Buhari visits Trump

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

President Buhari’s Visit to the US

 

Jibrin Ibrahim, Friday column, Daily Trust, 4^thMay 2018

 

On Monday, President Buhari visited with the American President Donald Trump and there is some relief that the visit concluded without any major incident. Coming soon after the much-castigated comments by Muhammadu Buhari about the Nigerian youth, people were looking for another faux pas or de-marketing of Nigeria. Maybe the President’s minders are doing a batter job of protecting him from the people, as apparently there was no meeting with the Nigerian community or other public events. President Buhari was the first sub-Saharan African leader to have an Oval Office visit with President Trump and this is not surprising given the importance and place of Nigeria in Africa. The two leaders had extensive discussions.

 

As expected, there was a lot of discussion on countering violent extremism. It would be recalled that the American governmenthad approved a $593 million foreign military sale to Nigeria, including 12 A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircraft, in order to further the nation’s military campaign against Boko Haram. Nigeria has been seeking permission from the U.S. government to buy the aircraft since 2015 but the Obama administration had put the sale on hold due to concerns about the country’s human rights record. In February, U.S. President Donald Trump signaled his support for the sale during a phone call with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. Nigeria has since pad for the aircraft although the National Assembly is furious because the payment was done without appropriation.

 

President Trump praised Buhari’s efforts in the war against corruption and this must have been pleasing to our President who has been under significant criticism at home for the ineffectiveness of his anti-corruption strategy and rising voices on corrupt activities by some of his close aides. In some of his recent statements justifying his decision to contest for a second term, the President has argued that another tenure would be an opportunity to engage in a more efficacious second round struggle against corruption. This is tough terrain for the President as his fifteen-year engagement in partisan politics has always been presented as an anti-corruption programme that would be successful if and when he gets into power.

 

President Trump made a forceful demand for increased importation of American food. This is problematic at a time in which the policy thrust of the Nigerian government is the development of self-sufficiency and it’s my hope that this demand would be rejected. This is important because the United States is determined to impose GMO food on the rest of the world with all the associated dangers of the policy. The American promise to return $500 million dollars of our stolen money is however welcome and should be pursued with vigour,

 

Another issue that President Trump raised was the murder of Christians in Nigeria, which he said they would not tolerate. There have been concerted narratives articulated for some time that Christians are being targeted for annihilation in the country. The fact that Muslims are also being killed on a daily basis is a reality that the Nigerian media has been relatively successful in masking. Specifically, Trump warned that his country would no longer accept the further murder of Christians in Nigeria by herdsmen and other Islamic extremists and terrorists. He sad that:“We have had very serious problems with Christians who are being murdered in Nigeria, we are going to be working on that problem very, very hard because we cannot allow that to happen.” During the visit, a prominent U.S. group, Open Doors USA, had through its the President/CEO, David Curry, published in America’s most widely circulated print newspaper, USA Today and later by The Atlantic Post, an article arguing that the protection of Christians in Nigeria can only be achieved by an international coalition.We are told that:“Buhari’s Fulani kin are responsible for hundreds of deaths already in 2018, attacking villages and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and land. The scale of the Fulani aggression threatens to surpass Boko Haram’s reign of terror, based on the sheer number of deaths.”

 

In September last year, I attended a Human Rights Commission public hearing in Congress jointly led by Congressmen Randy Hultgren and James McGovern in Washington DC on Nigeria. The topic was violent conflict between “Muslim cattle rearing herders and Christian farmers in the Middle Belt”. The labelling of Muslim herders versus Christian farmers has been an effective way of misconstruing generalised mass killing in Nigeria to a pogrom against Christians.

 

During the hearing, one Dr. Elijah Brown, Executive Director of the 21^stCentury Wilberforce Initiative told the Commission hat there is an insidious campaign by “Muslim Fulani militants” to kill Christian farmers in the Middle Belt, drive them out of their ancestral lands, rename the seized territory with Fulani names and use the office of the Governor to transfer the lands to Fulani ownership. This is the type of framing that influenced the comments by Trump. The fact that “Muslim-Muslim” killings related to the same herder-farmer conflicts inZamfara state has been higher that “Muslim-Christian” killings in states such as Benue have fallen on deaf ears. The reality that the combined effects of competition for land and water, crime, and poorly informed media speculations have resulted in a cycle of conflict with mass casualties suffered by both famer and herder communities as well as Muslim and Christian communities has simply been ignored. 

 

Codeine and the Drug Epidemic in Nigeria 

This week, the Federal Government finally banned the importation and distribution of cough syrup with codeine. The ban occurred less than 240hours after the release of a BBC documentary on the issue. Its great that this first step has been taken, The fact of the matter however that a major campaign had been on-going by Nigerian advocates over the past two years calling for the ban. It’s unfortunate that the Nigerian government only listens when the outside world speaks. I would like to thank Dr Mairo Mandara who has been a true leader in the campaign to rid our society of the menace of drugs. As she has been emphasising, the ban is only a first step and our governments, civil society, religious and community leaders all have a huge role to play in rescuing our youth from drug addiction.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

This is misrepresentation-

' The reality that the combined effects of competition for land and water, crime, and poorly informed media speculations have resulted in a cycle of conflict with mass casualties suffered by both farmer and herder communities...'. 

Kogi offered the Fulani herdsmen land for their much touted cattle ranches.

Yet, they still serially attacked Kogi and massacred their people.

Why?

The attacks on sleeping and defenseless communities across the nation, from the SE to the Middle Belt, for which the Fulani herdsmen terrorists are known, attacks where men, women and children are massacred, are these examples of the '  combined effects of competition for land and water, crime, and poorly informed media speculations'?

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, the Greeks stated.

toyin

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Trump is of course wrong in identifying a non-existent agenda of killing Christians, of religious cleansing against Christians, in Nigeria. He is echoing the views of his Christian Right base.

However, Trump's prejudice does not excuse the egregious and repeated error in Professor Ibrahim's interventions on the herdsmen issue. 

Jibo seems oblivious of or simply refuses to recognize two important points:

1. What is going on in Zamfara is banditry. There is killing and looting in rural areas. The conflict pitches Fulani against Fulani, Hausa against Hausa. There is, as far as we know, no occupation of land involved. Even when villagers desert their communities after massacres, there is no indication that the murderers and bandits take over the deserted lands for grazing or other purposes. The killings are a cycle or murderous recriminations.

2. In Benue, Southern Kaduna, Plateau, and other Middle Belt areas, by contrast, the killers almost always work in tandem with herdsmen, and it's no coincidence that whenever they massacre villagers, decimate their villages, and the survivors flee, herdsmen are always in tow and take over those communities with their cattle, sometimes less than an hour after the attacks. In some instances, the killers are literally vanguards for herders, going ahead of them to clear out communities. This is a recurring pattern.

This is what Jibo doesn't understand about the Zamfara-Benue comparison. He is absolutely right that the Zamfara killings are not resonating across the country as much as the Benue killings. The reason, he fails to grasp, is quite simple.  People perceive, for good or bad, the situation in Zamfara as a family affair, brother killing brother, with no perception of "foreign" or "outsider" conquest, or a hostile territorial takeover. In addition, as he knows, notions of ancestral land are quite fluid in the Northwestern part of the country, among the Hausa and Fulani.

By contrast, in the Middle Belt, people are tied to their land, and their identity and economic existence are tied to land. Notions of ancestral land, of ancestral origins and nativity, are very well established in those areas. Add that to the fact that the Middle Belt communities that are attacked are largely non-Muslim and are almost entirely non-Hausa/Fulani. The result is a perception of the killing spree of the armed herdsmen as "foreigners" or outsiders coming to kill us in our own ancestral land, or even worse, coming to takeover our ancestral lands for their grazing activities. There is no such perception in Zamfara or interpretation around the killings in Zamfara.

This perception is not unique to the Middle Belt victims or to Nigerians who may appear to care more about the killings in the Middle Belt because the perpetrators are herdsmen not indigenous to the Middle Belt. The same perpetual compartmentalization applies to Americans as well. Gun violence in America kills thousands of Americans every year. They've become so commonplace that Americans now largely shrug them off as unpleasant aspects of their quotidian reality. However, when people perceived as outsiders attacked America on September 11 2011, the same Americans wanted instant revenge and lashed out  almost unanimously, at the killers. Not only that, terrorist attacks perpetrated by Americans of Christian background, or "insiders" hardly resonate or elicit the outrage that terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreigners or "outsiders" do.

It is human nature. We can tolerate abuse and violence from "our own" and we often don't take seriously conflict "among brothers." But we explode in anger when outsiders or people we see as outsiders with no ties to our communities invade our land and hurt us. It is not just the violence, it is also the feeling of being humiliated in one's own home, in one's own ancestral homeland. Your home/land is your sacred space, and you do not want anyone not related to you or to that space to violate it or to try to uproot you from it or to attack you on it. All these factors are not present in Zamfara, where the perception is that both victims and killers are "brothers" and belong to the same space, have ancestral ties to the space. Many Nigerians, themselves from communities with strong notions of ancestral lands, can relate to this basic human instinct to protect the natal space against "outsider" aggression. It is the basis of their empathy for the people of the Middle Belt and what may appear as their indifference to the "brother vs brother " killings in Zamfara.

I hope that this lengthy explanation gives Jibo some perspective on why the Middle Belt killings are treated and perceived differently than the Zamfara ones. That Donald Trump prejudicially put a religious and a one-sided spin on the killings across the country should not send us into another error of our own.

[Malami buba]

Dear Moses & Jibrin,

As Trump spews his ‘Christian Right agenda’, with all the ‘framing’ and ‘masking’ that go with such campaigns, it’s not far fetched to connect the bandits of herdsman ‘Buharin Daji’ in Zamfara, who kill and maim for cattle,  and the Benue ‘invaders’ who may be receiving and moving stolen cattle through Benue for pasture and sale. 

In other words, this ‘brotherhood’ is one of banditry, not of kinship. And don’t forget that some 200 yrs ago, Sultan Bello had urged his wandering kinsmen to reduce their cattle holdings and settle in urban spaces, among other conflict-avoidance strategies. He saw cattle herding as ‘bad for business’ at the time, as it should be for Miyetti Allah and its trustees at the moment. 

I may be wrong.

Malami

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

We thank God for informed interventions like this by Moses helping us unravel this madness.

toyin

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Moses

You cannot cherry pick your facts - Zamfara is criminality and Benue is land alienation - we all know there is massive criminality in Benue, that various political leaders run criminal gangs killing for political purposes. We also know that the livestock guards established by the Benue State Government recruited criminals to serve the political purposes of the Governor who has been very unpopular until he found political salvation in the herdsmen issue. If you systematically refuse to see the politics of what is happening in Benue, it cannot be unrelated to your partisanship on the issue.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Ashafa Abdullahi]

Bubs you are right.  An intellectual excursion into the writings of Caliph Bella will reveal this foresight. As an architect of archetypal urban setting,  Bello only proposed and did reasonably well to convince many a Fulani to hold unto few herds in the ribats. Our major missing is the politicisation of the whole thing masquerading it for an intellectual discourses or Enlightening exchanges. Given the problem the "we" Vs "them" category tends to make people stick to the unreasonable,  if not unwarranted propositions we offer as solutions. When Prof Jibo was more restraint & balanced, some tend to blemish such reasonable analysis with no better alternate proposition. 

Well,  nothing is right in Nigeria. 

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Malami and Jibrin,

 

Could you please share your views of the role of Miyetti Allah within this complex?

 

Miyetti Allah is run by the most elite

​Nigerian ​

Fulani, with the Emir of Kano, ex central bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and the Sultan of Sokoto, the leader of Nigeria's Muslims,  being the most prominent.

 

The same Miyetti Allah has, on various occasions, justified the massacres carried out by the herdsmen militia, from Agatu to the most recent massacre in Benue following Miyetti Allah's publicly stated  defiance of the state's open grazing law. 

 

People are also keen to understand why a government run by a Fulani man, who has placed his fellow Hausa Fulani as heads of  almost all Nigerian security agencies, has refused to go after the Fulani herdsmen terrorists and Miyetti Allah, their organiser and spokesperson.

 

We all recall how the separatist group IPOB, which killed no one, developing a  purely  civil disobedience strategy, was summarily dealt with by this government, only for the herdsmen terrorist killings to resume with even more systematic ferocity after Nigerians had been beguiled into thinking IPOB was an enemy of Nigeria, rather than than the terrorist group which the Fulani President told the Benue people to accommodate as brothers after they struck in defiance of the state's open grazing law.

 

Are these questions I am asking avoidable? 

 

No, becease they are based on historical facts known to all

​who are ​

following this bloody drama.

 

Why is Miyetti Allah belligerently opposing a law created by a state to protect itself agst  massacres and social disruption created by Myetti Allah operatives   and how was it able to carry out its threat to strike in defiance of that law and not only succeed,

​it ​

g

​o​

t support for its actions from the Minister of Defense and the Inspector General of Police,

​as demonstrated by their ​

 position speeches after their security counci

​l​

meeting with the Fulani President?

 

Am I describing fantasy or historical fact? Would you interpret these developments differently?

 

If these are facts, can we continue to focus on claims of  'the livestock guards established by the Benue State Government

​[who] ​

recruited criminals to serve the political purposes of the Governor who has been very unpopular until he found political salvation in the herdsmen issue?

​'​

​Could 

 that

​characterization ​

 apply to gov Fayose of Ekiti who faced the same problem, established the same open grazing law and built an armed force to enforce this law, following which the challenge of terrorist Fulani herdsmen was  eliminated in Ekiti?

 We also know that Kogi  was vilified by some for recently offering land for cattle colonies to the herdsmen. Yet after making this generous offer which some saw as self destructive, the Fulani herdsmen terrorists  proved the sceptics right by repeatedly attacking and killing large numbers in Kogi communities.

Can you share your views on this paradox?

Nigerians are observing a pattern of attack and community decimation supported by the fed govt and are concluding that a terrorist colonization strategy coordinated between ethnicist  politicians  and their ethnic  kin is at play.

Can you share your views on how the historical facts that have led many to draw these conclusions  should be interpreted  bcs it seems the claims of banditry, farmer/herders conflicts and terrorist sponsorship by Benue politicians such as the governor of Benue  can no longer be accommodated  by the

​glaring evidence of ​

systematic Hausa-Fulani politicians/ Miyetti Allah/Fulani herdsmen terrorists coordination represented  by this carnage.

thanks

toyin

 

 

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Jibo,

I am not from Taraba, Southern Kaduna, Plateau, and Nasarawa, where herdsmen killings have also been widespread over the last decade, so please spare me the predictable cheap shot of partisanship accusation. You were pretending not to know why there is such an outrage around the killings in Benue, Plateau, and Southern Kaduna--in the Middle Belt compared to Zamfara and even attributed it to an "uninformed media." I gave you the logic and basis of the differential perceptions, and all you can do is resort to an accusation of partisanship. I will not return the favor with a similar accusation even though it's on display for all to see in your interventions.

You are my friend on Facebook and you know from my postings that there is no greater critic of the Benue governor than myself even on this issue of herdsmen killings. Even if the governor is playing politics with the issue, with has become the stock narrative of the Buhari-caliphate wing, how does that erase the hard fact that armed herdsmen are rampaging through several local governments and slaughtering people in their ancestral villages and then taking over their lands for grazing? It is not only in Benue that this is happening but across the Middle Belt.

I'm from Benue and I watch the politics of the state closely. The anti-open grazing law is supported by the vast majority of the people of the state as a desperate response to herdsmen killings that have been going on since at least 2010. In fact Ortom was forced to initiative it reluctantly after resisting the grassroots, popular pressure to enact such a law. The pressure and initiative came from below, not from Ortom, who was not keen on the law obviously because he didn't want to antagonize his APC benefactors in a Federal Government whose principal agents have displayed open bias for the herdsmen in their utterances. 

The people of Benue are actually mad at Ortom because they feel that he only made a public show of the law against open grazing and was not truly committed to its implementation, hence the haphazard manner he constituted the so-called livestock guard and his refusal to properly fund and equip it, cementing the view that he's only interested in the politics of it and not in yielding to the yearning of the people. In fact Ortom is playing both sides, trying to ride the popular support for the law at home while trying to appease Abuja by vacillating on its implementation. That has been his political downfall and will continue to be.

And the point about Ortom's coziness with gang figures in no way vitiates my contention. Ortom even granted amnesty to gang leaders such as Ghana and even appointed some of them to head state agencies. The notorious Ghana was scandalously given a contract to collect state revenue before he was implicated in a murder and was disowned by the governor. In the larger perpetual logic, however, these are considered internal, domestic, brotherly Benue matters. Every state has its version of the toxic mix of politics and gangsterism. That has nothing to do with herdsmen murdering villagers repeatedly in the state, and reasonable people do not conflate internal political issues with murderous attacks by  armed "outsiders" who are even killing security forces sent to confront them. 

Reasonable, logical people are able to separate the two. In fact they often apply the same logic: if I have an issue in my home, and then get attacked by an outsider, I will not appreciate anyone who invokes my internal issue, which every ones in their own home, to excuse or trivialize the murderous attacks on my home by outsiders. That is what you seem to be doing, but it is a familiar tactic of people who do not want to acknowledge or confront the reality of the armed herdsmen threat facing Nigeria.

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Toyin, Moses

My position is that we need to rise above the single narrative approach boxing us into a cheap conspiracy theory. Miyetti Allah is an NGO that speaks for herders and has many splinter faction. It is important to note however that we are in the age of fake news and many of the messages in the social media saying they committed massacres are crafted by  fake news anchors and hate mongers. There are multiple actions taking place at the same time - pastoralists encroaching into farmlands and herder-farmer conflicts and violence arising therefrom, killings and revenge killings of people and cattle, cattle rustling (of Fulani cows), criminal gangs kidnapping Fulani and forcing them to sell their cows to pay ransom and so on. Its not a neat one-sided simplistic story although thats how the media tends to present it and the two of you act as the megaphones. You might be interested in knowing too that it predates the Buhari Administration by far. In 1965, the Northern Regional Government passed the Grazing Reserves Act because they correctly read the trend that we we moving towards increased conflicts between herders and farmers. I understand the commitment of Moses to Logam's double colonialism narrative but its important to accept others have more complex narratives that tell a broader story.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

And, by the way, Jibo, speaking of cherrypicking facts, you seem to have conveniently forgotten that Miyetti Allah, that terrorist organization that routinely threatens and claims massacres without any consequences, vowed to attack Benue if the anti-open grazing law was passed. Then, after the killings started, Miyetti repeated the threat and added that the only solution to the killings was a repeal of the law. And yet not only has that organization not been declared a terrorist organization, its leaders still walk around freely and its patrons, prominent emirs and even the president himself, continue to associate with and defend their membership of it. Go figure. I've not even mentioned the scandalously based statements of the IGP and the minister of defense, who publicly sided with the herdsmen, called for the repeal of the duly passed grazing law, and attributed the killings to farmers blocking the grazing routes of herdsmen.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Malami,

Wow, I find your take to intriguing, insightful, and plausible. It's this kind of new thinking that will take us to a solution, not the denialism of some people. In fact, the "brotherhood of banditry" you describe makes a lot of sense and dovetails with what has been observed in many Middle Belt communities where these massacres take place. The brotherhood between bandits and herders (they need each other) is indeed not a brotherhood of ethnicity or religion but one of economic convenience. As you know, and as many Nigerians do not know, the Bororo herdsmen are not even religious, do not pray, and drink alcohol, among other violations of Islamic prescriptions on piety. 

In fact not only is your take a plausible explanation, it also confirms the widespread observation of many, including myself, that we have a new, deadly, aggressive, and murderous set of "herdsmen," who are a radical, deadly departure from the familiar, historical herdsmen that many Nigerians grew up knowing and interacting with. The angle of Fulani bandits of the Buharin Daji type moving their stolen, rustled herds of cattle to Benue and other Middle Belt areas for pasture and sale is a such a plausible explanation that I'm surprised that the powers that be have not explored it instead of blaming Gaddafi, foreigners, and other phantom actors. 

And thanks for the historical reference to Sultan Bello's advice to his nomadic herder kinsmen to embrace a less conflictual form of cattle husbandry.  He saw into the future, as we say. In truth I was not aware of this advice and so, as a historian, I appreciate your referencing of it. Is this advice in Infakul Maisur? I would like to explore it further. It is remarkable that Miyetti Allah continues to claim some kind of custodianship over the essence of Pulaaku while ignoring the admonition of Sultan Bello in regard to the potential of transhumant herding to cause trouble. It may be down to the urban Fulani/nomadic Fulani divide, which unfortunately has been lost in the ethnic stereotyping of Fulani that has become the staple of discussions on the herdsmen killings.

I salute you.

[Malami buba]

You are THE specialist on this subject, Toyin. What do I know? 

Malami

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[Windows Live 2018]

I'm not sure this response supports the claim that Moses is " cherry picking''  How do you analytically unravel dissimilar narratives without 'cherry picking?'

O. Agbetuyi

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Date: 05/05/2018 17:41 (GMT+00:00)

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Toyin, Moses

My position is that we need to rise above the single narrative approach boxing us into a cheap conspiracy theory. Miyetti Allah is an NGO that speaks for herders and has many splinter faction. It is important to note however that we are in the age of fake news and many of the messages in the social media saying they committed massacres are crafted by  fake news anchors and hate mongers. There are multiple actions taking place at the same time - pastoralists encroaching into farmlands and herder-farmer conflicts and violence arising therefrom, killings and revenge killings of people and cattle, cattle rustling (of Fulani cows), criminal gangs kidnapping Fulani and forcing them to sell their cows to pay ransom and so on. Its not a neat one-sided simplistic story although thats how the media tends to present it and the two of you act as the megaphones. You might be interested in knowing too that it predates the Buhari Administration by far. In 1965, the Northern Regional Government passed the Grazing Reserves Act because they correctly read the trend that we we moving towards increased conflicts between herders and farmers. I understand the commitment of Moses to Logam's double colonialism narrative but its important to accept others have more complex narratives that tell a broader story.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

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[Moses Ochonu]

Jibo,

Unfortunately, you're beginning to sound like Trump. Any narrative that does not suit your pro-herdsmen position, for which you have been called out by many on this list, you attribute to fake news and an uninformed media. And yet you don't supply evidence to counter these facts. Can't you find facts to cherry pick to counter the narratives and facts you find unpalatable?

Just to avoid dealing with the central issue, you throw out these canards. The latest curious digression is double colonialism or is it triple or quadruple colonialism? Na wa o. 

What's perplexing is that you've not expressed any outrage about the herdsmen killings or concern about the potential threat the problem poses to Nigeria. Your only concern has been that Nigerians and the media have not accorded the killings and banditry among your ethnic kinsmen in Zamfara the same attention they've accorded the herdsmen killings in the Middle Belt.  I gave you an explanation as to why and you came back with non sequiturs and tangential insinuations meant to cleverly change the topic.

Sent from my iPhone

[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

Prof Jibrin, thanks for spotlighting and using the word “epidemic” to describe the drug problem in Nigeria today which cuts across all ethnic, religious, regional, class, gender, whatever other lines exist. This epidemic, in the long run, will take far more lives and futures than all Nigeria's previously fought wars— if government does not go beyond the recent ban and put in place a comprehensive action plan that is well thought out, well funded, and carefully implemented.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

I wonder what relationship there could be between what is described as new herdsmen and those whose cows are shown occupying classrooms in a school in Edo state, destroying the crops of various communities across Nigeria and attacking and maiming and raping across the nation.

Whether these people who have made themselves into a scourge at different levels of destructiveness, from raping, killing, ravaging farmlands and occupying classrooms to engaging in systemic massacre of communities and moving in to their land with their cattle, have replaced en masse the old herdsmen, or the new herdsmen have become belligerent after the old ones became sedentary or passed on, the fact is the new culture of Fulani herdsmen lawlessness and terrorism has become institutionalised in Nigeria through the blessing of the most prominent Fulani centred organisation, Miyetti Allah, whose apex leadership has never dissociated itself from any of the justifications of massacres made by its representatives, so the theory of Miyetti Allah splinter factions, admitting to and justifying fake(?!)  new of killings by its agents, does not hold water here.

Whatever declaration is made on behalf of Miyetti Allah that is not disavowed by its apex leadership represents the voice of the composite corporate body, it is the voice of the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and of the Sultan of Sokoto, the most prominent leaders of the organisation. 

Fulani ethnicity is transnational. So, the theory of 'they are from elsewhere' is of dubious value as these murderous right wing  characters are well settled in Nigeria with the help of Miyetti Allah, with the assistance overt and tacit assistance of the Fulani national ruler and his majority Hausa-Fulani heads of security agencies and there is no outcry agst the murdering colonizers   from most Hausa-Fulani as the Fulani led federal  govt does everything in its power to allocate Nigeria's land to these people through grazing laws and cattle colonies.

The Miyetti Allah pressure group and their politician affiliates are urban Fulani. The foot soldiers  of colonization are nomadic Fulani. A neat combination as the right wing urban Fulani provide political cover and the terrorist elements among the nomadic Fulani enable or engage in penetration of various communities to wreak carnage.

All Germans were not Nazis but all Nazis were Germans fighting their own vision of a German cause as most Germans let it happen.

All Hausa-Fulani and all Fulani herdsmen are not terrorists, but the people orchestrating  and executing this terrorist strategy are either outright Fulani or identifiable as Hausa-Fulani, while most people from the same demographic see no evil, hear no evil and speak of  no evil as the horror unfolds, after fighting side by side with deluded Southern compatriots to remove the govt of the previous Southern President  in the name of 'united nation building'.

toyin

thanks

toyin

On 5 May 2018 at 19:41, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jum...@gmail.com> wrote:

Prof Jibrin, thanks for spotlighting and using the word “epidemic” to describe the drug problem in Nigeria today which cuts across all ethnic, religious, regional, class, gender, whatever other lines exist. This epidemic, in the long run, will take far more lives and futures than all Nigeria's previously fought wars— if government does not go beyond the recent ban and put in place a comprehensive action plan that is well thought out, well funded, and carefully implemented.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

And when are we going to stop using the 1965 Northern Nigeria grazing reserve law as a reference? This was a law enacted by the ruling NPC government, which had very little support in the Middle Belt, a part of Northern Nigeria with loyalties to other minority parties and thus with little or no consequential say in the legislative and executive branches of the regional government--and a part of Northern Nigeria with the best and thus most coveted pastures.

The grazing reserve law clearly failed to consider centuries old notions of ancestral lands and instead deployed the loose, fluid relationship to land in the caliphate areas of the North.

Did the law not lapse when Northern Nigeria, along with other regional governments, cease to exist as sub-national governmental units with the creation of states?

Even if such a law is a point of departure for the postcolonial period, why should we continue to invoke a law that, in light of population growth, expansion of towns and villages, and other factors is no longer tenable, realistic, or implementable?

And some people like to talk about grazing reserves that no longer exist in law or practice but pay the merest attention, if at all, to herders' invasion of communities and farmlands, including those not even on their much-vaunted grazing routes. Talk about cherry-picking.

It seems like some people have a nostalgic attachment to and a craving for the hegemonic arrangements of a colonial and post-colonial past when their ethnic forebears, aided by the British and by their control of the North's commonwealth, enacted self-serving laws and emplaced arrangements that subordinated the interests of minorities to majoritarian interests deemed more important. This is 2018. Self determination and the rights of indigenous people are protected rights in international law. It is time for some people to drop their obsession with hegemonic, one-sided impositions of the past.

On Sat, May 5, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jum...@gmail.com> wrote:

Prof Jibrin, thanks for spotlighting and using the word “epidemic” to describe the drug problem in Nigeria today which cuts across all ethnic, religious, regional, class, gender, whatever other lines exist. This epidemic, in the long run, will take far more lives and futures than all Nigeria's previously fought wars— if government does not go beyond the recent ban and put in place a comprehensive action plan that is well thought out, well funded, and carefully implemented.

[Windows Live 2018]

Jibrin:

I note your observations on Miyetti Allah and conspirator theorists with interest. I was about to commend your last Friday call for more enlightened participants with observations when this new thread intervened and I ask those questions now with focus on 'conspirator theorists' whose theories having been facilitated by the conduct of northern leaders otherwise trusted by the rest of the country only to get to power  to focus directly or through surrogacy on  northern hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense) interests. 

After years of military rule some Nigerians gathered (by the Aare 's account) to form a NATIONAL party in the Aares sitting room only for the party to be hijacked by the likes of Umaru Dikko who promptlybturned it to the Northern Party of Nigeria simply turning When I Shagari into an ineffectual president.

The military intervened again ostensibly to sanitize things and after the likes of OBJ and Danjuma midwife there occupation of the centre stage the likes of Babangida and Abacus turned the Army to a virtual army of occupation to further the hidden agenda of this hegemony against the rest of Nigerians.

It took a Herculean effort to dislodge the evil duo almost to the point of war before Nigerians got rid of these agents of evil. 

After much rejection the nation endorsed Buhari only to allow himself as his wife rightly cried out to be hijacked likecShehu Shagari  by agents of destabilization largely composed of his ethnic kinsmen and the conservative North

IYet given the presidential system practised in Nigeria it is clear no single major ethnicity can produce the President relying either on its ethnic or regional resources alone.  Why can't northern leaders get this?  That in a presidential system no ethnicity can foist its own agenda either by stealth or openly on the rest of the country.

It is reflections on such matters that made me conclude that yes new political leaders are needed but more needed is a change at the centre to broaden the top so that whoever captures the centre can use that to attempt to hijack the country for his own group interests.  More urgently needs is a change of system to a Presidential Council made of all zones of the country and not a President.

In the present circumstance in which the nation finds itself if PMB cannot on summons satisfy NASS that he is able to stop the killings and confront his kith and kind publicly  he should consider honourable resigning or risk a follow up move by NASS of impeachment for incapacity and gross dereliction of duties

Should the latter happen NASS should seriously consider amending the post of the President along the lines suggested.

It is only if this is done that conspiracy theorists will not thrive in the garb of prophets 

Olayinka Agbetuyi

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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

From: Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinib...@gmail.com>

Date: 05/05/2018 17:41 (GMT+00:00)

To: 'chidi opara reports' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Buhari visits Trump

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Toyin, Moses

My position is that we need to rise above the single narrative approach boxing us into a cheap conspiracy theory. Miyetti Allah is an NGO that speaks for herders and has many splinter faction. It is important to note however that we are in the age of fake news and many of the messages in the social media saying they committed massacres are crafted by  fake news anchors and hate mongers. There are multiple actions taking place at the same time - pastoralists encroaching into farmlands and herder-farmer conflicts and violence arising therefrom, killings and revenge killings of people and cattle, cattle rustling (of Fulani cows), criminal gangs kidnapping Fulani and forcing them to sell their cows to pay ransom and so on. Its not a neat one-sided simplistic story although thats how the media tends to present it and the two of you act as the megaphones. You might be interested in knowing too that it predates the Buhari Administration by far. In 1965, the Northern Regional Government passed the Grazing Reserves Act because they correctly read the trend that we we moving towards increased conflicts between herders and farmers. I understand the commitment of Moses to Logam's double colonialism narrative but its important to accept others have more complex narratives that tell a broader story.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

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[Windows Live 2018]

EDITED

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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

From: Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>

Date: 05/05/2018 22:33 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Buhari visits Trump

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Jibrin:

I note your observations on Miyetti Allah and conspirator theorists with interest. I was about to commend your last Friday call for more enlightened participants with observations when this new thread intervened and I ask those questions now with focus on 'conspirator theorists' whose theories having been facilitated by the conduct of northern leaders otherwise trusted by the rest of the country only to get to power  to focus directly or through surrogacy on  northern hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense) interests. 

After years of military rule some Nigerians gathered (by the Aare 's account) to form a NATIONAL party in the Aares sitting room only for the party to be hijacked by the likes of Umaru Dikko who promptly turned it to the Northern Party of Nigeria simply turning  Shagari into an ineffectual president.

The military intervened again ostensibly to sanitize things and after the likes of OBJ and Danjuma midwifed their occupation of the centre stage the likes of Babangida and Abacha turned the Army to a virtual army of occupation to further the hidden agenda of this hegemony against the rest of Nigerians.

It took a Herculean effort to dislodge the evil duo almost to the point of war before Nigerians got rid of these agents of evil. 

After much rejection the nation endorsed Buhari only to allow himself as his wife rightly cried out to be hijacked like Shehu Shagari  by agents of destabilization largely composed of his ethnic kinsmen and the conservative North

Yet given the presidential system practised in Nigeria it is clear no single major ethnicity can produce the President relying either on its ethnic or regional resources alone.  Why can't northern leaders get this?  That in a presidential system no ethnicity can foist its own agenda either by stealth or openly on the rest of the country.

It is reflections on such matters that made me conclude that yes new political leaders are needed but more needed is a change at the centre to broaden the top so that whoever captures the centre can use that to attempt to hijack the country for his own group interests.  More urgently needed is a change of system to a Presidential Council made of all zones of the country and not a President.

In the present circumstance in which the nation finds itself if PMB cannot on summons satisfy NASS that he is able to stop the killings and confront his kith and kin publicly  he should consider honourably resigning or risk a follow up move by NASS of impeachment for incapacity and gross dereliction of duties