The continuous Fulanisation and Northernisation of Nigeria

General Muhammadu Buhari will most likely be remembered by history as the President of Northern Nigeria rather than as Nigeria’s President. More than any president before him, Buhari has neither hidden his preference for his Fulani and Northern kinsmen nor his disdain for the rest of the country. He has continued to speak and act in a manner that suggests that he sees the North and his Fulani people as his primary constituency, rather than the whole country.

President Muhammadu Buhari, during a meeting with the World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, had asked that the Bretton Wood institution should concentrate on developing the North, and not Nigeria. Kim, who disclosed this while addressing journalists in Washington on the sideline of World Bank/IMF annual meetings in October 2017, had said, “In my very first meeting with President Buhari, he said specifically that he would like us to shift our focus to the northern region of Nigeria and we’ve done that. Despite that, there is so much turbulence in the northern part of the country.” Kim added, “Focusing on the northern part of Nigeria, we hope that as commodity prices stabilise and oil prices come back up, the economy will grow a bit more. But very, very much important is the need to focus on what the drivers of growth in the future will be.” Now, what manner of leader would want efforts concentrated on activities that would not engender growth while neglecting drivers of growth? What manner of leader would want his part of the country developed and others neglected?

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Despite the atrocities perpetrated by herdsmen, the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has treated them with kid gloves. Herdsmen have wreaked untold havoc in various parts of the country. According to a report by the United States Agency for International development (USAID), herders and farmers’ clashes have been responsible for the death of 7,000 people since 2015 in the Middle Belt region. Yet, the Federal Government, rather than bringing the weight of the state against the Fulani herdsmen so as to curtail their murderous rampages, wants to take over other people’s lands for the purpose of converting same to grazing routes and cattle colonies. What manner of leader will brazenly mete out injustice to the people he took an oath to protect? What manner of leader would give fillip to wanton destruction of the people through his actions?

Perhaps the most disappointing among the many injustices of the Buhari-led government to non-Northerners and non-Fulani is the announcement last week by the Federal Government that it had established a radio station to reach Fulani herdsmen across the country. It was quite disappointing because I had thought that having been given another chance by Nigerians, the President would seize the opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past by being fair to all. But apparently that is not to be, Buhari’s second term in office promises to be the continuation of his first. Those who had it rough and tough in the first term should not expect a departure in the new term.

Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, who made the announcement of the Fulani Radio, said “The radio service will serve as a vehicle for social mobilisation and education, in addition to interactive radio instruction methodology that will be adopted to reach the very hard-to-reach segment of our target population.”

Excuse me, Mr Minister, stop the insult. What can this new radio do that cannot be achieved through the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN)? So, the government has to build a radio network just to reach a segment of the society? Rather than building a whole network just for the dissemination of news and information to his kinsmen, what the President ought to have done was to have appropriated a window in the FRCN to reach out to the Fulani herdsmen. He could have asked the management of FRCN to develop a number of programmes for these people. With that, the same purpose would have been served without injuring the Nigerianness of others. But as far as the President is concerned, the Fulani deserve more attention and better facilities than the rest. It does appear that for the President, nothing but spiting the rest of the country to appease this special breed of Nigerians would do.

I think the President has continued to brazenly disregard the feelings of non-Fulani and non-Northerners because of the assumption that most of them are too docile to contest any form of injustice. Since he got away with what he did in the past, I think he is of the belief that he can always get away with maltreating the people. But the fact is that by stretching the patience of non-Northerners and non-Fulani to the limit, he is also overstretching his own luck and this is sure to result in a snap. Once there is a snap, Arab Spring will be a child’s play compared with what will happen. The time for President Muhammadu Buhari to start being fair to all Nigerians is now; tomorrow may be a day after the fair. For the President, the clock keeps ticking.