Out there, it’s high season of hate. Suddenly, it’s infra-dig to love.
Bigotry, bounding and swashbuckling, is in high season. Love, across ethnic lines, high treason.
Were it a new spike among the lunatic fringe, it would still have been bad enough. But the fanatical neophytes of scalding hate, as binding faith, appear the cultured, the reasonable and the sane.
It’s a fast track to Kigali. But no one seems to care.
Nothing illustrates this new pestilence more than the July 12 Fasoranti tragedy.
News came that armed criminals just shot and killed a woman, Mrs Funke Olakunrin, 58, near Ore, while travelling with others, in a jeep, to Lagos from Akure.
The felons, attackers who reportedly came out of the bush, rained bullets on her car, sending everyone scuttling for cover.
As it turned out, she was daughter of the 93-year old Baba Reuben Fasoranti, Leader of Afenifere. Now, that was a big deal — a 93-year old father, losing a 58-year old daughter, he had hoped would bury him!
By African culture and universal fraternity, that was a deep, deep tragedy to befall an old man. You can only feel, and pray, for Baba Fasoranti, in this hour of grief!
Only God can console and strengthen him!
But from that juncture, of humane empathy and grief, crude politics took over.
The bigger deal, apparently, was that she was killed by “Fulani herdsmen”, as a sensational release by Yinka Odumakin, Afenifere spokesman, claimed.
Odumakin’s statement, shortly after the heart-rending tragedy: “We have confirmed the death of Mrs Funke Olakunrin (58), daughter of our Leader, Chief Fasoranti. Eye witness accounts say she died of gunshots from Fulani herdsmen who shot her at Ore junction in Ondo State earlier today. She was coming from Akure when the armed Fulani herdsmen came from the bush to attack her and other vehicles.”
That there was no herd, in tow, to substantiate the “Fulani herdsmen” charge, arose from another popular claim of “Fulani” kidnappers overrunning Yoruba forests.
From that sub-text, it went without saying: every bandit, or kidnapper, just had to be Fulani! Every herdsman, with or without his herd in tow, just had to be armed: to steal, rape and plunder — and South West forests are new, rich, profitable frontiers!
The Fulani, whose son heads a North-South West ruling coalition, just declared war against their Yoruba allies — and to do what exactly? To undermine President Muhammadu Buhari, the son in whom they are well pleased!
What gaseous thinking! But then, that’s what hatred does to your mind!
Like the plebs of old Rome, notorious for echoing inanity and banality without thinking, the press of today’s Nigeria flew with, and echoed it over and over!
One just hopes while that grand, scalding distraction is afoot, the criminals — Hausa, Fulani, Tiv, Edo, Yoruba, Ijaw or whoever — wouldn’t have escaped to other blood-cuddling crimes, cock sure they are covered by the overwhelming pall, of the “Fulani” ogre.
God knows, Baba Fasoranti deserves justice for a slain daughter, just as others felled in the senseless killings that have seized the land. But it’s clear most won’t get that justice — no thanks to wilful self-distraction, powered by passionate Fulani hate.
That brings the matter to the trending mental pathology of Fulani-loathing and nailing.
Not a few say the Fulani had it coming, no thanks to a past record of galloping outlawry; and the alleged tapping into illicit official protection, by cousins in power.
This arrogance to commit crime, they insist, often emboldens the herders, as stark as they come, as they unleash their cattle on farmlands: their herd chew up the crops; the herders slaughter the protesting farmers; the Nigerian state plays dumb in cold, conspiratorial silence!
Then, injustice upon injustice! Since PMB became president, his Fulani cousins, and herdsmen criminals, had gone haywire! Some even claim the president’s body language gave them the vim to go ye and destroy!
There are some truths to these allegations — herders-farmers clashes are as old as humanity itself. Therefore, the Nigerian Federal Government must be hard on criminal herders, both the Bororo alleged killers; and the kill-joys that feel only other people’s sweat (crops) befit the patrician palate of their cattle.
That is imperative to remove ingrained fear; and impotent rage that breed wide-spread hate; and reckless Fulani demonization.
But a lot of these claims are also pure crap. One is that the president’s body language gave the murderous Fulani the vim to go ga-ga. That is pure trash.
Why might the president do that — to unleash mayhem on the same folks that gave him their vote, and thereby undermine his own government?
Besides, beyond a media conspiracy to fan the embers of crude politics, based on dangerous ethnic profiling, it is debatable to claim Fulani-linked crimes have spiked under PMB.
Before PMB — aside from the ill-fated Umaru Musa Yar’Adua — the last Fulani man to be president was Alhaji Shehu Shagari (Allah bless his gentle soul!). That was the 2nd Republic (1 October 1979 – 31 December 1983).
Ironically, the then Major Gen. Muhammadu Buhari also succeeded President Shagari as head of state, after the December 1983 coup.
But since the Buhari overthrow (again except Yar’Adua, who died in office), no Fulani had been president — Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Olusegun Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, in that order.
There is no proof herdsmen-farmers tension was any less, when these non-Fulani were in power. Neither did the alleged Fulani arrogance diminish. So, where then is this Fulani ogre, crippling and stifling, coming from?
Let everyone rail against illicit privileges for any group. But that power disequilibrium, that birthed such, dated back to the 1st Republic North-East regional power deal-turned ash.
The first coup, in January 1966, was dubbed an Igbo domination coup. The counter-coup, in July later that year, was a clear northern ploy to wrest back power.
By the time the impasse was settled on the war front, the northern segment of the belligerents had seized the Nigerian military; and remoulded it in their own image.
Still, most of the principal players in the 1966 counter-coup would tragically dissipate. A classical example was Murtala Muhammed and Bukar Suka Dimka.
Murtala was the leader of the counter-coup. Dimka was one of his zestful boys, fighting the northern cause. Yet, Dimka would lead the abortive coup that claimed Murtala’s life!
Even the older Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, and net-gainer after the coup that claimed Murtala, was himself wasted by Abacha, in another coup, which observers continue to insist was phantom.
No, the North had not always gained by these power adventures!
So, let everyone rail against preferential treatment for any group. But that cannot equate a visceral Fulani hate.
The danger here is no ethnic group holds a monopoly of hate, profiling and counter-profiling. It’s the Mosaic Law — an eye for an eye makes everyone blind!
Let the Buhari presidency scale up security and stop this ceaseless bloodletting. Let it also get justice for the slain Mrs Olakunrin.
But let the high season of irrational hate come to a stop. It will lead nowhere but perdition.
*Written By Olakunle Abimbola
