THE following is from my very first piece on this page on October 16, 2021 titled There are no farmer-herder clashes in Nigeria: “As I write, Nigeria’s farmers remain at the mercy of Fulani ethnic warlords masquerading as herdsmen. They rape women before their husbands and daughters before their parents. They kill at will, drink and bathe in the blood of their victims, and conduct the most horrendous robberies on the highways. They displace farmers from their ancestral heritage: lands that their forebears farmed hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago; lands that are an inerasable feature of their identity. The lands are not just a spot of ground: they are the site of history, of culture and identity, in short, a site of life.”
As you must have guessed by now, my topic today is the Uromi tragedy. Before another sentence: those familiar with this page know that my writing is simply about what I think is right, nothing else. And so, without wasting time, I state categorically that the so-called “hunter’s story” that emerged from Uromi, Edo State, encodes the many contradictions in the larger “One Nigeria” story. First off, contrary to the jejune, self-serving observations that certain northerners reacting to the incident have made about the Yoruba wisecrack, “Gambari pa Fulani, ko l’ejo ninu (Gambari killed Fulani, case dismissed), namely that the Hausa are distinct from the Fulani and that southerners are merely ignorant or mischievous on this score, I say that the wisecrack is rooted in lived-in, everyday experience. When core northerners kill in the name of religion, the Hausa-Fulani distinction is absent. Indeed, there is no race eager to please, further and perpetuate Fulani ideology than the Hausa. As a Nigerian who did his NYSC in the North, I am aware, for instance, that you cannot preach the Hausa-Fulani distinction to the Merniang people of Dokan Kasuwa, Qua’an Pan, Plateau State, who have lived for centuries under genocidal attacks by the “core northerners.”
A Yoruba proverb says, “The pigeon does not eat and drink with the home owner, then flee on the day of death.” That being the case, I dismiss the hypocritical Hausa-is-not-Fulani singsong. I will change my view when the Hausa instinctively embrace the Atyap, Berom, TIV, Angas, etc., and stop taking sides with the Fulani simply on account of religion. I quaked in my NYSC boots when one of my students in GSS, Dokan Kasuwa, whom I had been trying to dissuade from inflammatory rhetoric, told me: “Our fight with the northerners can never end.” Looking back now, I can see why.
Now, in this country, a South-South person with a gun is a militant, an Igbo person with a gun is an IPOB terrorist, a Yoruba with a gun is a Yoruba Nation terrorist, while a Fulani with a gun is a herder. Then the Hausa man with a gun is a hunter. As you can see from this basic observation, One Nigeria is an elaborate scam. Pray, just how can you carry arms across states, claiming to be a hunter on other people’s lands? How do you hunt in Yorubaland, for instance, without familiarity with the hunter’s chant, lore and mores? You mean that you can be a professional hunter in Yorubaland without any knowledge of Iremoje, the transitional chant? And when a real hunter bursts into a song, saying “Ode to re ‘gbe o, ti o r’eran bo (The hunter who went to the forest and came back with no game), what would your reply be? A real hunter would reply: “Yi o j’orunla, pansaga obe.” (He will eat orunla, whorish (poor) soup.” You simply can’t be a hunter on another person’s land, invading ancestral forests and breaking local mores at will. Igbo hunters don’t just have dane guns and dogs; they have a culture that goes with it.
Remember that we are talking about professional, not occasional, hunting. You mean a stranger will come to my village from distant lands, carrying ammunition and claiming to be a hunter? Hunter bawo? Hunting what or who? Is Nigeria so bad that they are now lying against (even) animals? Is anyone seriously suggesting that an Igbo man can storm Kaduna forests with dane guns, claiming to be a hunter? His fate will be worse than Gideon Akaluka’s.
Inter-state hunting? What do they hunt if animals don’t surface? If you say dane guns aren’t dangerous, then submit your neck, let real hunters check something. Who gave hunters a licence to hunt across states and under which law? The hunters in the Uromi story must have had a residence and sold a lot of game. So who were their customers and where was the sales point? In which Rivers forest did the hunters hunt? It is dumb to claim that they hunted just for food: no serious hunter does. Hunters hunt as a business: they sell most of what they capture, or language has lost its meaning. A moron claimed that newspapers should have reported the incident along religious lines. If they had done so, then his case would have collapsed in three minutes, because we all know the religious subscription of the terrorists in the North. “They killed our brothers,” just won’t fly, because your brothers reside in Uromi and nobody has killed them.
Is there any real evidence, beyond emotional hysteria, that the deceased were actually hunters? Which CDS Squad surfaced in Benue? Where are the killers of Deborah Samuel? Hear the renowned scholar, Prof. Patrick Muoboghare: “Before now, they [the core North] openly stated that they are not Nigerians by deliberately breaching the constitution and declaring a state religion. They are pretenders, not Nigerians, because they have long pulled away. The average Northerner would rather construct roads to nearby countries than to the South because they see us as conquered people.”
Speaking with Arise News, one Major-General Cecil Esekhaigbe (retd) gave some context to the Uromi incident. Hear him: “It was not a one-sided thing that happened in Uromi. When these people were stopped, they (vigilantes) said they were going to search the vehicle because they had local information that they (the deceased) were actually carrying arms. So in the process of struggling to go inside, one of them stabbed one of the vigilante guys…Hell was let loose. But that is not justifying the action because it’s condemnable and taking another person’s life unjustly is not part of our culture in that area where we come from.” Why is this angle being suppressed? Remember, no one is justifying the Uromi killings. But half-truths won’t get us anywhere.
As we speak, Benue State, like many other parts of the country ravaged by Fulani herdsmen, is under siege. Go to Asa community in Otukpo. And the DSS DG, Mr. Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi, has asked Nigerians to take responsibility for their own security, as the security agencies do not have the capacity to protect every community from terrorist attacks. Hmmm.
The North won’t forget, says an actress. Well, neither will the South and the Middle Belt, whose people continue to be hunted down in cold blood.
READ ALSO: 15 suspects in custody over Uromi killings — Edo govt
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