Bauchi governor on the ‘stateless’ Fulani

LAST week, the Bauchi State governor, Mr. Bala Mohammed, said that Fulani herdsmen from Chad, Niger and other neighbouring countries would benefit from the National Livestock Transformation Plan being championed by the Federal Government to put herdsmen and their livestock in designated colonies and give them the opportunity of exploiting the livestock value chain. Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on the initiative which is expected to be funded by the Federal Government at 80 per cent while the states would provide 20 per cent counterpart funding and the grazing land, the governor claimed that it would be inappropriate to deprive the ‘transnational Fulani’ of the benefits of the livestock plan simply because they were not Nigerians. Mohammed said: “I think there is a lot of mistrust and misconception as regards the Fulani man. The Fulani man is a global or African person. He moves from The Gambia to Senegal and his nationality is Fulani. As a person, I may have my relations in Cameroon but they are also Fulani. I am a Fulani man from my maternal side; we will just have to take this as our own heritage, something that is African. So, we cannot just close our borders and say the Fulani man is not a Nigerian. In most cases, the crisis is precipitated by those outside Nigeria. When there is a reprisal, it is not the Fulani man within Nigeria that causes it. It is that culture of getting revenge which is embedded in the traditional Fulani man that attracts reprisal.”

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According to the governor, it is proper for Fulani foreigners to benefit from Nigerian taxpayers’ money since the Fulani do not  actually have a single nationality given their nomadic in nature. As he noted: “We are already accommodating them. Do you delineate and really know who is not a Nigerian Fulani man? They are all Nigerians because their identity, their citizenship is Nigerian even though they have relatives from all over the world. So, presumably, they are Nigerians because they move all over and have relations all over. That is why our population in Nigeria is fluid.”

Truth be told, Governor Mohammed’s position on the nomadic Fulani derives from the dominant thinking in the North, a position which poses serious risks to Nigeria’s existence as a sovereign entity. It is hard to imagine any serious country whose population is fluid in the manner delineated by the Bauchi State governor. Saying that Fulani herdsmen from other countries will benefit from a Nigerian government’s programme because they are transnational rubbishes the very basis of nationhood. A system whereby members of a particular ethnic group show no regard for national barriers, and flow in and out of the country without any institutional checks and balances, cannot be ideal. That is not the way modern states are run. Fulani herdsmen exist in many countries across Africa and share a brotherhood which transcends boundaries, yes, but so do members of other ethnic groups.

For instance, there are people of Yoruba ethnic stock in several parts of the world, including the Republic of Benin, Togo, Ghana, Brazil, among others, but no one has, to the best of our knowledge, ever suggested that these ‘transnational Yoruba” have the same status in the country as their counterparts in the South-West. According to tradition and custom, the non-Nigerian Yoruba all have their roots in Nigeria. Do you then confer Nigerian citizen on them all, as it were? Pray, how do you ask people to go in and out of your country on the basis of ethnicity? What about the all important question of citizenship? How can ‘Fulani’ be a nationality, as suggested by Governor Mohammed? The question becomes much more poignant when the horrific and barbaric activities of Fulani herdsmen across the country, a considerable number of whom are said to be foreigners, are considered. In which other country do the herdsmen enjoy such criminal leverage? It is a fact that not many ethnic groups in Africa have posed the kind of threat to nationhood and national barriers by the ‘transnational Fulani’, about whom the Bauchi governor waxed lyrical.

To be sure, we are not in any way suggesting that Nigerians or the Nigerian government should discriminate against or maltreat foreigners. That would be unjustified. But foreigners coming into Nigeria must carry passports indicating their national origin and they must come into the country legally. The political and cultural leadership in the North really needs to rethink this issue. How do you conduct population censuses and elections with such transnational configurations? What about enlistment in the armed forces which demands loyalty to country? Do you simply allow people who are non-Nigerians to enlist in the Armed Forces based on their ethnic affinity with certain groups of Nigerians and without having acquired Nigerian citizenship? How do you police the borders successfully when a political leadership believes that kinship overrides national security considerations? With the kind of mindset evident in the Bauchi governor’s analysis, the country will never get its population census and many other critical national activities right.

Governor Mohammed’s claim that “the Fulani man settles anywhere he can feed his cattle” is banal. The typical Igbo person settles anywhere he or she can do business, but that is in the context of national and international laws. There is no reason why the Fulani or indeed any other group should be different. Migration is not peculiar to the Fulani; it is an essentially human trait, but it has always been moderated by rules, even in pre-colonial times. Nigeria needs to police its borders effectively. It cannot be the eternal home of transnational citizens scoffing at national laws.  We reject the idea of stateless Fulani and urge the federal and state governments to do same without delay.