Guest Columns.
Femi Awoniyi

NigerianNews
January 06, 2002

Femi Awoniyi
Speyer, Germany

Fulani Oligarchy and the death of Bola Ige
By Femi Awoniyi

Bola Ige was one of a very few number of our politicians in the South who have been able to cut through to the core of our dilemma: the Fulani politics of power supremacy. He was no rabble-rouser who indiscriminately lumped more than 150 diverse peoples who inhabit the north of our country together as "these Northerners".

Bola Ige had a clear vision of a democratic Nigeria where no ethnic or racial group would dominate our polity, and his activities in the Obasanjo government were geared towards this goal.

Fulanis hated Bola Ige for he understood the mechanism of their dominance in Nigeria. He's therefore held responsible by the Fulani power elite for what they perceive as the "anti-North" policies of the government. Of course, the President makes no policies against the North, but the interest of the Fulani Oligarchy is deceitfully called the "interest of the North" by Fulanis.

The vitriolic media campaign against him by Fulani politicians and intellectuals (and their lackeys in the Muslim North), which began as soon as he was named a minister in the Obasanjo government, has no precedence in our political history. The virulent attacks on the person of the politician was only a precursor to his physical elimination.

Unfortunately, many of his contemporaries in Yoruba politics did not understand that he was already advancing the same struggle they claim to lead. And Bola Ige himself obviously underrated the enormity of the danger he represented to the racial and power supremacist Fulani Oligarchy hence the feeble attention he paid to his personal safety and that of his family.

The professional way in which Bola Ige's elimination was carried out shows that his detractors far beyond Yorubaland were the perpetrators of his demise. The mode of his murder shows that it had nothing to do with the machete and danegun thuggery of the Akande-Omisore rift. It should also be remembered that unknown persons had twice broken into his Abuja office and destroyed documents in the past one year.

The logic of his elimination marks out the Fulani elite as prime suspects.

Nigeria must not be misled by the hypocritical condolence visit of M. D. Yussuf, the Fulani chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum, to the Ige family in Ibadan or by the statement issued by the organisation warning against the imposition of emergency rule on Oshun State.

We must refuse to be deceived by the feigned kind comments of some Fulani politicians about Bola Ige, because they are presently revelling in schadenfreude, joy over misfortune that befalls one's enemy.

The real killers of Bola Ige must be unmasked, Yorubas must refuse to accept any Dele Giwa-style deadlock in this case.

If the Fulani elite were indeed behind with this assassination and if they get away with it, they will very soon kill again. And they will have enough camouflages. They could send a hitman to kill Works and Housing Minister Tony Anenih and pin it on the Aihkomu-PDP dispute in Edo State. The Ishan man after all is perceived as a strong back-watcher of Obasanjo.

There is panic in the Fulani Oligarchy over the style of Obasanjo's governance. It is afraid that if the President completed two terms in office, its hold on Nigerian politics would be neutralised for ever. Hence, they might even take the desperate step of eliminating him so that power would fall back to a fellow Muslim Northerner. They have done this before. In 1966, they instigated mutiny in the army that led to the brutal murder of General Aguiyi Ironsi.

Fulanis and the rest of us in Nigeria

The Fulani establishment has been the driving force of our politics and has unequivocally set its agenda for the past 41 years.

Fulanis depart from a premise of greater entitlement to power in Nigeria than the rest of us. This attitude is inspired by racist-supremacist instinct similar to the Tutsi natural resentment of Hutu leadership in Burundi and Rwanda or the Tuareg rebellion against African rule in Mali and Niger from the 1960s to as recent as the mid-1990s.

The Fulani establishment could build alliances like 'Hausa-Fulani', 'Muslim North', 'North' or 'Nigerian Muslims', their game-plan has always been to secure Fulani supremacy in our polity. This politics requires that "external" enemies must always be found against which to define the common identity they seek to share with their chosen allies. Therein lies the danger of perpetual crisis in Nigeria.

And Fulani politicians are superior to their counterparts in the rest of Nigeria. Fulanis have been shaped by thousands of years of battle with the harsh forces of nature to be more clever, more cunning, more aggressive; to have sharper instincts of survival and sense of perception. And our leaders do not understand them. Imagine fighting against an enemy you do not know well!

An example of our faulty perception of the North and Fulani politics is provided by the speech delivered by Chief Abraham Adesanya at the "first Alhaji Abdulrahman Okene memorial Lecture", organised by Gamji Members Association (GAMA), in Kaduna on 15 August. In the speech, which after a critical reading would make a Yoruba look foolish, the Afenifere chief said:

You have invited me, the leader of Afenifere and leader of the Yoruba to be your special guest of honour. History will record that this is the first time in Nigerian political history whether ancient or modern when a descendant of Oduduwa will be honoured in such an environment so closely and so warmly associated with a descendant of Othman Dan Fodio.

Chief Adesanya speech writers elevated Dan Fodio to the rank of Oduduwa, placing a Fulani man who died less than 200 years ago on the same level of the mythical cultural hero of Yorubas.

They also chose an event in honour of Okene, an Igbira man, to seek dialogue with the Fulani power establishment. They thereby tacitly recognised the right of the Fulani power establishment to speak on behalf of Igbiras. Yet Okuns and Igalas, both Yoruba poeples, have been living with Igbiras for thousands of years, far, far long before Fulanis first appeared as destitute nomads in our horizon.

The Fulani Oligarchy has fought the popular clamour for fundamental changes in our polity almost to a standstill. The governors of the southern states have abandoned their call for state police, although it is the most logical solution to the problem of crime in  Nigeria. On resource control, they have told us that people do not have any claim to resources for "merely sitting on them". They have cowed the proponents of a Yoruba traditional leadership institution in Ilorin with the threat of imported violence.

Yet, against our loud protestations, they have introduced an autonomous judicial space in Nigeria with sharia. And, to boot, they have a local police to enforce the Islamic penal code (Islam was the chief weapon in the Fulani conquest of Hausa country and culture, and their other fiefdoms in the North, and sharia amounts to an aggressive reassertion of the religion as the chief agent of cultural unity in the Fulani-ruled North and the Muslim North as a whole). They claim they have the right to practise their religion the way it suits them, but we have no right to adopt measures we consider appropriate to safeguard our lives and properties.

We have overindulged the insensitivity of the Fulani elite and thus have emboldened them to act with impunity in Nigeria.

The Fulani Oligarchy in its traditional form is an outdated system that resists social progress. It is a system that inculcates subordination and acquiescence and these have come to characterise the society and polity of the Fulani-ruled Muslim North.

Nigeria will not move forward until the Oligarchy is defeated like in Cameroon. Yet we are disadvantaged in the battle against this force of backwardness because our leaders are too given to in-fighting, too self-centred,  too prone to being satisfied with little achievements. Our scholars are busy fighting for better conditions of service instead of enlightening their people, our popular intellectuals are confused ideologues, our prominent social critics keep quite to avoid being labelled tribalists. Gani Fawehinmi is a tribalist, Professor Peter Ekeh is a tribalist, Tiv generals are tribalists etc. Fulani intellectuals and journalists use the label so often that it seems only Fulanis, because of their different facial features, transcend ethnicity and tribalism.

Fulani supremacist politics is comprehensive. Their few newspapers have well-programmed content. Their few intellectuals pursue an ideological objective: the Fulani supremacy in our politics, and they are very effective in working for their race in Nigeria. They co-ordinate with their traditional rulers, politicians, top civil servants, military officers, both serving and retired. Arewa has successfully mobilised into its membership almost all the prominent retired military and police officers in the whole North. This kind of co-ordination is lacking in the South.

Bola Ige's death marks a turning point in the struggle for a peaceful, stable Nigeria, free from the choke-hold of Fulani power supremacy. A general in this war has fallen and his demise has dire implications for the nation.

The message of Bola Ige's death is that we must be ready to do an all-out battle with the idea of Fulani supremacy in Nigeria. We must stop shying away from a fight. Our politicians must seek allies in the North, we must undercut the influence of Fulanis in its regional politics. Our journalists must become conscious of this evil idea of Fulani supremacy in our land, our students must be sensitised to it. Our civil servants, policemen, military men and women, the whole of the civil society must be awaken to this obnoxious ideology of racial superiority. Only this encompassing mobilisation can defeat the Fulani Oligarchy which is the hinderer of our progress in Nigeria.

Fulanis are not invincible. Southerners must only stop lumping all Northerners together for condemnation for our problems. The South must reach out to the North. Kanuris and Yorubas, for example, are related peoples. All ethnological studies of Nigeria since the beginning of the 20th century have always pointed this out. Why can't Yoruba intellectuals help to make political capital out of this? Why can Southern Christians not reach a strategic consensus with the Christian North, not against Islam but against Fulani-inspired political Islam?

Until the politics of Fulani supremacy is correctly recognised for what it is; a cancer in our nation, we will not be able to move forward.

---

Bola Ige: Eulogy

The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to place obstacles into perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders.

- Henry Kissinger, October 1981, on the difference between great and ordinary leaders

The American doyen of diplomacy was speaking of Anwar Sadat, extolling the leadership quality of the Egyptian leader who had just been murdered by Muslim extremists. While Sadat's fellow Arabs were rejoicing over his death, for daring to make peace with Israel the world mourned a great leader of vision. Of course, events since then have shown that Sadat had a far greater foresight than his critics.

Bola Ige confounded many in the tail end of his life.

When he joined the Obasanjo presidency in 1999, his detractors in Afenifere shouted: Ige has jumped ship like Akintola!  But Bola Ige unlike Akintola, led by his sharp instincts and powerful sense of insight, only broke rank in order to explore the road ahead so that he could point the way forward for his Yoruba people and Nigeria.

When he said "no need for sovereign conference", his people shouted: What a betrayal. They didn't read between the lines. He never said there was no need for a national conference or a constitutional reform.

An ardent supporter of resource control, the court case on littoral rights of states he initiated as Federal Justice Minister caused consternation in our compatriots in the South-South, but luckily the politics of the case was not lost on his friends in the region. For it was the first step in the constitutional struggle to confer primary sovereignty over resources in a geographical space on those who inhabit it.

He recognised that reality is not a thing, but a process that is always changing. And he believed that there could be more than one way to a desired goal. The Oduduwa Republic illusionists who dominate Afenifere did not understand him, they believe rather in the big-bang solution.

Ige's death is the greatest tragedy that has befallen Yorubas since Egbe omo Oduduwa was founded about 50 years ago, the beginning of modern Yoruba nationalism.

He was no hopeless romantic who espoused lofty ambitions with belligerent rhetoric without much of a thought of how to achieve them.

He wanted the best for Nigeria and he was a believer in black redemption. That he was an exponent of Yoruba interests didn't make him a tribalist like his Fulani detractors labelled him. Ethnonational politicking is the logic of the reality imposed on all of us in Nigeria by the antics of the Fulani Oligarchy.

Harry Truman once wrote that "Many are indispensable, but no one is irreplaceable". The unfillable vacuum created by Bola Ige's death in Yoruba politics has proved the American soldier-statesman wrong.

Femi Awoniyi is a journalist and he lives in Germany

[back to Top News]

Let us empower ourselves so that we can be strong, Register your new Domain Name (i.e yourDomain.com) with no other company but with  MICN DOMAIN REGISTRATION SERVICE and also HOST this domain with MICN DOMAIN HOSTING SERVICE. If you are in MICN  DIAL-UP coverage area, why will you want to DIAL-UP to another company? If the price is the problem, email us and we shall see what we can do. USE OUR DIAL-UP NETWORK. We will reasonably match any price for the sake of our unity. Send personal email to admin@micn.com. Let us stop what has hitherto set us back Let this be a new day! Patronize our people today, buy in our neighborhood! [back to Top News]