Professor Banji Akintoye, a foremost historian, is the President-General of the Yoruba World Congress (YWC), an umbrella body of 87 organisations with chapters in several countries of the world. In this interview, he speaks on critical national issues, including state of security. BOLA BADMUS brings excerpt:
There is an outcry over insecurity in the land. What do you make of the security situation in the country?
I think the insecurity is intensifying. It is no longer a matter of people coming from the North to attack the South. They are still doing that. They are still coming. Even with the ban on interstate movement, they are still coming. The Federal Government banned interstate travel but these people are still encouraged and assisted by some people in the North to come and invade the South. They are coming in large numbers and that is beginning to create a lot of panic in the South, in Igboland, in Yorubaland, everywhere in the South-South. The killings in the Middle-Belt seem to be intensifying. The killings have spread to the North-West. They have been in the North-East since Boko Haram started. Now it is North-West and people are dying in hundreds.
But the killings, the kidnappings, brutalisation of the people, rape of vulnerable women and so on are all symptoms of a deep-seated problem that needs to be addressed and that problem is the unresolved national question. We have reached a point in Nigeria where the nationalities that make up the country are no longer capable of living together in harmony. And one particular small nationality, the Fulani, has taken it upon itself to announce to the world that it is going to conquer the rest of us, that is, the rest of the nationalities in Nigeria. It is an expression of the failure of the nationalities to live together in harmony. It has always been there but now it is reaching an unbearable proportion.
What do you think is the endgame here?
The fact is that the Fulani are under some sort of pressure that the rest of us don’t understand, but some people are trying to use that as a means of conquering the rest of us. It all started when draught created grassland shortages in some parts of the North and the Sahel. The government of Nigeria and governments of countries of the Sahel didn’t do anything for the herders, so they became poor; they became very violent. In fact, they began to fight among themselves. The ones who lost their cattle began to create gangs to steal cattle from those who still have cattle and so there was a great deal of violence among them. And rather than attempt to contain the violence and help them, the governments of West African countries did not help them, so their coming to the South-West became some sort of stampede and some people said okay, we can use this to conquer the non-Fulani people of Nigeria and turn Nigeria to exclusively Fulani country and seize their lands.
The people who wrote to the governor of Benue State in November 2017 and again in January 2018 threatened that the land of Benue does not belong to the ethnic group that had lived there for thousands of years; that it belongs to them, Fulani, and they have come to kill, to maim and destroy and take your land from you and banish those who would not surrender their land. The same thing they are saying about Yoruba. The same thing they are saying about Igbo. The same thing they are saying about the Ijaw. The same thing they are saying about everybody who is not Fulani.
In fact, in the far North, the Hausa who had accepted the Fulani as their rulers are now in danger also. Fulani people are killing Hausa people in large numbers in places like Sokoto and Katsina. They call them bandits. They are Fulani people killing Hausa people. So, it is becoming a terrible thing. The nationalities problem is expressing itself in its worst form ever in our county and if we do not solve the problem, we can never have stability and peace.
The Federal Government could have been able to stop it earlier when it was just trouble between herdsmen and herdsmen in the damaged grassland in the North, the grassland damaged by drought. The sovereignty is no longer in their hand to solve that. It is all over. The Igbo are shouting that the Fulani are arriving in large numbers in spite of ban on interstate movements. We, Yoruba, are saying the same thing. The people in the South-South are saying the same thing. We are seeing more and more killings in the Middle-Belt and so on. People in southern Kaduna are being killed in their tens, so it is a situation arising from the deep seated-problem that has been particularly poorly managed in Nigeria. If we don’t solve it, we can never have stability and Nigeria will ultimately implode. That is where we are going.
You said earlier that there are Fulani all over West Africa. Why is it that their focus is Nigeria and not other countries in the sub-region?
Yes, the reason is clear: they have been more successful in Nigeria than they have been in all the other countries, and so they could sit down and say ‘we came here as a little group, to the nation of Hausa people, and Hausa people were the single largest ethnic nationality in the interior of Africa, the Yoruba were the single largest ethnic nationality in the coast. The Hausa were the single largest ethnic nationality in the interior of Africa and they are conceivably civilised people but we conquered them and became their rulers’. I don’t want to go into how that happened but the important thing is that it happened, a minority group coming to Hausa land and becoming the rulers there, and Hausa themselves becoming subdued in their own country.
It might help to say something on how it happened. The Hausa were Muslim people before the Fulani came at the end of the 18th century. When the Fulani came, they were mostly cattle rearers in the bush, but there were a few who had become urbanised in Mali and Songhai empires. They came and they were Muslims. They were the ones who were Muslims; the Fulani rearing cattle in the bush were not Muslims. It was the ones that came from urban centres in west of Hausa land who were Muslims. So, it was one of them who got a revelation, who got the belief that started preaching something new. There was one Hausa cleric who began to preach what he said was a new version of Islam, a reformed version of Islam and many Hausa young men wanted to learn from him. In his circle, there emerged doctrines that were hostile to the Hausa kingdom. He said the Hausa kingdom was not being ruled according to the tenets of Islam; that yes, they were Muslims nominally, but they were not ruling according to the tenets of Islam. The propaganda was that they were corrupt and not ruling according to the tenets of Islam; that they were oppressing their people, and so on and so forth. The propaganda spread so much that a large number of Hausa people wanted to fight their own rulers and so it became a jihad. The man who led it was the man who had gathered the crowd in the first place, Othman Danfodio, alongside a few other Fulani clerics like himself. The Hausa people conquered their own rulers to make the Fulani rulers of their land. But the important thing is that these two black people, the Hausa people and the Fulani people, became citizens of the same country in north-western Nigeria in Hausa land and the Fulani were the rulers, while the Hausa were the ordinary people. The Fulani took the language of the Hausa but tried to destroy every part of their culture.
So, we have Fulani people today because they have found themselves to have not much of influence in the various countries they belong to in West Africa. They can then say, ‘look at the history, we came to Hausa land, a small group, we came to the largest black nation in the interior of Africa, the Hausa nation and somehow God did it, we became their rulers. Only God can do a thing like that, that is the deduction. That is God in action. Not long after that the British came and they had nothing in particular, the Yoruba people were already advanced in education, and in the South, people were accepting education and running after Yoruba and everything was okay. Those are the people they [the colonialists] should have been friendly with. They were not friendly with them, they were friendly with us who were not educated at all, who didn’t want their education or their religion. That, again, has to be God in action. How did the British choose us rather than choose Yoruba or the Igbo or the Ijaw? Why did they regard us as friendly people and not regard Yoruba as being friendly people? So that is another thing we Fulani can regard as an act of God’.
And when they were going, they handed the country of Nigeria to us, another act of God! And so we have the right to regard Nigeria as the country that God has given to us, all this our scattering around and roaming around would not do, we need a country of our own and Nigeria seems to be the country God has given to us. So the doctrine developed among the Fulani that Nigeria is the country that Allah has given to us, the land of Nigeria is ours because Allah has given it us.
For instance, when the Ife and Yoruba fought in Ife three years ago and there were killings in Sabo and so on and so forth, we leaders of Yoruba land, we leaders of Afenifere decided that Yoruba people don’t do this; we don’t kill strangers in our land. So, we sent a team in advance and the Ooni helped us to organise a meeting with the Yoruba leaders in a hall and then held a meeting with Sabo leaders in their Sabo.
And then the leaders of Sabo community told us something, maybe the rest didn’t particularly notice, but as a historian, I noticed it. They said, ‘God is the owner of land, God is the owner of the land here in Ife; it is true that God gave it to your father, Oduduwa, but God has never abdicated ownership. He gave it to your father, Oduduwa, to use and He is still able to give it to anybody to use because He is the owner’. That is it. So, you see, they say Miyetti Allah, you hear Fulani nationality, it is the same thing. They say ‘the land belongs to us, all the people of Nigeria belong to us. We are going to bring all our people from West Africa to come and take the land’. And they are bringing them. They are coming in large numbers.
What is your group with others doing to ensure that this surge stops?
Nobody takes our land from us so that our farmers can wake up early in the morning, as they have been doing for ages, and go to the farm and work before they even think of breakfast. So that the Yoruba woman can wake up in the dead of the night and go to the farm to harvest delicate crops like beans which you cannot harvest in the sunshine. When the sun comes, she let go, she comes back home. She comes tomorrow very early in the morning. Now, no Yoruba woman can do that anymore and our economic activities are being destroyed. A large number of Yoruba people have abandoned farming. I have spoken to many of them; they have come to speak to me.
I have heard stories like when I retired and they gave me my gratuity, I decided to go and start a farm. And I started a farm and planted a large area with cassava, or whatever, and one day I arrived there to discover that the Fulani had destroyed the farm. It is not just a question of the cattle eating the crops; the herdsmen themselves would dig up the roots and cut them into pieces.
I have seen videos of oil palm plantation being burnt. That is not cattle eating grass. Cattle eating grasses does not make it necessary for you to burn palm tree plantation, or to dig up cassava or yam and cut the tubers to pieces. It is an invasion and Fulani people are arriving from different parts of West Africa to take up Yorubaland.
I have spoken to some of them. I must research and find out what I am talking about. I have been to parts of the Yewa area of Ogun State and spoken to some Fulani there who do not speak English or Hausa or any other Nigerian language, and who are from Burkina Faso or Mali or whatever, and they tell me, ‘this is our home, this is our country, so we have come to take it’.
In what way do you think the presidency is culpable or assisting these people in fulfilling this their mission or agenda?
When these people are saying these things, ‘we are coming to take your land, we would drive you out, we would kill all of you, we would destroy’ and so on, when they are saying all that, they are committing very serious crime against Nigeria. It is a crime. No Nigerian, under the law, should be able to say to their neighbour that they are coming to destroy their house. For you to make a threat like that, that is a very serious crime.
So, the Fulani organisations which are threatening that ‘we are going to kill and maim and destroy, and banish the people from their land’, they are committing very, very serious crime and, therefore, the government of Nigeria has a duty to stop them by throwing the law at them. The Nigerian government refused to do that. That is it. So, what we have now is a situation in which it looks like the Nigerian government has acquiesced to the division of Nigeria into two – the Fulani side and the non-Fulani side, the rest of us.
The Fulani side said they are coming to conquer and they are trying to conquer. And the rest are finding different ways to defend ourselves. Nobody is waiting for the Federal Government.
The Federal Government should be stopping the people who are saying ‘we are going to conquer part of Nigeria ruled by the Federal Government’. You are coming from another part of Nigeria to conquer part of Nigeria. That is s crime, a very serious crime, indeed. They are saying ‘we are going to bring our people from other parts of West Africa to come and take lands of Nigeria’. That is another very serious crime. They are saying and trying to do it, and they are doing it.
So, the logical conclusion now is that there are two countries. There is a country of the Fulani that wants to conquer the country of the non-Fulani people. So, they are coming, they are armed, they have access to guns and so on. We don’t know how they do that, but they are coming with very sophisticated weapons, and the rest of us are scrambling around to find anything to defend ourselves with. So, Yorubaland created Amotekun. In Delta, they created something. In Igbo land, they created another thing. In the Middle-Belt, different groups are creating one thing or another. Everybody is scrambling in the non-Fulani country to defend themselves. Essentially, therefore, there are two countries, one trying to conquer the other and the other trying to defend itself.
But in parts of the North, there are reports of banditry as well. Just a few days ago, the governor of Katsina State said he would no longer give amnesty to bandits. What do you say to that?
It is the same people who are coming to the South. That is our situation. The problem is the unresolved nationality problem.
When the British came and gathered the Yoruba, the Igbo, the Hausa, the Fulani and the Ijaw in one country, they created a problem. It is so in every African country, in every black African country. If the people of many African countries had been told at the beginning of the 20th century that ‘you are still small to live as a country, make friends with your neighbours and agree to form a larger country together’, many of the African countries today would not have chosen the people they were lumped together with by the British or the French. They would have chosen other people. That is it. So, people were being forced to live in the same country with the people they would never have chosen as their partners. And the rulers of African countries are not looking at that problem. It is a serious problem and they are not looking at the problem. They just leave it and let it fester.
If the problem persists, what steps are Yoruba leaders going to take?
We at the Yoruba World Congress, a knowledge-based organisation, are a disciplined organization. We are looking at the situation very carefully. It is here in the book I wrote titled ‘Coming Revolution in Black Africa’. It was published in 2015, the year I left America. The problem has to be solved.
The Yoruba nation is the largest single nation in black Africa. We are the most educated. We were the most urbanised before the white man came and we were one of the most urbanised people in the world. So, we have lived advanced civilisation for at least a thousand years. Therefore, we cannot disrupt anything. We cannot disrupt Nigeria, but we owe it a duty to ourselves to do something about it and get ourselves out of this mess as quickly as possible without causing any disruption or any violence or any war. That is our objective.
If the problem continues, we might need to seek help for a peaceful, friendly resolution of the problem. One Yoruba man, lawyer Adedapo, wrote a book with the title ‘Towards Peaceful Dissolution of Nigeria’. Former President [Olusegun] Obasanjo, in 1998, wrote a book. The title is: ‘This Animal Called Man’. In it, he proposed that we should write a clause in the Nigerian constitution for peaceful secession. Yes, it is there, and that we should take clearly the steps that we must take for peaceful secession so that whoever wants to leave can leave peacefully. Ango Abdulahi said, in an interview about three years ago, that if we, Nigerians, sincerely finds we cannot live together, it makes sense to accept division rather than to live in pain with one another. So, asking that we should do what is sensible is not a crime. The Yoruba World Congress is not asking any young man to go on the streets and begin to riot and create trouble or anything. We will never ask our young people to do that. We don’t want them to go and die in the streets. They don’t have to die in the streets before the Yoruba people achieve what they want to achieve, and we are not going to ask some young men to go and buy guns and hide in the bush and begin to create a terrorist organisation.
There are ways in which we can do what we want to do without creating bloodshed and maiming and so on, while still respecting the government and the law of Nigeria.
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