“Fulanization” of the North by the South
Farooq A. Kperogi
Saturday, June 5, 2021
“Fulanization” of the North by the South
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Fears of “Fulani domination” have endured since Nigeria’s founding but, more than ever before, there is now an insanely unhealthy obsession with the Fulani in Nigeria’s South. The Fulani are not just routinely reviled with genocidal rhetorical venom, all manner of devious, supernormal political power is ascribed to them.
In the service of the reigning monomania about the Fulani, Northern Muslims, irrespective of their ethnicity, are now labeled “Fulani.” It’s worse if they are also beneficiaries of “juicy” political appointments in the Buhari regime.
Former Chief of Army Staff Tukur Buratai, for example, was habitually called “Fulani” even though he is Babur from southern Borno, a good portion of whom are Christians. The late Abba Kyari was called “Fulani” even though he was Shuwa (but linguistically and culturally Kanuri) from Borno.
When Muhammad Mamman Nami replaced Babatunde Fowler as the boss of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), many people in the South said Nami was “Fulani.” But Nami is Nupe from Niger State, and Nupe people are linguistically, historically, and geographically closer to Yoruba people than they are to Fulani or Hausa people.
There is a list doing the rounds on social media of supposed “Fulani” people who are holding strategic positions in Buhari’s government, but most of the people on the list are merely northern Muslims who are neither ethnically nor culturally Fulani. Take immigration boss Hammed Ali, for example, who appears on the list. He is neither Fulani nor even Hausa. He is from the Jarawa ethnic group from Dass in Bauchi State.
Nigerian Television Authority's boss, Yakubu Ibn Mohammed, is also on the list of “Fulani” appointees of strategic government agencies, but he is ethnically Jukun from Taraba State who grew up in Plateau State.
NNPC boss Mele Kyari has also been assigned a “Fulani” ethnicity even though he is a straight-up Kanuri man from Borno.
The only linguistically and culturally Fulani people on the list are FCT minister Mohammed Musa Bello and UBEC boss Hammed Bobboyi who are both from Adamawa State.
A reporter from the South recently interviewed me for a personality profile, and although one of the issues we discussed during the interview was the robust diversity of northern identities and how people mistake me for Fulani, Hausa, “Hausa-Fulani” or Nupe even though I am actually Baatonu from Kwara State, he still went ahead and described me as “Fulani” in his story. This shows how our preconceptions can sometimes distort our perceptions.
I corrected his unintentional mischaracterization of my ethnicity because he was kind enough to let me have a pre-publication readback of his story.
In other words, the South is relentlessly rhetorically Fulanizing the North, particularly the Muslim North, just to fertilize and sustain a simplistic narrative of superhuman Fulani domination. One of my Fulani friends from Adamawa by the name of Idirisu Alkali tells me he is often simultaneously amused and flattered by the prodigious capacities that southerners endue on his people.
The Fulani are now lionized in the South as the lifeblood of the North and the sole designers of all that is ill with Nigeria. But at the core of this sociologically impoverished monomaniacal fixation with the Fulani is a deep-seated but unacknowledged inferiority complex, which is fully realized in the tendency to describe as “Fulani slave” anyone who expresses opinions that depart from the forced and false consensus of the Fulaniphobes in the South.
Since only “masters” can have “slaves,” people who call others “Fulani slaves” have clearly accepted the Fulani as “masters,” indicating that they have also internalized their own inferiority before the Fulani.
But the truth is that the Fulani are just as human as anyone else. They are not a stagnant, undifferentiated, unthinking human monolith with no dissensions. They have the same fears, anxieties, and pains as anybody else. They have both good and bad people like other groups. There’s no conspirative conclave where Fulani people meet and plot to dominate everyone else. They battle disunity within their ranks like all ethnic groups. In fact, like the Igbo, they agonize over the progressive erosion of their language and culture in much of Northern Nigeria.
Muhammadu Buhari on whose account the Fulani are ceaselessly dehumanized and vituperated is, in fact, not culturally or linguistically Fulani. In other words, although he traces patrilineal descent from the Fulani, he doesn’t understand or speak Fulfulde (as the language of the Fulani is called) and has no experience with Fulani culture.
Buhari’s father, Adamu Bafallaje, who was an ardo (as Fulani community elders are called), died in his real hometown of Dumurkul in the Daura Emirate of Katsina State when Buhari wasn’t old enough to know him, so Buhari was brought up by his maternal relatives in Daura. His maternal relatives are ethnically Kanuri people who are nonetheless culturally and linguistically Hausa.
As Mamman Daura’s daughter, Fatima Daura, wrote on the occasion of her father’s 80th birthday, Mamman Daura is Kanuri. The family’s forebears migrated from Borno to a town in what is now Niger Republic and finally to Daura. Note that Mamman Daura’s father, Dauda Daura, shares the same mother (but different fathers) with Buhari. So Buhari’s mother, Hajia Zulaiha, was Kanuri.
Not having grown up with his father and knowing next to nothing about the Fulani, Buhari idealized not just his absent Fulani father but the Fulani people. This is a well-known psychological phenomenon that is encapsulated in the folk wisdom that says, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Barack Obama, for instance, idealized his absent Kenyan father—and his Luo people— with an intensity he would never have had if he’d grown up with him.
Buhari’s idealization of his absent Fulani father inspires an exaggerated identification with the Fulani in ways that alienate others and expose innocent Fulani people to unjustified animosity. That’s why I called him the “single greatest threat to the Fulani” in a July 6, 2019 column.
I also pointed out in a January 12, 2019 column titled "Miyetti Allah, Presidential Endorsement and Politics of Fulani Identity" that “People who are on the edge of an identity tend to be more exaggeratedly aggressive in their assertion of the identity than those who are—or see themselves as being—in the mainstream of the identity.
“For instance, when there was a butcherly communal turmoil that pitted Bororo Fulani cattle herders against Yoruba farmers in the Oke-Ogun area of northern Oyo State in October 2000, Buhari led a group of ‘Fulani’ northerners to Ibadan to meet with the late Governor Lam Adesina where he told Adesina, among other things, ‘your people are killing my people.’ A Fulani person from the northeast is unlikely to say that.”
Nothing in what I’ve said is intended to mitigate the injustice of Buhari’s preferentialist style of governance. I started calling out what I called the “undisguised Arewacentricity” in Buhari’s appointment since 2015 when most people were scared to criticize the regime (read, for instance, my September 5, 2015 column titled “Buhari is Losing the Symbolic War”), but to put the entire moral weight of his wrongheaded choices on the Fulani and proceed to demonize them without let is both reprehensible and unconscionable.
There’s no denying that northern Muslim elites have benefitted disproportionately in choice appointments in this regime, but “northern Muslim elite” isn’t synonymous with “Fulani.”
An honest, empathetic role play would probably help. Imagine being from an ethnic group that’s perpetually slandered, maligned, reviled, and vilified as a national pastime because you share ethnic identity with someone—or some people—whose boneheaded policies smolder you like they do your traducers. How would you feel?
Demonizing people based on invariable attributes that are incidental to their humanity, such as their ethnicity or race, is akin to condemning them even before they were born. Malcolm X once called that the worst crime that can ever be committed. Let the toxic, hateful ignorance stop already!
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Toyin Falola
Farooq:
I was expecting an essay on Twitter!
Homogenization is very common in politics and public statements. The Igbo do these things; the Yoruba do that thing. Africans sold their people into slavery. Westerners are exploiters, etc.
Framing the other has a purpose—to rubbish all without discrimination. I have been rubbished many times as black, Nigerian, African, Yoruba—for things I don’t do or know nothing about. On WhatsApp, my beloved city of Ibadan is routinely rubbished for the way we speak, for our slowness with modernization, for our food preferences, etc.
When I was growing up, the distinctions were clear. No one confused an Ebira or Nupe with a Hausa person. The Yoruba invented many proverbs to distinguish and differentiate. Gambari, Fulani, Beriberi, Tapa, Kanuri, etc., were identified within the city.
However, in “federal Nigeria,” that homogenization connects to broader ethnic politics:
Those ethnic politics is about power;
That power is about theft, the ability to use power based on the ethnic divide to steal money.
Only the people can safe themselves, and when they do, they accuse them of murder, portraying struggling people as criminals.
TF
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Farooq A. Kperogi
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Cornelius Hamelberg
More big grammar. Hasn’t Ogbeni Kperogi belaboured this point before? I seem to remember that he has. The fixation with tribe, ethnicity etc. continues. I should just like to add this other little fact, that the late great Tunde Idiagbon’s mother is said to have been Fulani. And how do you like that?
Fulanization indeed. At least, al-hamdulillah, in jest, or with the usual passionate intensity the buff does not talk about foolanization, a put-down, unless understood as I would, that foolaniztion in that case would be a legitimate and acceptable new fangled British English expression talking about how people, not necessarily Fulani people, are fooled, deceived. The foolanization of the Chadian Emperor. As Old Abe said about foolanization, and this also applies to the Nigerian People: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
And the Peul? The Fulɓe? That would be the Senegalisation of the Fula People of Shierra Leone.
The politicization of our dear Fulani people = Fulanization.
Fulani man impregnates, has a child with Igbo woman can be translated into, Igbo woman was “Fulanized”. Sadaqah. He gave her the number One and she became Fully Fulanized. Nine months later baby enters the world and the Shahada and Allahu Akbar is whispered in his ear. Like the usual good wishes from Professor Bolaji Aluko , “ May your tribe increase”. Sky’s the limit...
Obviously, there has been a power-shift and parallel with it, a shift in the language, especially the language of identity and identity politics and this partly explains the insane reply I got from one Ogugua Anunoby when I told him that in my four years fraternising with Igbos mostly in the then Imo State (under dear Sam Mbakwe of dear Imo State now truncated into what’s known as dear Chidi’s Abia State and BTW, I hope that dear Umuahia is still there) what the term “Hausa man” meant to his post- Biafran War Brethren, circa 1981-1984 when I was in Nigeria.
I told the learned Professor Ogugua somewhere either here or here that when one of my Igbo brethren in Imo or Rivers state used the expression “Hausa-man”, he meant Northerner / Muslim – for my Igbo brethren “Hausaman” was synonymous with Muslim but all the irate and somewhat irritated Professor wanted to know was whether or not I had asked “all “ Igbo men (and women) if that’s what they meant.
By the same token I guess with reference to John Pepper Clark ‘s empathic ”Fulani Cattle” he would like to ascertain about that collective description, that there are no mad British cows lurking among the Fulani herd. And of course when it comes to Fulani Herdsmen , that they are all bone fide Fulani ( and not Hausa or anything else…
At another point he got angry/ irritated because I singed off as “Cornelius Adebayo” and then he wanted to know , why did I bring tribalism into everything. Me? I don’t know whether or not he was referring to me or whether or not he thought that I was Cornelius Adebayo was me or merely someone else, such as the real Cornelius Adebayo who was the governor of Kwarra state during my time in Nigeria.
The Yoruba-i-zation , the Creole-i-zation and ultimately the Sierra-Leone-i-zation and nationalization of the name Adebayo. I wonder if the Igbo-i-zation and tribalisation of Adabayo would be a misnomer...
In Sierra Leone it’s reliably being reported that the Government of the day has its on-going Mende-i-zation project, a project started by Julius Maada Bio’s ideological ancestor Akpata Margai of Gbangbatoke
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Professor Falola,
Even you must agree that Nigeria’s Presidential Brother Muhammadu Buhari is no President Donald Trump who was banned by Twitter and has now been banned by Facebook for more of the same reason for his banishment from Twitter.
Presidential Brother Buhari is different, and apart from the Biafran militants and some of their supporters, who think that violent secessionists should be treated with kids gloves, one would have thought that the rest of the country that would like to keep Nigeria one should be rallying around President Buhari on the issue of the President’s comment that was deleted by Twitter
Twitter’s double standards is surprising. Has Twitter deleted much harsher tweets by Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett and a whole lot of other pro-Israel people that I follow on Twitter, about Hamas, Islamic Jihad etc.?
With all due respect for freedom of speech, what "standards” could Twitter be talking about? Twitter removed a fair comment by President Buhari ( common Nigerian English parlance) that he was going to teach some people " a lesson" ! How does that compare with all the bile that passes through the fingers of Twitter?
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Saturday, June 5, 2021 12:07 PM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “Fulanization” of the North by the South
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
As for the Fulani elite, I dont see them as being in any hurry to dissociate themselves from the image of them being constructed by the likes of Buhari and Miyetti Allah
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Those were very strong words from Professor Harrow. He may freely lecture all he wants about “the bones of the dead” and reap a lot of sympathy from all the predictable quarters. He may even quote the Holy Quran which says that the fires of hell will be fuelled by stones and the bones of men.
By the conspiracy of silence / hypocrisy or something even more sinister, we still don’t have President Buhari’s precise tweet that was deleted, so unceremoniously, by Twitter’s double standards as aforementioned.
As far as most of us are concerned, our hearts should be with all those longing to taste some real freedom, be they Palestinians or, outlawed word, Biafrans.
In the case of the Middle East both the Israelis and the Palestinians also remember “the bones of the dead” and this has not meant that Messrs Netanyahu, Bennet, Gantz, Lieberman or indeed the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef have been compromising about whatever way you chose to interpret the meaning of words such as “decimating” Hamas.
In the case of Nigeria, it’s tough words from President Buhari, the Fulani President of All Nigerians and being who he is, he does not compromise about the now fragile unity of his country being threatened with INSURRECTION – so – as a military man he decided to speak in the language that is understandable to both Boko Haram and the militant secessionist adventurers and gun-runners who want to jeopardise that unity, and are challenging the Federal Government militarily or by wanton acts of terrorism , when - just as being demanded by the Israelis, the best way forward is served by negotiation, tabling issue of secession – through the proper channel for discussion and not by adding to the anarchy by more insurgency and wanton violence.
So Brother Buhari is also talking tough and saying that fire will be met by fire, maybe even greater fire.
President Buhari’s response to Twitter should be lauded.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Have a heart !
In the context of all the banditry, ransom kidnappings, Boko Haram etc. and. to add fuel to the fire
you think that it’s OK for Twitter to serve as a pulpit agency for those who advocate insurrection and incitement for the violent overthrow of the current government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but when President Buhari says he will deal with them as drastically as they should be dealt with, you think that that’s not OK?
A civil war anywhere is not child play!
Think: Rwanda, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, think: a repeat of the 1967-1970 Biafra Civil War, once again without any winners and this time (God Forbid) with all kinds of much deadlier weaponry than before and all the coveted oilfields in Nigeria going up in smoke as those who would like to witness the violent dissolution fan it on, want to manipulate the country beyond the point of no return and unto the abyss, as they (the hypocrites) cheer on. Think of the total destruction and the untold human suffering. Where are the innocent, long suffering unemployed young men, women children who get caught up in the war going to go – seek refuge? Across the Mediterranean Sea?
Denmark is saying that applicants for refugee status to that country will be flown back to some locations in Africa.
You are going to say that all the causes of distress have to be addressed. The answer to that is Yes!
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
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Cornelius Hamelberg
“Lack of communication skills” indeed. The occasional what you call gaffe , such as “ My wife belongs in the kitchen “ which was a joke and which is also cultural everywhere in the world apart from in Sweden where the wife is referred to as “ Regeringen “ (The Government) i.e. “ She who decides everything” - and you have of course heard in “Democracy” about “the homicidal bitchin' that goes down in every kitchen.”
The major communications problem facing me is how to word a question I may have for the First Lady of Ekiti State in the ZOOM session slated for Sunday, 27th June...
“Lack of communication skills” indeed
So how did Muhammadu Buhari and not Lord Agbetuyi become Nigeria’s democratically elected President twice, by a landslide? Every time he opens his mouth his foot comes through his mouth? With superior communicative skills you could write something like “Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories” by Saul Bellow of Chicago.
More seriously, maybe, you and some other buddies could team up with Jon Favreau and offer your collective services as President Buhari’s next appointees, his speech writers? Then you wouldn’t you be doing him and the nation a favour, instead of just sitting on the sidelines in the Diaspora and speaking big grammar and a pacifist type unlike Zimmerman singing Love Minus Zero
“My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals of violence…
There is a conspiracy that has been hatched by traitors in cahoots with foreign interests to destabilise Nigeria to the point of Nigeria’s total disintegrations.
The question is this: What is to be done about what we see unfolding as the complete breakdown of law and order in Nigeria with all the on-going banditry, Boko Haram, armed criminal gangs on the rampage, ransom kidnapping, armed secessionists, vigilantes, mass murder, rape and plunder?
The ruthless truth is that President Buhari has addressed the miscreants – all of them, in the only language that they understand, not the language of Jesus preaching his Sermon on the Mount, love your enemies, turn the other cheek and all that jazz, but the God-talk in Exodus: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot; a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.” Later will look at this Mandatory War in the State of Israel & The IDF Code of Ethics
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