On Wednesday this week, the Ondo State government said that the death toll from Sunday’s terrorist attack on St. Francis Catholic Church, Owo, had reached two scores. The state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Banji Ajaka, disclosed that those affected by the attack were 127, out of which 40 had been confirmed dead. The details are still being sorted and more damning statistics promises to emerge as I write these lines on Thursday evening. The killers, whom Nigeria’s central government has said were men of ISIS, came to Owo determined to stage a massacre and they did so in deadly fashion, sparing not even suckling children. The voices of wailing and lamentation were still dripping with agony when another band of killers stormed the shores of Ekiti, apparently to perpetrate mayhem. But this time around, they had resistance. Men of Amotekun, ill-equipped though they were, stopped them in their tracks. The killers came in a lorry supposedly conveying food, but Amotekun, embracing the proverb of the crab and its watchful eyes, burrowed deep into the truck, removed the fodder placed in pretence, and discovered weapons of war. Such discoveries are routine, and do not tell me the owners of these weapons just want to play roulette.
The Yoruba, like members of other ethnic groups, have been slaughtered like rams for years and this was one great moment, for the soldiers and policemen tasked with guarding the highways and saving life had acted true to type, hamstrung by the lords of federal power. These, let us remember, are the days when kidnappers allegedly waste lives during the day and sleep in some barracks at night. Residents of Ikere dodged certain carnage: others might not. The suspects claimed to be Fulani. The vehicle and the passengers were later handled to the police for investigation, but the Yoruba have no faith in the (wo)men in black, because the Fulani are a special, protected breed and have been for decades. The killers, say the voices on the streets, will only be freed in order to wreak further havoc on the land. The sentiment is understandable: Iskilu Wakili, a man accused of horrendous crimes in the Ibarapa axis of Oyo State, was remanded by the court of law in the Abolongo correctional centre in Oyo, only for reports to surface that he was nowhere to be found in that facility. Sunday Igboho, crude in his methods but right in his suspicion of ethnic persecution, was harangued by the Nigerian State with bullets and bile, and remains in the Republic of Benin submerged in legal battles.
The crab watches over its head with its eyes, so says a Yoruba proverb. And that is precisely why the Yoruba, seemingly hemmed in by killers from distant lands, have been engaging in local mobilization using the instrumentality of social media. The times are terrible and do not be caught off-guard, the messages proclaim in panic mode. The messages may be much more than mere artifice. Indeed they are no game: games are not played in the face of certain death. The Yoruba are Nigeria’s most (un)fortunate group: they own Lagos, the city of ports, and other jewels of nature and are the country’s most urbanized and academically inclined, but they are also probably the most accommodating and most trusting ethnic group and the most death-prone in pestilential times.
There are not a few who believe that the despisers and would-be exterminators of the race have been arriving the length and breadth of the land in droves, taking up strategic positions. Travel on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and notice the shanties springing up in bushes. Danger lurks. The occupants may not always be compatriots in search of daily bread; they may be the dregs of an advancing army preparing the trimmings of assault. I do not speak of Hausa youth fleeing Boko Haram/herdsmen’s persecution or Middle Belt boys fleeing the carnage that has become routine. I do not speak of Fulani (wo)men plying known trades. I speak of nomadic killers, mostly from other climes, perfecting their craft. You cannot play Boy Scout and move any decent distance into the heart of the Oduduwa flora and fauna. You will walk into the waiting arms of traders in blood.
Death lurks in Yoruba forests. Farming is risky: rape without a slit throat is a lucky escape. The forests are no longer the spring from which pen wielders like Tutuola and Fagunwa documented demonology. They are no longer the site of fickle ancestors: they have been taken over by fair men from distant lands, men who maraud for a living and have no subscription to Nigeria’s green-white-green. They are merchants of blood who brook no dissidence. A farm, I suggested in the piece that inaugurated this column, is a site of history and culture. Yoruba farmlands must be reclaimed if the Yoruba are to remain on planet earth. I am no Yoruba irredentist: I just happen to hear and see a few things.
There is no reason to pretend that the killers and their sponsors want anything less than war. They want war and plenty of it, and if the situation did not require it I would not sound this alarm. I feel for the farmers mutilated on their farms in Sokoto, and the men and women cut down in feasts of bestial rage in Benue. I feel for the innocent souls regularly donated to the demons of bloodlust in Zamfara, and the men and women wasted in Imo and Anambra on a daily basis. They are just as encircled as the Yoruba from whom I have taken my point of reference, because those who control the levers of state force care nothing about broken bones and wasted blood. They care only for their positions obtained with fraud. They care only about the present and their stakes in it.
Yoruba eyes, like other eyes in this forcefully forged clime, may be getting dimmed with the encumbrances of daily life. The land has become blood-weary. Death lurks under the sun and in broad daylight. It is time to reclaim the forests and guard the highways with better weapons. Amotekun empowered with sophisticated weapons is the way to go. It is time the six governors woke up and invested heavily in the outfit, and in communities and hamlets. Greater integration is a sine qua non. There must be community forces established by law. The special breed who believe it is their right to make other people cry should be confronted before too late. Doing that is saving lives. Yorubaland is encircled; Nigeria is encircled and the wasters of the land must be wasted with venom.
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