How Did We Get Here?
The Current Mass Killings in Nigeria
The government has always claimed that it is just clashes between farmers and herders but that is far from the truth. There are or were clashes between farmers and herders in the past but were highly localized in places such as Plateau state and southern kaduna where grazing reserves were set up in 1966 by the then Regional Northern Nigerian Government. Thereafter, the settlers began to expand and encroach into the lands of their host communities, up to a point that they fought them over the control of their immediate local governments because of the federal allocations that went directly to the local governments.(Nigeria operates a system that is akin to the Federal US government taking hold of the entire oil revenue of the state of Texas and sharing it amongst the 50 states and local council governments in the country, using a sharing formula of population + land mass). These settlers are mostly herders while the host communities are mostly peasant farmers. It is the fight that goes on within these settlements that are known as farmers -herders clash in the past.
That was all about farmers-herders clash until sometime in 2014 leading to the 2015 presidential elections when most of the minor political parties joined the leading oppositions of Action Congress(AC) and Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), led by Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Mohamed Buhari respectively. This alliance birthed a formidable opposition to the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) for the first time. As a political party that was desperate for power at the center, they left no stone unturned including the use of terror. Most of us know the story of the kidnap of the nearly 300 Chibok school girls which prompted a global outcry with #Bring Back our Girls. Even Mitchel Obama pitched in from the White House by tweeting a picture of hers displaying #Bring Back Our Girls.
Apparently, they didn’t stop there, they went as far as inviting Buhari’s Fulani kingsmen living all over the bushes of West and Central Africa into Nigeria (Aside from the link referenced below, there are also videos of a released kidnapped victim of the group narrating what the terrorist said were their grievances with the government). These are people without any form of formal education, who have lived all their lives in the bushes of Africa amongst their immediate families and clan settlement as either herders or clan security men. Which explains why in the past, when we saw Fulani herders, they had company of two or three others armed with bows, arrows and machetes. They were the clan security men who have replaced the Bows and arrows with AK47 and other semi-automated guns) All they know is the primordial ways of their forefathers as told to them in forklaws,”herding and power grab via conquest”.
Therefore, their understanding to come and grab power in Nigeria was to come and use brute force to maim and kill but the then incumbent president Jonathan quickly conceded and there was no longer the need to activate them at a national scale and a major bloodbath was averted. President Jonathan knew what was in the offing when he made the statement that his “2nd term ambition does not worth the blood of any Nigerian”.
The intriguing thing is how they managed to sell themselves to Obama’s White House, that it was just a case of an opposition party against an incumbent that is trying to turn our young democracy into a one party system. With all the resources available to the CIA, how come they didn’t pick up the accompanying terror threat via their own independent investigations. President Obama even sent secretary Clinton who met with them in Nigeria.
These groups of killer herdsmen who were originally clan security men in their various clans were mobilized with funds provided by Bola Tinubu (a former drug lord) who was their major financier but they wanted more than money. They equally demanded for land settlement as was promised to their fathers that came to fight the Nigerian – Biafran war but could not be fulfilled. So Buhari’s government designed a means to officially settle them on lands across Nigeria.It would have been easy for Buhari to instruct Governors of his ruling party (APC) across the northern states to allocate them with lands, but knowing that they are parasites in nature,it will be economically unwise to burden an already impoverished region. Moreover, they equally wanted nearness to the waters of the south. Thus, the RUGA bill was drafted and pushed to the national assembly with the aim of backing it up later with the Local government autonomous bill and the water resource bill. Which explains why the Buhari government did not take up the offers of some northern governors who offered land in excess of the total land size the federal government wanted. As a result, one of the state governors (Kano State), implemented a similar program at the state level.but still, these people are yet to put down their arms and settle there like the governor advocated. Thus, we the “ConcernedChristians” suspect they are up to something else.
What Could They be up to?
Had RUGA passed, it would have indirectly created 1 local government in each of the 36 states of the federation and over a period of 10-20 years, after they might have expanded and encroached into their host communities, they will go after the control of their nearest local government by fighting and killing members of their host communities. Reminiscent of Jos and Southern Kaduna situation that were occasioned by the 1966 grazing routes settlement in those areas. Under this theory, at some point years down the line whenever they grab control of the central government again, the government would propose one new Local Government Area for each state, of which no one would object because each state would get one but practically, they are for Fulanis that were settled in each of the states. With the Local Government autonomous bill guaranteeing that they receive their federal allocation directly which they share in cash amongst all the families that made up the clan or clans that were settled there. Pulling communal wealth and sharing equally amongst themselves is just part of their culture. They even make special provisions for the families of their dead security men. These two are actually good cultural practices of which no one should fault them for, but the killings and targeting the use of other people’s resources to do it, is where the problem lies.
Recent increase in the killings
At what point and why did these herder security men double down on their violent attacks?, Considering that President Jonathan averted their mayhem after the 2015 election by peacefully conceding to the opposition even before all the results were in. A fit that was previously considered impossible, because there has never been an inter-party hand over before in Nigeria.
Their latest round of violence intensified when the Buhari led government could not deliver on the RUGA land settlement he promised them. No thanks to the vigorous campaigns of activist groups such as Nigerian Indigenous Nationality Alliance (NINAS) with the support of groups like the Washington based International Christian Concern/ Save the Persecuted. No one really knows the full meaning of the acronym RUGA. The best out there is that it means Rural Urban Grazing Areas. However, it is rumored to have been derived from a Fulani word ruga which most Nigerians thought means “my land” in fulfulde (Fulani language). However, following extensive research and investigations whilst writing this, I can now categorically reveal that it means “Family house” in that same fulfulde language. (Their language which they kept to themselves after adopting the Hausa identity and language in the 1804 conquest)
Recall, this terror herdsmen sent a message to Nigerians through their released victims of Kaduna-Abuja train kidnap who stated that the terrorists said that they are not really after Nigerians or money. That the government knows what they want (Which is nothing but the home that was promised to them). Since they lacked the knowledge to understand that the government did not have the powers and genuinely could not pull this stunt through the national assembly, they must be thinking that the government was trying to deceive them, since deceit is commonly practiced within their culture known as taqiyya, which is borrowed from the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya in Quran Chapter 2:225. Hence, they resorted to violence. some, in an attempt to take the land settlement by force while some to raise money and others just to continue their terror intimidation.
Even the presidential spokesman Mr Femi Adesina, once told Nigerians on national television to choose between their lands or lifes. Had they succeeded with RUGA, I can assure you that there won’t be this immediate killings, but worst would surely come years or decades down the line when they would fight for the control of the Local Governments nearest to each of those 36 RUGA settlement and that would probably be the beginning of the fight of the rumored Muslim Fulani taking over of the entire Nigeria AKA Fulanization akin to the Ottoman take over of the previous Christian states such as Constantinople that made up the present Turkey. Now that they are doing forceful settlement, I can assure you that the future bloodbath is still in the making. By which time, it might even be too late for even the US to intervene.
Reversed Progress
The RUGA bill and program would have passed if not for the work done by groups such as the Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance (NINAS) with the support of groups like the Washington based International Christian Concern/Save the Persecuted. It was after their breakfast meeting with VP Pence in 2019 that the VP invited his Nigerian counterpart for a summit. After their meeting, the Nigerian VP, ironically a pastor went back to Nigeria and distanced himself from the RUGA program and it crumbled
Equally, under the past Republican government, the US designated Nigeria alongside countries like Burma, Eritrea, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan as Countries of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, as amended, for engaging in or tolerating systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of Religious Freedom. Only for the current Government to remove Nigeria from that list while leaving all other countries that were designated alongside Nigeria but turned around to designate Boko Haram alongside, al-shabab, Hayat Tahrir al-sham, the Houthis and the Taliban as entities of Particular concern.
Please what does this even mean? All these groups but the Houtis were designated terrorist groups years ago by the Global Terrorism Index. The Houthis, as far as we know are the opposition group in the ongoing war in Yemen but there is a Tribal Terror group in Nigeria known as Fulani herdsmen that were designated the 4th deadliest terror group in the world by Global Terrorlism Index, but did not even make the list of the present US administration. Please, what is going on here? This is what we should be asking our congressmen and women on behalf of Concerned Christians of Nigeria.
They are desperately trying to conceal their agenda that they coerced the media to stop using the term Fulani herdsmen and use the word bandits in describing these killer terrorists. Banditory is an archaic term used in the conquest era (336 BC- AD138) when most raids / criminal activities were associated with states (communities),It became a popular term during the reign of the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s. During that era, when such raids occur, the raided community would investigate to know which of their neighboring communities raided them so they can plan for either a revenge or peace talk but in some cases, it would turn out to be criminal gangs that settled in the nearby ungoverned bush without any state backing. They then refer to them as bandits in line with Oxford definition of Bandit as “a robber or outlaw belonging to a gang and typically operating in isolated or lawless areas”. This was the era when there were ungoverned spaces but that is no longer the case today. However, it was suddenly brought back into the Nigerian media lexicon in 2019 which I learnt from friends in media that they were coerced into dropping the use of Fulani herdsmen and adopting bandits. Except the Nigerian government is trying to tell us that there are ungoverned spaces within the center of the country where these groups have been operating from or is the government deliberately turning a blind eye because of their involvement and even shielding them as alleged by some of the affected communities (primary sourced video available).
We are particularly using this medium to call on the US Christian community to stand up, join hands with us at ConcernedChristians of Nigeria to demand answers from the US government because not a single one of these criminals has been arrested or prosecuted rather what we hear is that they have been rehabilitated and recruited into the Nigerian Army(videos released by these set of people are showing them in their clan camp/ settlement celebrating in military uniforms while shooting automatic rifles into the air) while the communities they sacked are still living in internally displaced people’s camp (IDP). Which is essentially living as a refugee in your own country. If their powerful sponsors in government are shielding them? It means there is no end in sight but alternatively, if the international community can put pressure on these powerful people by targeting them with individual sanctions and even threat of international prosecution, it will surely help in curbing these attacks and probably bring succor to the affected communities and the families of the deceased. Thus, we need the church in America to help us put pressure on the American government to achieve this goal.
Currently, the party has given the presidential ticket to his co-founder and financier Bola Tinubu on the basis that it is his turn while a former governor, who the previous government accused of being behind the Boko Haram terror group as well as directly orchestrating the school girls kidnapping in his state has now been rewarded with a Vice Presidential ticket in what is known as muslim muslim ticket. Ignoring the concerns of Christian Nigerians considering that a senior member of the terror group was once tracked to his governor’s lodge in the capital Abuja.
The Victims
There are over 50 minority ethnic nationals among this group and they were the group that all historic accounts credited with the effort that stopped the advancement of the Ottoman- Fulani 1804 conquest before the coming of the British colonizers put an end to that era. It is the people of this middlebelt that are mostly the victims of the present day killings. They are of over 50 minority ethnic nationalities, thus cannot be grouped as a single ethnic group to warrant the use of “ethnic cleansing”. The only thing they have in common is their Christian faith.Hence, we are using it as their common denominator in grouping them. In a recent (December 2023) burial ceremony of over 40 victims, all were recorded as Christians of different denominations.
This does not mean that there is no single none Christian victim. There were also cases where 1 out of about 50 victims was recorded to be of a moderate muslim sect.
Who are the Fulanis?
Fulani’s were recorded as descendants of the Ottomans that came into the geographical space presently known as Northern Nigeria through Egypt, down to Sudan and finally via the 1804 -1804 Islamic Jihad conquest of the Hausa ethnic group and their minority siblings, married their wives and daughters, adopted their identity/language and became Hausa-Fulani (whilst keeping their fulfude language to themselves ). Thus, they are predominantly Muslims in the north except the ethnic groups at the middlebelt between north and South who resisted the advancement of that 1800-1804 Ottoman- Fulanis conquest, which was led by one Usman (Ottoman) Dan Fodio whose great grandson was credited with the following proclamation just 12 days after Nigeria’s Independence. “The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our grandfather, Usman (Othman) Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We must use the minorities in the North as willing tools and the South as a conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us or have control over their future”.
That is why there is such a palpable fear amongst the informed Christian communities in Nigeria especially in the middle belt region that what is playing out could just be the beginning of their age long conquest desire.
