain was, simply to assert Muslim rule over non-Muslims.

thanks

toyin

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

The jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio was religious and ethnic.

Having conquered the Hausa states in the name of his own version of Islam, he established a Fulani aristocracy that rules till today.

The current jihad going on in Nigeria may be described as primarily ethnic and secondarily religious. It is being prosecuted by right wing Fulani elite for the benefit of Fulani people, the immediate beneficiaries being Fulani herdsmen and the millionaire owners of the cows they herd, fellow Fulani, and the right wing Fulani elite being Muslims, with a good no, if not a majority of the herdsmen, also being Muslims.

thanks

toyin

 

toyin

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Jibrin,

I will be back with evidence ( don't worry, not the last contested one from Plateau) that contains the very words of the Miyetti people claiming and threatening attacks. But I won't be shocked if you characterize them as fake news, given your current diversionary obsession with fake news. I'll be back.

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Jibrin,

I see a lot of evidence on one side--pictures of dead bodies in the thousands; burnt homes; destroyed crops; Fulani herdsmen and their cattle occupying and grazing on land deserted by locals after massacres; maimed humans; refugee camps where dispossessed survivors live in squalor, etc. We historians work with evidence, not propaganda and unfounded equivalence plucked from air. I want to see evidence of the herdsmen you claim are being killed in the Middle Belt and for which you claim the mass murder is retaliation. You don't simply want us to take Miyetti's word and yours as evidence, do you? I also want to see evidence that the purported theft of cattle was documented (police reports or reports to local traditional authorities, etc). 

Finally, even if we see evidence of cattle theft (so far we haven't), you'd have to tell us, as a self-appointed spokesperson of the herdsmen, how it is acceptable in a modern nation state for a group to 1) ignore constituted authorities and instruments of judicial redress to avenge the theft of their cattle with AK-47-aided violence, and 2) perpetrate this "retaliation" by attacking entire communities, massacring their inhabitants, and destroying them. You'd have to tell us what logic or law authorizes the herdsmen to engage in murderous criminal "retaliation" and to inflict the "collective" punishment of mass murder on entire communities.

The problem as I see it as the absence of a moral compass on the part of some our intellectuals.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

but Jibrin, Miyeti Allah has not denied those news stories. their officers who made the declarations are clearly named in the news reports. 

in the light of this fact, why should anyone continue to insist the news reports in which miyetti allah is quoted owning up to and justifying massacre to be false?

i'm somewhat puzzled.

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Amidst what I describe as the disaster that is Fulani leadership at the current time, is what may be seen as the tragic case of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, ex-central bank governor, Islamic scholar, one time anti-establishment gadfly and now apologist for Fulani  terrorism.

Sanusi is a man in search of a mission adequate to his capacities. The sad fact is that he has not been able to resolve the contradictions between his quest and his environment. For him to  find that vision, he needs to sacrifice something.

What does he need to sacrifice?

He might need to sacrifice his hunger to be recognized as a member of the elite.

As central bank governor, he was a major critic  of the govt, the highlight of that, in my view, being his revelation to the country of the fact, as he put it, that most of the nation's budget was spent in running the govt. 

He also made spectacular claims about massive fraud in NNPC. 

These dramatic acts of social enlightenment took place agst the background of the very high profile given to his image by the sweeping reforms he initiated in the banking sector once he assumed office. 

He became such a thorn in the flesh of  President Jonathan that the President asked him to resign. He declared that the President had no right to ask him to resign. 

People like me saw him as a hero. I even speculated, in a Northern Muslim centred group we both belonged to, Yan Arewa, I think, that he could be a fitting President of Nigeria. 

How did President GEJ eventually remove him?

By suspending him from office while he was out of Nigeria on official business. The President claimed he was investigating monies spent by Sanusi's  office. Sanusi defended the huge gift monies he had given out from that office, particularly to Kano State, as Corporate Social Responsibility, a level of generosity no central bank governor in the last ten years, if not more, has been known to demonstrate.

Of course, the suspension was meant to permanently remove him from the CBN job and thereby destroy his platform of advocacy. GEJ placed an interim governor in his place pending when Sanusi's tenure would expire while Sanusi was still on suspension. When Sanusi's tenure expired, GEJ appointed a permanent CBN governor, Godwin Emefelie.

Emefelie declared, when asked what he thought of Sanusi, that Sanusi seemed to be running for another office while he was CBN governor.

Sanusi being the most outspoken public official, after perhaps the visibility granted the President by his own office, the position Emefelie was referring to could only be the Presidency. 

What did Sanusi do next? He had been ousted from an office that represented the pinnacle of his public career. The international visibility he had gained as a daringly reformist CBN governor muted. His fellow Northern Muslim elite were silent, to the best of my recollection and to the Northern Muslim governors, like Kwankwaso of Kano, his removal might have been a blessing bcs using the platform of the CBN governorship, he had practically eclipsed them. 

Would he set up a consortium to advise international financial bodies about emerging markets, having led one such market? Would his financial expertise be deployed in initiatives unifying his  knowledge of Islamic and Western banking?

The next news about Sanusi was that he had become Emir of Kano amidst controversy stirred by those who believed the office should have gone to the son of the immediate late Emir, and who ruminated on the possible role of Sanusi's massive donations of CBN money to  Kano in his clinching the Emirship, some say with the help of Kano state governor Rabiu Kwankwasor. The late Emir's son, for his part, retired from Kano for some time and chose not to involve himself in those controversies, even when interviewed about them.

I saw the Emirship as providing a landing for Sanusi after being outplayed by GEJ. He had been removed from the headship of the  country's apex financial institution but had been absorbed into the assumption of one of the country's most respected traditional rulerships. Whatever sense of diminution of social capital had been lost in the GEJ skirmish had been regained by the ascension to the Emirship.

With all due respect to the Emirship, though, I wondered what a financial technocrat like Sanusi was doing in such an office. Covered up in public from head to toe in traditional robes, moving always in an elaborate courtly entourage, living according to the most strict protocols, sacrificing his face on covers of international financial magazines as when an magazine named him banker of the year, giving up the easy mobility of an internstionally  visible financial figure for a traditional rulership  that can be run by people without his level of international and corporate  exposure puzzled me.

I eventually reasoned, though, that I had no way of understanding the world Sanusi lives in and has grown up in, the Emirship being described, perhaps by ex-Vice President Atiku Abubakar,  as a life long dream of Sanusi's.

The next public news about Sanusi was that, in his 50s, I think, he was getting married to a teenage girl, a story that seems to be true. When he later challenged destructive Northern Muslim customs, perhaps mentioning marriage of young girls, some wondered if he was leading by example. I wondered about the psychology of marriage in a context in which a man marries a girl young enough to be his daughter.

The next public news about Sanusi was his scathing attack on what he described as the 13th century character of much of Northern Nigerian Islam. He excoriated a Northern Muslim governor for resting on the notion that a particular disease was caused by the justice of Allah rather than working at getting vaccines to arrest its spread. His daughter represented him at a public occasion, making  me wonder if he was trying to make a case by personal example, of the need to enhance the role of women in the Muslim North.

At this pint, he had gone too far for the conservative elements who dominate the region. He had become a public defamer of a regional ethos, a person who pints to his father's house wit his left hand, as the Nigerian adage goes, defiling a sacrosanct space by not only reveling it, but doing so to outsiders. exposing its He was called to order by voices urging him to recall the impeachment of his own father as Emir of Kano, an infamy that could be visted on him if continued to remain restive. A formal charge was initiated agst him in connection with hos spending as Emir. I recall the charge being about the scope of his Internet usage.

Tragi-comedy, in my view.

A topmost pubic official, a financial expert with international visibility, a man who could work with perhaps any financal institution in the world and who has the clout to assemble the world's financial experts in Nigeria if he so wished, being charged for the scope of his Internet usage in the commercial city of Kano, in one of Africa's most vibrant economies, when even in a remote village in a place like England, 24 hr super speed internet service at  at little cost is the norm.

It appears Sanusi got the message. He retreated  into silence. His pubic critiques of Northern Muslim society closed. He made no more sounds that reverberated into the nation.

Then came the 2015 esclation of Fulani herdsmen harassment of Nigerians into full scale terrorism, with Miyetti Allah Fulani Socio-Cultural Organisation their spokespeople, owning up to and justifying the massacres of entire defenseless communities.

Who are these insanely brazen people,Nigerians were asking. Supremacist ideologues who can commit  massacres, justify them and go free?

These questions gathered momentum for years until the name of ex-Vice President and current Presidential aspirant Atiku Abubakar was mentioned by a public figure as a sponsor of the terrorist army and a key figure in Miyetti Allah.

Sanusi rose to name himself and the Emir of Sokoto as leaders of Miyetti Allah, the first time the group's apex leadership had responded to the ongoing genocidal terrorism being carried out in the name of the organisation.

Miyetti Allah challenged Benue state's anti-open grazing law instituted to protect the state from  the murderous  incursions of Fulani herdsmen. Miyetti Allah  swore they would assemble Fulani herdsmen  in the state as they have always done. They did so and committed another massacre, which they never denied committing, and which the Hausa -Fulani mister of defense blamed on the anti-open grazing law  even as the Fulani led govt is moving to suspend such laws.

What did Sanusi so?

In response to the outcry over the masscare by Fulani in Benue, he rose to point to massacre of Fulani in Taraba . I wondered why he had not raised an  outcry at the time of the massacre he claimed in Taraba, and thus highlighting the persecution of his people. in the current instance, was he better than a terrorist enabler, a lawless character justifying  a  massacre by a spurious claim of another massacre directed agst his people?

'How are the mighty fallen. Tell it not in Gath, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the sons of [ our enemies]  exalt.'

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, champion of the reformation of Northern Nigerian Islam, champion of Nigeria agst the wasteful excess of its spending on its govt officers, leaving little for development, a man who fought  President GEJ to a standstill and could be removed only by subterfuge, winner of an international banker of the year award as CBN governor, TED speaker, magnificent in his exquisitely tailored suit and crisp accent in pristine English, reformer of Nigeria's baking system, a key scholar  among schools of thought in Northern Nigerian Islam, long standing commentator  on Nigerian pubic affairs as attested  by his various essays, has now become the spokesman for a terrorist group wearing the face of an ethnic organisation.

If we are sent on an errand fit for a slave, may we deliver it like a freeborn, the Nigerian adage says.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Jibrin,

 

You made me go to the vast internet archive to dig up these pieces of evidence of Miyetti’s Allah’s confessions to ”retaliatory” mass murder, threatening attacks, and even describing in gruesome, boastful terms the murderous exploits of its armed militia in different parts of the country. And this is a just a result of quick google searches, not painstaking research, which would yield a lot more evidence. And no, I have not included the recent contested Plateau rationalization, your sole example in your fake in your bogus fake news campaign—never mind that it has since been established that the said Miyetti official did indeed make those statements to the Tribune reporter, who, along with his paper, has stood by his story regarding the interview he conducted with the official. So here we go:

 

 

 

 

https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-42555276

 

(This story is about the January 2018 herdsmen massacre in Benue. The excerpt from a BBC pidgin story below quotes Garus Gololo, leader of Benue State branch of MACBAN justifying the murder as revenge for theft of 1000 cattle. Other local papers carried the story but I’ve chosen BBC because I assume that it is less likely to incur your faux outrage against fake news)

 

“Di oga for Myetti Allah cattle breeders association for Benue State, Garus Gololo, tell BBC News Pidgin tori person Dooshima Abu, say di wahala start as some people attack Fulani herdsmen wey dey carry their cow comot from Benue State. 

Gololo say, "as we dey relocate go Taraba State through Nassarawa State, for border town of Nengere, thief come collect 1000 cows from us, so we sef fight dem back."

 

 

 

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/nigeria-deadly-nomad-farmer-conflict-escalates-160704043119561.html

 

(This is an al-Jazeera story about the Agatu massacre. The excerpt below quotes a Fulani leader as justifying the massacre as retaliation for theft of cows.)

 

“Mohammed Husseini, a Fulani leader, explained that in Agatu, young men were stealing the Fulani's cows and that cattle theft is a crime that frequently goes unpunished.

Husseini is the head of one of the state chapters of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association. He claims that the constant thieving of Fulanis' cows puts the Fulani people at risk, and that they deserve to protect themselves.”

 

 

 https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/general/-115-grazing-reserves-in-nigeria-taken-over/145808.html

 

(This is a link to a DailyTrust story on the Agatu massacre. DailyTrust, a paper owned by a Fulani man, would not qualify as fake news in your book. In the excerpt below, a Fulani head told reporters that the massacre was revenge for the theft of 800 Fulani cows and the killing of a Fulani herdsmen leader. By the way, he granted this interview at a public forum organized by the Benue State commissioner of police. In order words, he confessed to mass murder in the presence of the police commissioner and walked away a free man).

 

“Speaking in an interview in Makurdi, a Fulani traditional head, Ardo Boderi Adamu, traced the genesis of the clashes between his people and the Agatu natives to the brutal murder of one of their leaders by suspected Agatu youths, as well as the killing of their 800 cows.

“We (Fulani) have lived together with Agatu people for 60 years in Agatu LGA without any problem until sometime in 2012, when our chief (Ardo) was killed in his house and our over 800 cows were tampered with by Agatu youths. They came to our Ardo’s house and killed him.

“That was how the problem started and the problem escalated as Agatu youths continued to kill our people. They have equally refused every intervention from government quarters to allow us to come back to live with them. We want to come back and live in Agatu. That is the only place I know and where I have lived all my life,” he said.

According to Boderi, the crisis was further aggravated by the Agatu youths who abandoned their farming and fishing occupation to keep vigilance along the River Benue border with Loko in Nasarawa State to prevent herders and their cattle from crossing into their fertile land to graze on greener pasture.

He alleged that several efforts, even until early this year, to enable the herders move into Agatu freely were resisted by the youths at the riverbank, consequent upon which their cows were often rustled and their children killed in the process.
Boderi who until the crisis was the Ardo Fulani in Agatu, said in such situations herders were left with no choice but to enforce their rights to move freely as guaranteed by the Nigerian constitution.”

 

 

http://sunnewsonline.com/we-ll-resist-anti-grazing-law-in-benue-miyetti-allah-leaders/

 

(This is a story in which Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, one of the many factions of MACBAN, vowed to resist the Benue anti-open grazing law and for good measure threatened that for peace to reign, the government must repeal the law)

 

 

http://dailypost.ng/2017/03/27/expect-bloody-reprisal-herdsmen-give-kwara-govt-ultimatum-killings/

 

(This is a story reported widely across multiple platforms in which the Kwara State chairman of Miyetti is quoted as threatening vengeful violence on certain communities if their demands were not met by the police and the state government. He also chillingly reveals in the press release that Miyetti’s Fulani armed herdsmen have been killing in different parts of the country. I invite you to read below his bone-chilling, blood cuddling confession of Fulani herdsmen mass murder.)

“Fulanis from across the country and neighbouring countries gathered here last week and they requested for my permission to go and retaliate but I insisted that they should sheath their swords. From there, they started pointing accusing fingers at me that government was paying money to me, that is why I don’t want them to retaliate despite incessant attacks on Fulanis.

“Then, we want this one to be the last because Fulanis of these days have changed. See what is happening in Nasarawa, Zamfara, Jos and other states.

“If you see what our Fulanis did in Imo, and if you are Muslims honestly, you will cry. And if somebody said it was Fulanis that did that, you will not believe it."

 

 

By the way, I've not even included the statement of Prof. Umar Labbo of Kano's Northwest University, who said the entire Benue-Plateau area belongs to the Fulani by right of Jihadi conquest and that Fulani herdsmen have a historical right to take possession of it. This man was not even invited for questioning by the country's security agencies let alone held accountable for legitimizing the narrative of jihadi expansionist conquest and inflaming the herdsmen conflict. 

Nor was any of the named and quoted officials in the stories above arrested and prosecuted for their confessions to mass murders and threats to inflict same on communities. So the circumstantial case in favor of Buhari's pro-herdsmen complicity and indifference to the herdsmen killings in the Middle Belt is clear. Once again, quit blaming those who see a pattern on the part of the government and its appointees of sparing, siding with, and encouraging the herdsmen with a mix of exculpatory statements, inaction, defensive statements, state-sanctioned Miyetti terrorist impunity, and an unwillingness to hold armed herdsmen and their backers accountable. It is this climate of injustice and open pro-herdsmen bias that causes conspiracy theories to proliferate. That and the ongoing killings are the problem, not "fake news."

What is tragic is that this government believes that the massacres are not the problem but rather how citizens and the media portray them. That is hardly shocking, given that this is a government that cares more about its image than about solving problems, about citizens highlighting a problem and blaming the government than about solving said problem. What is shocking is that Jibrin, a scholar who should be more circumspect and skeptical of the government's escapist obsession with "fake new," is trying to outdo the government in changing the subject from the killings themselves to how citizens and the media report, explain, analyze, and label the conflict. Scholars used to have core moral commitments anchored on the defense of human life and liberties above all else. That used to take precedence over idle, diversionary, abstract, and peripheral concerns, such as Lai Mohammed and Jibrin's contrived campaign against fake news. Today, I guess the opposite is the case, with abstract masturbatory intellection about the menace of "fake news" supplanting the moral imperatives of public intellectual interventions.

 

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

i think the claims of the theft or killings of hundreds of cows are lies.

where could the non-pastoralists have kept the cows? killing such a large no of cows would leave readily visible evidence.

toyin

On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 at 20:10, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:

Moses,

You more than deserve commendation.

Well done.

More stories can be added by others.

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Moses,

You more than deserve commendation.

Well done.

More stories can be added by others.

toyin

On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 at 18:33, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

If Jibrin has established a paradigm that enables him to do a pro-Fulani analysis, his response to you is predictable: fake news!

Thus, is it possible, with due respect, to let us move him in a new direction:

1. Where does Jibrin get his own facts from so that we, too, can head in that direction. Facts are not magic. So, we need his help.
2. What information does the security apparati, spending millions of naira, collect and how can you and I access them?
3. Where dead bodies are seen—and several have been seen—like those of innocent Catholic priests, is this fake news? Are the dead bodies computer generated?
4. Is Jibrin aware that his recent intellectual thrust enables the government to routinely characterize that which is true to that which is fake? Here lies the danger of Jibrin’s intervention, and we need to warn him.
5. Nigeria is an anthropological observable zone---even fictions on Nigeria, as those by literary writers—are actually true!!! If you use a good language to present what you see in many cases, it actually becomes fiction! So, Jibrin may be seeing “truth” as fiction, and our challenge is actually not to excavate evidence as you have done, as good as this is, but to understand what Jibrin wants to achieve. I originally read Jibrin as saying that there are two sides to a coin but now it is that one side is fake and the other is true.
6. TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

And, one more thing, Oga Falola. I observe that you've been pushing Jibrin to divulge his corrective evidence or facts, to recognize that where there is clear state failure, various explanatory paradigms thrive to explain tragedies, and to let us in on the true motivation of his "fake news" denialism. I don't recall him answering you or taking your questions and probings into account in his subsequent essays. If anything, your prodding and pushing seem to have made him even more rigid in his linear, one-dimensional commitment to "fake news" escapism.

It is truly sad to see a respected intellectual persist in this path of anti-intellectualism, parochial advocacy, and pro-regime suppression of truth.

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

"So, Jibrin may be seeing “truth” as fiction, and our challenge is actually not to excavate evidence as you have done, as good as this is, but to understand what Jibrin wants to achieve. I originally read Jibrin as saying that there are two sides to a coin but now it is that one side is fake and the other is true."

Oga,

And that is precisely the long and short of Jibrin's project. Whatever evidence or fact intrudes in or disturbs his propaganda is dismissed with the Trumpia discourse of fake news denialism. For him everything that implicates the armed herdsmen is fake--even tragic visuals of mass burials and dead bodies. Perhaps he would say the Benue and Plateau State governments filled graves with empty coffins or human-like dolls! Such detachment from realm of facts and objective reality!

And yes, the danger you underscored is real, which is that, with people like Jibrin doing a Trumpian dismissal of all the killings as fake news, the government will be led to believe that its escapism and diversionary obsession with fake news and media portrayals is legitimate and gaining resonance. The cognate of that is continued governmental inaction and intensifying herdsmen killings. In fact, as of this moment, Jibrin is arguably the Buhari government's favorite public intellectual, always slyly diminishing the government's failures and unwillingness to deal decisively with the menace while blaming victims and citizens for constructing self-comforting narratives from available informational resources and the circumstances realities that make such narratives plausible.

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

"So, Jibrin may be seeing “truth” as fiction, and our challenge is actually not to excavate evidence as you have done, as good as this is, but to understand what Jibrin wants to achieve. I originally read Jibrin as saying that there are two sides to a coin but now it is that one side is fake and the other is true."

Oga,

And that is precisely the long and short of Jibrin's project. Whatever evidence or fact intrudes in or disturbs his propaganda is dismissed with the Trumpia discourse of fake news denialism. For him everything that implicates the armed herdsmen is fake--even tragic visuals of mass burials and dead bodies. Perhaps he would say the Benue and Plateau State governments filled graves with empty coffins or human-like dolls! Such detachment from realm of facts and objective reality!

And yes, the danger you underscored is real, which is that, with people like Jibrin doing a Trumpian dismissal of all the killings as fake news, the government will be led to believe that its escapism and diversionary obsession with fake news and media portrayals is legitimate and gaining resonance. The cognate of that is continued governmental inaction and intensifying herdsmen killings. In fact, as of this moment, Jibrin is arguably the Buhari government's favorite public intellectual, always slyly diminishing the government's failures and unwillingness to deal decisively with the menace while blaming victims and citizens for constructing self-comforting narratives from available informational resources and the circumstances realities that make such narratives plausible.

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 2:18 PM, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

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[Jibrin Ibrahim]

The great success of fake news is in referring to tainted sources, newspapers that are actively inventing the stories in question to support their political positions as evidence. That is what I have been fighting against. In 2016, we published the result of a two year research we had been conducting - Rural Banditry and Conflicts in Northern Nigeria (CDD) based on fieldwork. There is no one that has done research on the question that believes in your one-sided conspiracy theories. I have not heard any of you refer to the thousands of herdsmen killed in Taraba, Zamfara because you believe their lives do not matter. I have not heard Moses explain why the Benue Livestock Guards were staffed by known cultists and killers with a long established track record who massacred and sent out of the State all survivors of a community. Clearly, you are motivated by the desire to drive Nigeria towards full scale civil war and you get very agitated when you are caught out as you spread your fake news. You are supposed to be scholars, go and do your research.. When I say Vanguard and Punch are publishing fake photos from East Africa sourced from the internet and the evidence of the sources of the photos pointed out to them but they persist in using them, its because they know of the gullible community that would believe them and push their people to more killing. Finally, I have never said that there are no killings by herdsmen, I have been consistent in saying the killings are on both sides but only one side is reported and stigmatised and you are certainly guilty as charged. As to your claims about my politics, I have been engaged in advocacy long enough not to be distracted by political labelling and invective. Its interesting that you believe you cannot make your arguments without insulting me. As the invective is so important for your arguments, please go ahead.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Jibrin,

Famous last words. Falola was right that your come back would be the usual, predictable canard that everything is fake news unless it supports your pro-Fulani herdsmen position. No surprise here. We get it now: as far as you're concerned all sources are "tainted," including eye witness accounts and the stories of IDPs and family members of victims. All sources and photos and videos from the crime scene and even interviews, press releases, statements and media appearances are fake news. I anticipated that you would dismiss Vanguard and Punch as purveyors of fake news, which is why I supplied evidence from Daily Trust, BBC, and al-Jazeera and shunned Punch and Vanguard. I guess when it comes to the fake news test, only the so-called fieldwork conducted by CDD is passes and can be considered factual. This is self-indulgent intellectual narcissism on your part, and a bit of shameless self-promotion since you were until recently the head of CDD. I give up. 

Falola can continue to make you go in the direction of facts and evidence as he said. For me, I have better things to do and have been ignoring your Trumpian, fake news dismissal of mass murder as fiction and only intervened on this occasion because you've since crossed into the territory of mendacity, invention, and dangerous propaganda. For engagement to occur productively, there has to be some basic fidelity to evidence, truth, and facts. I know we live in the age of "alternative reality" but you cannot simply assert and expect us to believe or pluck things from the air. The anti-intellectual dismissal of all sources except one's contrarian assertions as "tainted sources" does not invite engagement. It is a discussion ender. Good luck to those who want to" understand what Jibrin wants to achieve," as Falola puts it. And good luck to you, Jibrin, on your quest to eliminate the scourge of fake news, which in your analysis is responsible for all the killings, displacements, and suffering in Nigeria--how insightful! People are dying and your intellectual mission in life is a Lai Mohammed-esque obsession with fake news. Beautiful. We await your next treatise on the topic as we sit under your illuminating scholarly sagacity.

[Windows Live 2018]

Toyin:

As much as you  try to conflate two issues: Jihad and herdsmen massacres, you have not succeeded.  Then you added the colonisation agenda which cannot be counted as part of Jihad in its ordinary meaning.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Date: 20/07/2018 23:37 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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EDITED

Thanks, Moses Ochonu.

What is jihad?

That term has a number of meanings. Its central meaning has to do with systematic warfare in the name of pursuing a goal empowering to Islam. This warfare may be moral or military. 

Let us take one by one Ochonu's presentations of what is going on.

1. Massacres are taking place across a swathe of the country, committed by Fulani herdsmen, well armed military groups. After the massacres, the herdsmen move into the decimated communities with their cows and commence occupation. 

2. Miyetti Allah Fulani Socio- Cultural Organisation, the apex Fulani organisation in Nigeria, led by the country's most elite Fulani, of whom the Sultan of Sokoto, the head of  Nigerian Muslims and the Emir of Kano, the most publicly visible Northern Muslim traditional ruler, ex-central bank governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi,  are the most prominent,  recurrently owns up to committing 

these massacres 

and justifies them.

3. Not only is Miyetti Allah never taken to task by the Fulani led govt govt, talk less indicted by the  govt, practically no effort is made to apprehend the troops under the control of Miyetti Allah.

4. My summation on Miyetti Allah-  Miyetti  Allah runs a parallel govt, with its own army and propaganda wing. Note what happened to Apostle Suleiman when he became the first Christian cleric to challenge them, how a vigorous attempt to savage his integrity emerged out of the blue.   Note also what happened to the Catholic priest who challenged them and how he died. 

They are so powerful they are able to defy the law made by a state to defend itself agst them. After the massacre by them in Benue in defiance of that law, Sanusi not only did not deny they carried it out, he simply referenced the spurious claim of a massacre of Fulanis in Taraba, declaring that when people are pointing to killings by Fulani they should also point to killings of Fulani.  A declaration from a former principal officer of the nation. An emblem of Northern Nigerian Islam.

5. What do  the security agencies do?

 a. ' ...the IGP, who serves at the pleasure of the President, proclaimed publicly that his men will not implement the anti-open grazing law duly passed by the Benue State assembly and signed by the governor.'

b. '... the Minister of Defense publicly justified the herdsmen massacre by blaming it on the so-called blocking of their grazing routes by farming communities'.

6. What does Buhari do?

a.'... president Buhari has on at least two occasions minimized the killings in Benue and Taraba states and displayed his perplexing irritation at being asked to do something about them by declaring that more people have been killed in Zamfara than in Benue and Taraba States combined!'

b. ' ... Buhari scandalously told the Benue delegation that visited him after the armed herdsmen militia killed more than 80 people in several villages to "go and accommodate your neighbors," a most callous and egregiously insensitive statement that some people advance plausibly as a smoking gun evidence of the president's complicity in, or at least indifference to, the herdsmen massacres'. 

In the light of the mutual enablement btw the Fulani led fed govt, the Fulani led Miyetti  Allah and the Fulani herdsmen militia, mutually reinforcing orientations that enable colonisation through massacre by the Fulani herdsmen, in what sense may this military/civilian pressure group and political operation not be called a jihad?

Any military operation that empowers a group of Muslims while disadvantaging  other people, is a jihad. A jihad, as attested in Islamic history, is not necessarily directed at converting people to Islam. It can be waged, as the Moorish invasion of Spain was, simply to assert Muslim rule over non-Muslims.

thanks

toyin

[Windows Live 2018]

Prof.

I have read and re- read Jibrins article carefully again and I think it looks like you weighed heavily to one side in this debate. I think you ought to have credited Jubrin with if not congratulate him for writing a balanced article:

Jibrin zeroed in on three issues that heats up and aggravates politics in Nigeria today: Fake News  hate speech and poor governance. People isolate Fake News and berates him as Govt apologist and you seemingly agree with them.

Jibrin contextualized his article in a workshop in which he cites one of the participants Dapo Olorunyomi (a man I have known for over 30 yrs for his dogged  pursuit of truth even in the face of military bullets thus jointly proactively responsible for ushering in democracy as we know it today) whose take on Fake News approximates Jubrins, yet you seem to cast doubt on Jibrins take on the issue.

Jibrin effectively demonstrated how people who are he'll bent in effecting a change of govt at all costs are exploiting Fake News capacity for telling half the truth toward achieving their goal but your response contained in your query seems to be that Govt may be doing the same thing too..

These don't do justice to Jibrins excellent cinclusion  that we ALL ( Government & the governed need to be vigilant against Fake News and hate speech. Many of the insinuations contained in objectors to Jibrins article are neither in the article nor implied.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>

Date: 21/07/2018 20:29 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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Moses:

If Jibrin has established a paradigm that enables him to do a pro-Fulani analysis, his response to you is predictable: fake news!

Thus, is it possible, with due respect, to let us move him in a new direction:

1. Where does Jibrin get his own facts from so that we, too, can head in that direction. Facts are not magic. So, we need his help.
2. What information does the security apparati, spending millions of naira, collect and how can you and I access them?
3. Where dead bodies are seen—and several have been seen—like those of innocent Catholic priests, is this fake news? Are the dead bodies computer generated?
4. Is Jibrin aware that his recent intellectual thrust enables the government to routinely characterize that which is true to that which is fake? Here lies the danger of Jibrin’s intervention, and we need to warn him.
5. Nigeria is an anthropological observable zone---even fictions on Nigeria, as those by literary writers—are actually true!!! If you use a good language to present what you see in many cases, it actually becomes fiction! So, Jibrin may be seeing “truth” as fiction, and our challenge is actually not to excavate evidence as you have done, as good as this is, but to understand what Jibrin wants to achieve. I originally read Jibrin as saying that there are two sides to a coin but now it is that one side is fake and the other is true.
6. TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

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USA

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From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meoc...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, July 21, 2018 at 12:33 PM

To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

 

Jibrin,

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[Windows Live 2018]

Moses:  

l would not comment on why Jibrin  has chosen to concentrate on Fake News on this particular instalment ( I know he devoted one episode to castigating President Buharis sluggishness and laid back approach to national problem solving) but yours is a moving piece on the plight of the victims and the ineffectiveness o f ( or inadequacy) of Government measures so far.  I still dont think attacking his chouce of topuc is helpful. Your piece indicates that the problem is at least 10 years old so I would blame govt failure in general ( both Jonathan & Buhari) as Buhari also commented on its antecedents in his Ekiti speech.

I totally agree we cannot blame the victims (including non herdsmen Fulani victims) and that government must accept FULL responsibility for being unable to guarantee  safety of lives of the citizenry.  It is true that Government functionaries have been unhelpful in their immature provocative utterances.  I have suggested in the past that more proactive pressure  be continually be piled on Govt by civil society in various ways until it does the decent thing. I even went as far as demanding the resignation of the highest top ranking law professionals in Government Malami and Osinbajo (since govt is a collective responsibility in a democracy).  If the problem is that the President is not listening to their advice it is their reputation as law professionals that is being tarnished by remaining on board. I  For instance it is specifically the failings of Malami that people who declare themselves as murderers are walking the streets as free men.  f the problem is that they cannot think through a solution it means that like Jonathan's govt they have failed the nation.  The President cannot think through the solution alone by himself.  That's not how democracy operates.  If the people thinking through the solution are being rebuffed and they keep resigning that sends appropriate signals to both President and the people.

For instance the IGP cannot consistently be refusing to efficiently carry out his duty and other members of the Cabinet be afraid to point this out at NEC meetings or sanction provocative utterances at such meetings (either formally or informally.)

So there is a wider scope of what can be done within and outside govt to ensure that justice is done to victims of massacres and to make it mandatory that the President and Govt take effective action.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 20/07/2018 21:24 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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The term "Fake news" is mainly a blackmail tool, designed to silence the free and vibrant news media, made famous by the swashbuckling Donald Trump.

CAO.

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Oga Agbetuyi,

Why not tell us why you think I have not succeeded in proving the Fulani herdsmen/Hausa-Fulani politicians/Miyetti Allah massacres and land grab strategy is a colonizing  jihad?

I have stated facts and correlated the facts to arrive at the conclusion I made.

If you dispute those facts, why?

If you  dont dispute the facts but dispute the conclusions I draw from the facts, why?

thanks

toyin

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Oga Agbetuyi,

You keep insisting on playing the role of a man engaging in philosophical debate in the midst of a burning house.

When you are able to demand the impeachment of Buhari for his eloquently tacit support of this horror your response becomes a serious one.

Not when you wish to deflect blame to his other officers, while he has made it clear the Fulani herdsmen terrorists are his people to protect.

The escalation of this terrorist movement began with Buhari's ascension to power in 2015. 2019 is round the corner and you are still expressing palliatives about what SHOULD  be done.

You need to ask yourself some serious questions.

toyin

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Yinka,

A quick response before I head to church. We all know that fake news exists. In fact in this age of fake news proliferation when we're all in our professional and personal lives sifting real information from fake ones, it is a bit presumptuous and condescending for a peer to consistently lecture us on fake news and to insinuate that we're suckers for it. On my Facebook timeline alone, I cannot count the number of people I've blocked, unfriended, or unfollowed for posting fake news or sharing links to fake stories. I have blocked many fake news sites from my social media streams. I've not even discussed my emails. So this idea of someone constantly harping on fake news as though we're oblivious to it or incapable of recognizing it is laughable.

The other thing is that anyone who believes that fake news is the culprit in the killings and not the government's incompetence, the Buhari government's open, documented prejudice and provincialism and resulting citizen distrust, and government's unwillingness to go after self-confessed mass murders thus deepening a sense of impunity--such a person cannot be taken seriously.

So, yes, fake news exists and we should combat it and are combating it daily, but you don't combat it by denying reality, by inventing an alternative universe of your own truths, by dismissing tragic facts that go against your talking points and agenda, by minimizing tragedy, and by blaming victims and their sympathizers who are trying to make sense of the ongoing tragedy by stitching together information, statements, and other circumstantial evidence and realities to construct plausible and not-so plausible narratives and conspiracies.

You combat fake news by holding the government accountable. You combat fake news by prevailing on the government to abandon its provincial, blatantly pro-herdsmen position and adopt an even-handed, nationalist approach. You combat fake news by delegitimizing the conspiracies, and in turn you do that by calling out the denialist statements of the president, who minimizes the killings in some parts of the country, exonerates his Fulani herdsmen kinsmen ("they only carry sticks," and the killers are not Fulani but Ghadaffi's henchmen, etc). You combat fake news by pressuring the government to release factual information that is faithful to the unfolding catastrophe rather than concealing, minimizing, and denying it, thereby fueling the existing narratives of its indifference and complicity. You combat fake news by being transparent, just, and decisive in dealing with culprits, self-confessed and otherwise. You combat fake news by firing appointees, IGP and defense minister for instance, who display scandalous bias in the crisis. Above all, you combat fake news by actually solving the problem and ending the killings, which is in the sphere of the main reason for a government's existence: the protection of lives and propriety.

Finally, we also need to combat and resist attempts to use the reality of fake news as an alibi to deny reality, inconvenient facts, and to perpetrate an agenda of denial, escapism, and diversion. Call it the Trump maneuver or Trump effect. That, I content, is even a graver danger than fake news itself. The callous, self-serving denial or dismissal of facts as fake news has the capacity to authorize harm and to encourage inaction on our most urgent challenge--security.

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[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

 

1. As many cases have shown us in different parts of the world, the real manufacturer of the majority of fake news is the State—government routinely manufactures it for all sort of purposes.
2. As many cases have shown us in different parts of the world, the real beneficiary of fake news is the state—be it in Ethiopia, Syria, Egypt, etc, the state uses what it deems to be “fake” to increase its capacity for repression.
3. In the case of Nigeria, as in under Abacha, and Jibrin knows this to be a fact, the media generates alternative news because it was heavily repressed. Many of you in this forum may not know that I was a regular contributor to New Nigerian, Daily Times, etc. in the 70s, and what we grappled with was a void—if the government was not telling us things, we depended on leaks and blew that leakage to a proportion that you now call “fake news”.
4. The State has the capacity to counter fake news—it has created its own TV networks, radio networks, propaganda networks to disseminate its own information. The State is the primary generator of fake news—it denies, and denies, and denies areas of its own incompetence.

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

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USA

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http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

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http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, July 22, 2018 at 9:33 AM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

 

Yinka,

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

 

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[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Thanks for actually reading my article, I realised Moses and his gang do not bother to read before repeating their testament.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meoc...@gmail.com>

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[Salimonu Kadiri]

When our learned professors, Jibrin Ibrahim and Moses Ochonu, who are experts in the language of governance (English) in Nigeria could lock horns in a head-fight on ethnic grounds, what can we expect from millions of illiterate Nigerians who look up to them for guidance and leadership? In his address on Graduation at University of Ibadan, 1 July 1966, the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Keneth O. Dike lamented, "It must be said to our shame that the Nigerian intellectual far from being an influence for national integration is the greatest exploiter of parochial and clannish sentiment. And they exploit local prejudices not for the national good but for their selfish ambitions. …. The worst pedlars of tribalism in this country are the educated Nigerians." Recalling Dr. Dike's Graduation address of 1966, and reading Professors Jibrin Ibrahim and Moses Ochonu in 2018, one would think that time, in Nigeria, had stood still since 1966. The current imbroglio between Professors Ibrahim and Ochonu arose out of the post of the former on this forum titled, Combating Fake News…. Let's look at some excerpts from the post.

Today, the social media are inundated with images of allegedly 'Fulani herdsmen' carrying sophisticated weapons, which they use to kill innocent farmers in the Middle Belt and seize their ancestral land;  The strategy of weaponizing political campaigns is to use the fact that conflicts are occurring and people are being killed to construct a narrative of one-sided killings and raising the barometer of hate by accompanying the narrative with pictures that enhance the level of hate;  When Muslim farmers are killed in Zamfara State, there is a rational explanation, it's banditry and criminality. When Christian farmers are killed in Benue, it's Jihad and religious war. No one wants to know if criminality and banditry have spread into Benue as well. As for the herders, no one remembers their history, that in the past five hundred years, they have never tried to settle on a specific piece of land; When herders kill farmers and farmers kill herders and only one side of the story is reported by the media, then people feel justified in their judgment that's it's not a conflict, it's simply genocide;  The president knows fully well that the security team he has appointed are not performing and he has stubbornly retained them; Government policy must be clear that no livestock production models would be imposed on any community - Jibrin Ibrahim.

Incensed by Professor Ibrahim's reference to what Prof. Ochonu termed herdsmen killings as 'allegedly Fulani' atrocities, professor  Ochonu submitted a sixteen point references that charges of murders against Fulani herdsmen are not fake news. Interestingly, Professor Ochonu stated thus under items : (3) It is not fake news that thousands of people, Benue Plateau and Adamawa have been displaced from ancestral homes and lands and are now living in refugee camps-- in their own States. It is not fake news that caused their displacement but rather well-armed herdsmen militias who have since moved into the deserted villages with their cattle. (4) It is not a fake news that these herdsmen militias and their cattle (some say stolen cattle) have taken over the rural communities from where indigenous farmers were uprooted through mass killings. (6) It is not a fake news (if challenged I'll provide links to published direct quotes and interviews that were never repudiated) that Miyetti Allah officials have on several occassions claimed massacres and even described to journalists how they mobilized for attacks on communities they claim stole their cattle. In his response to Oluwatoyin Adepoju, professor Jibrin Ibrahim wrote, "You know very well that the attribution of those stories to Miyetti Allah is false." Professor Ochonu felt challenged and he submitted links to support the claims that Miyetti Allah had admitted on several occasions to murders. I have perused the links supplied by Professor Ochonu and I am confounded as to why he failed to see the fake news as observed by Professor Jibrin Ibrahim.

Donald Trump might have given fame to Fake News, but it was Felix Green who, in his 1964 published book, The Curtain of Ignorance - China: How America Is Deceived, drew world's attention to how the same photograph was presented as a slain Viet Cong guerilla in South Vietnam on 24 April 1962 and for the same picture to be published in the Sunday Herald of 3 June 1962 as the body of an exhausted refugee from Communist China (p.310). Thus, fake news is not a new phenomenon, it has always been with us. Here follows my observations on three of the links supplied by Professor Ochonu.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/nigeria-deadly-nomad-farmer-conflict-escalates-160704043119561.html/  

Nigeria: Deadly nomad-versus-farmer conflict escalates ... www.aljazeera.com Nigeria: Deadly nomad-versus-farmer conflict escalates. Roaming Fulani cattle herdsman accused of launching deadly raids against farming communities and targeting Christians.

Since the title of the article is, Nigeria: Deadly Nomad Versus Farmer Conflict Escalates, I have expected to see some gun-toting herdsmen in combat with farmers. In the texts, it is stated : Haruna Mohamed, 16, herds his father's sheep on the weekends in Akwanga. In a wide-open field in Akwanga, central Nigeria, Haruna guides his father's flock of nearly 200 cows to a stream in the forest. I cannot see the picture of a deadly conflict between the nomad and the farmer in Nigeria which Aljazeera was trying to paint in its headline and the boy with a stick, not gun, herding cattle in wide-open field and guiding nearly 200 cows to a stream in the forest to drink water. In this wise Aljazeera's deadly nomad versus farmer conflict in Nigeria is a plain Fake news.

http://www.sunnewsonline.com/we-ll-resist-anti-grazing-law-in-benue-miyetti-allah-leaders/  

We ’ll resist anti-grazing law in Benue –Miyetti Allah ... www.sunnewsonline.com The leadership of Fulani pastoralist groups Miyetti Allah yesterday rose from an emergency meeting in Kaduna, urging President Muhammadu Buhari to prevail on Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom not to implement the anti-grazing law in that state. The group said that, they would do everything legally ...

If Miyetti Allah had had a meeting and a press conference was being held, would it not have been appropriate to show photographed pictures of Miyetti Allah's attendees at the meeting? Does the photograph published by the Sun online represent Miyetti Allah members present at the meeting? However, the Sun claimed that Miyetti Allah complained that armed militia groups have been causing havoc to the Fulani pastoralists in the Benue Valley. According to the Sun online, "The group said that they would do everything legally possible to resist such law that is against their culture, movement and economic interest. Consequently, we affirm our support and solidarity for the legal action taken by the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore Fulani Socio-cultural Association to challenge the negative anti-grazing law at the Federal High Court, Abuja. Therefore, the headline of Sun online : We'll resist anti-grazing Law, Miyetti Allah, is misleading and mischievous in as much as it didn't indicate how the resistance was going to be done. And a Professor Ochonu reading the headline would flare up against the Fulani thinking that their resistance against anti-grazing law in Benue would turn out to be massacre of his Benue people by herdsmen. A pure case of fake news aimed at inciting hostilities among Nigerians.

https://www.dailypost.ng/2017/03/27/expect-bloody-reprisal-herdsmen-give-kwara-govt-ultimatum-killings/

The headline of the above link when clicked is : Expect Bloody Reprisal - Herdsmen give Kwara govt. ultimatum over killings. Instead of combat-ready herdsmen with guns, a photograph of two herdsmen holding wooden rods and tendering their cattle in an open forest, not a farm, showed up. However, the contents of the news revealed the following : Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), has raised alarm over incessant killings of its members in some parts of Kwara State by suspected men of vigilante group of Nigeria. The warning followed a recent fracas between a vigilante group and some herdsmen in Gwanamara, Baruten Local Government Area of the State, where some herdsmen were allegedly murdered. State Chairman, Alhaji Usman Adamu, told newsmen in Ilorin, that it was shocking that some natives have continued to wage war against Fulani herdsmen for inexplicable reason. The law of gravity is equal to the law of cause and effect which means that for any effect, there must be a cause. Without armed vigilantes, cattle rustlers and rural bandits killing herdsmen and stealing their cattle there would be no threat of reprisal. In Benue, there is a plague of out-of-control livestock guards armed by the Benue government and whose duty is to guard farmlands and not forests where cows are grazed. When livestock guards or vigilantes abandon farmlands to steal cows being grazed in the wild-grown forest, the law of self-preservation permits herdsmen to defend themselves and their properties. What happened to the herdsmen in Kwara State and which led to the warning of Miyetti Allah to the authorities there, is what Professor Jibrin Ibrahim has called one side narrative of killings. When herdsmen are killed and their cows are appropriated by bandits, livestock guards, vigilantes and rustlers no one cares until there are reactions from the herdsmen. Nigeria belongs to all Nigerians, and all Nigerians should be apportioned living space and breathing room.  

The President knows fully well that the security team he has appointed are not performing and he has stubbornly retained them - Jibrin Ibrahim.  This does not show that Professor Jibrin approves everything done by Buhari. Although Prof. Ibrahim wrote that, 'Government policy must be clear that no livestock production models would be imposed on any community,' I would like to modify that with an exemption that where it is found that herdsmen have permanently been resident in any state of Nigeria, they should be subsidized with ranching benefits. If we can subsidize fuel to private vehicle owners with over 700 billion per annum, it is more legitimate to subsidize livestock farming. 

Going through all the links referenced by Professor Moses Ochonu, I could not find any community which Fulani herdsmen have occupied in Nigeria with their cattle after displacing the indigenous farmers through mass killings as asserted by Professor Ochonu. In all social media that I have perused, massacres and deaths have all been attributed to 'suspected herdsmen' which means nobody had seen herdsmen at the scenes of the crimes and other group of criminals might have been responsible.

S. Kadiri  

 

 

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Från: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> för Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Skickat: den 21 juli 2018 18:24
Till: USAAfricaDialogue
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

 

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[Windows Live 2018]

Moses: 

I agree with all that you say and frankly so does Jibri n if you take him to task. That does not mean fake news has not aggravated the problem.  Again it's like blaming the messenger. I have cited articles Jibrin took Govt to task including the one  be being debated. Would you rather realistically expect he goes exclusively  on a crusade against Government in his presentvrole or resign to facilitate same?

Academics like yours truly left the country for foreign lands where I am safe to critique Govt.  June in remains to serve the Govt to the best if his capability, should we scorn him?  He could equally be on our side of the Pond but he CHOSE to remain behind and do his best to minimise the recurrence of the national tragedy through his intellectual skills.  Should we react the way we do to his honest efforts?  Could he force Buhari to act?

Let us be fair in our criticisms...

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 22/07/2018 15:35 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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Yinka,

A quick response before I head to church. We all know that fake news exists. In fact in this age of fake news proliferation when we're all in our professional and personal lives sifting real information from fake ones, it is a bit presumptuous and condescending for a peer to consistently lecture us on fake news and to insinuate that we're suckers for it. On my Facebook timeline alone, I cannot count the number of people I've blocked, unfriended, or unfollowed for posting fake news or sharing links to fake stories. I have blocked many fake news sites from my social media streams. I've not even discussed my emails. So this idea of someone constantly harping on fake news as though we're oblivious to it or incapable of recognizing it is laughable.

The other thing is that anyone who believes that fake news is the culprit in the killings and not the government's incompetence, the Buhari government's open, documented prejudice and provincialism and resulting citizen distrust, and government's unwillingness to go after self-confessed mass murders thus deepening a sense of impunity--such a person cannot be taken seriously.

So, yes, fake news exists and we should combat it and are combating it daily, but you don't combat it by denying reality, by inventing an alternative universe of your own truths, by dismissing tragic facts that go against your talking points and agenda, by minimizing tragedy, and by blaming victims and their sympathizers who are trying to make sense of the ongoing tragedy by stitching together information, statements, and other circumstantial evidence and realities to construct plausible and not-so plausible narratives and conspiracies.

You combat fake news by holding the government accountable. You combat fake news by prevailing on the government to abandon its provincial, blatantly pro-herdsmen position and adopt an even-handed, nationalist approach. You combat fake news by delegitimizing the conspiracies, and in turn you do that by calling out the denialist statements of the president, who minimizes the killings in some parts of the country, exonerates his Fulani herdsmen kinsmen ("they only carry sticks," and the killers are not Fulani but Ghadaffi's henchmen, etc). You combat fake news by pressuring the government to release factual information that is faithful to the unfolding catastrophe rather than concealing, minimizing, and denying it, thereby fueling the existing narratives of its indifference and complicity. You combat fake news by being transparent, just, and decisive in dealing with culprits, self-confessed and otherwise. You combat fake news by firing appointees, IGP and defense minister for instance, who display scandalous bias in the crisis. Above all, you combat fake news by actually solving the problem and ending the killings, which is in the sphere of the main reason for a government's existence: the protection of lives and propriety.

Finally, we also need to combat and resist attempts to use the reality of fake news as an alibi to deny reality, inconvenient facts, and to perpetrate an agenda of denial, escapism, and diversion. Call it the Trump maneuver or Trump effect. That, I content, is even a graver danger than fake news itself. The callous, self-serving denial or dismissal of facts as fake news has the capacity to authorize harm and to encourage inaction on our most urgent challenge--security.

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[Windows Live 2018]

The reasons are that when  Moslems want to embark on Jihads ( ie Islamic State and Biko Haram or Fodio) they mince no words and are categorical. They don't declare Jihads by stealth as you are insinuating about Fulani herdsmen..

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Date: 22/07/2018 14:44 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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Oga Agbetuyi,

Why not tell us why you think I have not succeeded in proving the Fulani herdsmen/Hausa-Fulani politicians/Miyetti Allah massacres and land grab strategy is a colonizing  jihad?

I have stated facts and correlated the facts to arrive at the conclusion I made.

If you dispute those facts, why?

If you  dont dispute the facts but dispute the conclusions I draw from the facts, why?

thanks

toyin

On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 at 12:51, Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

[Windows Live 2018]

Agreed! But so does anti government vested interests and ourveyors of sectional hate and Jibrin seems to be asking us to be vigilant to ALL. Of couse in ALL democracies it is standard that ALL oarties use fake news in the definition you have highlighted tonget to piwer.  But that is different from the yse tovwhich Jibrin alerts ys: to deliberately sow discord. I think he is very accurate.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>

Date: 22/07/2018 16:01 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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Moses:

 

1. As many cases have shown us in different parts of the world, the real manufacturer of the majority of fake news is the State—government routinely manufactures it for all sort of purposes.
2. As many cases have shown us in different parts of the world, the real beneficiary of fake news is the state—be it in Ethiopia, Syria, Egypt, etc, the state uses what it deems to be “fake” to increase its capacity for repression.
3. In the case of Nigeria, as in under Abacha, and Jibrin knows this to be a fact, the media generates alternative news because it was heavily repressed. Many of you in this forum may not know that I was a regular contributor to New Nigerian, Daily Times, etc. in the 70s, and what we grappled with was a void—if the government was not telling us things, we depended on leaks and blew that leakage to a proportion that you now call “fake news”.
4. The State has the capacity to counter fake news—it has created its own TV networks, radio networks, propaganda networks to disseminate its own information. The State is the primary generator of fake news—it denies, and denies, and denies areas of its own incompetence.

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

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USA

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512 475 7222 (fax)

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http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meoc...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, July 22, 2018 at 9:33 AM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

 

Yinka,

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

 

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[Cornelius Hamelberg]

“Cows,

Cows,

Sacred cows.

Cows lost,

The plateau of Nigeria

Overflow

With the blood

Of hapless humans.

Cows,

Cows,

Sacred cows.” (Chidi Anthony Opara)

How does one begin to make sense out of the ongoing nonsense?

If it's ethical relativity were talking about here's an interesting story which illustrates how cow - man relationships can vary from culture to culture ( the power and dominion of man over cow) : Farmers fear complaint about cows that ‘pinned man to wall’ could lead to herds being put down

Some of the most vociferous and the most vehement assessments and condemnation of the current situation are comfortably seated in their various professorial chairs and ivory towers, far from the scene where the crimes are being committed. As Baba Salimonou Kadiri has tirelessly pointed out , to the point of ad nauseam, in this season of ill-will there are all kinds of bandits throughout the Federation going around spreading death, destruction, chaos, anarchy apparently trying to make Nigeria ungovernable under President Buhari's mandate period and – of course - blaming it ALL on “ Fulani Herdsmen” - of Fulani ethnicity - the same ethnicity as President Buhari, and thereby – by extension blaming President Buhari himself and accusing him of complicity. Astagfirullah - they would much prefer ( God forbid) that President Buhari should hunt down and exterminate our Fulani Herdsmen. Only then would they be happy...

If only anyone is this thread who is neither Muslim, a less than omniscient Christian, Atheist or Jew could start a supporting argument or point of view with this kind of preamble : “As a patriotic Nigerian, a naturally neutral, objective and dispassionate observer who is in deep sympathy and empathy with the victims of each and every atrocity and deeply committed to the truth, I know for a fact that x, y and z ”

Unfortunately, it's not so easy to belong to any kind of neutrality when you are deeply committed to trying to right wrongs and at this stage you sympathise with all the Nigerian contenders in this thread. Professor Jibrin Ibrahim has not failed us in the past, no matter what his very aggressive interlocutors Professor Ochonu and Oluwatoyin Adepoju or other Islamophobes say. As rational and as reasonable as ever, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, even if in this his introductory essay he is more abstract ( theory) than concrete (examples, evidence)) he should continue to alert us to the dangers inherent in fake news - which President Trump has justly labelled “an enemy of the people” - an enemy that bears false witness, plants discord, reaps distrust and confusion and is therefore dangerous.

Didn't we read some scare propaganda in March 2015 about “How Buhari plans to Islamize Nigeria “?

Fact is , fake news does exist in Nigeria and it's a problem – not least of all in connection with the beleaguered Fulani Herdsmen

The opposition people/ parties have an axe to grind with President Buhari, his administration, so by hook and by crook, by unfair criticism, fake news, evil propaganda as so ably outlined by Professor Jibrin Ibrahim here , they intend to paint him as “clueless”

In the run-up to the 2019 elections , mischief is afoot, evil mythologies are being propagated about

“Armed Fulani Herdsmen” (like the Scarlet Pimpernel, appearing everywhere) and these “Armed Fulani Herdsmen” incidentally of the same ethnicity as Mr. President, are being linked with Mr. President in a very sinister fashion. These mythologies are being cleverly spun diurnally and are gaining currency. As is well known , repeat a life enough times, people will believe it is the truth and obviously the main aim of the linkage is clear : According to Oluwatoyin V. Adepoju who loves tarring and feathering his chosen enemies, President Buhari is the Patron Saint and Enabler of “Fulani Herdsmen Terrorism With Impunity!” Ask him for proof of this and he won't furnish you with any.

Just as with the gospels, a thousand fake news reports even from the most eminent purveyors of “truth”, about miracles, death and destruction, zealots' insurrection, even resurrections or as concerns our current subject matter, fake news reports from the most eminent purveyors of “Armed Fulani Herdsmen News” does not necessarily pass the litmus test for credibility, just because the credulous believe each and every ill report. One would have thought that there would be photos, live footage of some of the bloody carnage and that at least some of the alleged Fulani Herdsmen would have been apprehended and brought to justice, if not by the Naija Military and Police, then by the irate vigilantes who would naturally be protecting their valuable turf ( juicy apples) from any encroachment.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out, there's also the danger of the single storyWhat we have are some isolated examples of the single story multiplied by the media – a herdsman here a herdsman there and all the wanton, gross exaggerations such as “pictures of dead bodies in the thousands”

Here is just an example of Fulani Herdsmen on the receiving end : The Mambilla Genocide

[Windows Live 2018]

Thank you Alagba Kadiri for your usual attention to details and painstaking research. When President Buhari was  accused of minimalism of culpability I'm thinking as the President his security and intelligence officers must have shown him the links which you have perused and analysed for the benefit of forumites.

So if the President saw sticks wielded by herdsmen in the links  should he have lied that he saw guns?

OAA.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>

Date: 22/07/2018 21:42 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

[kemas osuji]

Prof. Jibrin national dailies published miyetti Allah’s statement severally!

[Windows Live 2018]

It is the duty of President Buhari to protect ALL Nigerians including his kinsman.  We should not politicize this national tragedy.  We should ALL work together to SOLVE it.  And that includes you my broda.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Date: 22/07/2018 14:44 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News

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Oga Agbetuyi,

You keep insisting on playing the role of a man engaging in philosophical debate in the midst of a burning house.

When you are able to demand the impeachment of Buhari for his eloquently tacit support of this horror your response becomes a serious one.

Not when you wish to deflect blame to his other officers, while he has made it clear the Fulani herdsmen terrorists are his people to protect.

The escalation of this terrorist movement began with Buhari's ascension to power in 2015. 2019 is round the corner and you are still expressing palliatives about what SHOULD  be done.

You need to ask yourself some serious questions.

toyin