The deliberately deceptive theories of Ishaq Kawu and Hakeem Baba-Ahmed
WHILE the killings of Southerners, Yorubas and Northern Christians continue unabated in the North, there is a recognizable systematic effort to locate the perpetrators among the victims or at least to obfuscate the source of culpability for the on-going mayhem.

The articles written by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed and Ishaq Kawu in the Vanguard of  January 11 and 12, respectively are an example of such attempts.

Baba-Ahmed and Kawu, both Fulanis, repeated the theory that is gaining increasing popularity among the intelligentsia of the Hausa-Fulani community, that there is probably the existence of a “Fifth Column”, possibly of Christians who are killing their co-religionists and Yorubas so as to give Muslims a bad name and provoke a chain of events that will eventually lead to the division of the country.

This calculated and deceptive attempt to shift the source of this war of genocide from the Muslim North to just anybody including foreign actors is a wicked strategy to provide intellectual cover for the terrorists. This is an established strategy of war, to confuse your enemies.

Genocidal violence

The culture of wanton, genocidal violence orchestrated to push a political agenda is an established practice in the North. From the 1953 Kano riots, when the Fulani-led Northern Peoples Congress set hoodlums to murder Southerners in Kano to make it clear that the “North” was not yet ready for independence in 1957, to the massacre of Igbos after the Nzeogwu coup in 1966 to create mayhem and seize power back; to the April 2011 mass killings that accompanied the presidential election, the Fulani-controlled Muslim North has always used organized mass violence that targets members of specific religious and ethnic groups to further its political objectives – a sort of scorched earth war practice.

Ishaq Kawu, who is notorious for his tribalistic advocacy for Fulani interests in Ilorin, had also written last year after the massive killings that accompanied Jonathan’s election victory that poverty and social frustration pushed the youths to systematically slaughter thousands of innocent, unsuspecting and defenceless Christians and Yorubas. And the mass murderers and their victims live in the same region afflicted with poverty and social frustration! What an obnoxious theory. Yet the same poverty which afflicts millions of Nigerians in other parts of the county did not make them to single out Fulanis and Hausas among them for systematic murder!

Intelligence of Vanguard readers

Kawu obviously did not respect the intelligence of Vanguard readers when he wrote that: “The exploitation of our fault lines was central to the political and electoral calculations that delivered the Goodluck Jonathan presidency.” I don’t think Nigerians have so soon forgotten that it was the Northern Political Leaders Forum or NPLF, led by Adamu Ciroma, that threatened hell fire if a Northerner was not elected president.

In fact that divisive and even subversive campaign made the rest of us who didn’t feel represented by the Muslim Northern establishment to support Jonathan. For Kawu to turn around to accuse Jonathan of “grand political strategy of exploitation of our ethno-religious fault lines” is to assault the memory of his readers. Has the “exploitation of our ethno-religious fault lines” not been the stock in trade of Muslim northern leaders since independence?

Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a former director-general in the foreign ministry, had also written in the Vanguard of January 11, 2012 about the “unacceptable levels of poverty and political alienation which has become more pronounced in the last one year in many parts of the north” which he considered a contributing factor to the Boko Haram problem. He then blames the Jonathan government “for the failure or refusal to recognise the need for some decisive intervention in terms of real investment in economic and social infrastructure in this region.” Could Mr Baba-Ahmed tell Nigerians which parts of the country do not have “unacceptable levels of poverty” and experience “political alienation?”

Could the Fulani man tell us where in Nigeria the Jonathan government has made “some decisive intervention in terms of real investment in economic and social infrastructure” since it came into office? Baba-Ahmed makes the failure of government to make economic improvements in the North responsible for the murder of innocent, unsuspecting and defenceless Southerners and Christians. What infuriating excuses for mass murder are our supposed compatriots making? Are all inhabitants of the region not suffering from the same social and economic situation there?

The Southerners in the North, for example, are hardly a privileged class; they’re in fact so desperate for survival that they take the risk to live in a part of the country where they know there is always a present danger of being killed for no just cause. Both Kawu and Baba-Ahmed also discussed an article written by an American scholar in an American newspaper as if the opinions offered in it were superior to our lived experience of the Boko Haram. This is also another diversionary strategy.

Jean Herskovits analysis is simply that of a scholar who observes Nigeria for the interest of her country. Whatever opinions she expresses should not now turn to the main discourse on the terror scourge in the country. We should know our situation better than the American woman. Yes, she is right that there is no Boko Haram as a well organised single-unit organisation, but to say the terrorists are not an ideologically coherent group is to miss the mark by a wide margin.

Boko Haram though a loose albeit a highly effective network of terror is driven and sustained by a fascist and racist ideology of domination. That is the fact. The quest of the power establishment in the North led mainly by the Fulanis to always dominate other Nigerians following the vision of Ahmadu Bello, who considered the country an “Estate” bequeathed by his grandfather Othman dan Fodio to Fulanis, is the source of our inability to build a united, democratic and modern nation since 1960. Nigerians must pay particular heed to the utterances of Muslim Northern commentators such as Ishaq Kawu, Shehu Sanni, Haruna Mohammed and Baba-Ahmed. People like them determine the popular opinion in the North and could in fact be covering up for the terrorists.

Greatest  danger

The greatest danger we face in fighting the Boko Haram scourge is that the outside world may not be able to help us because we are not letting our friends know where the shoe is pinching us. Since the terror campaign started, our press is quick to attribute every action to a ‘Boko Haram.’ What this suggests is that a fringe group is responsible for this systematic and widespread war which cannot be true. The original Boko Haram, whose members were killed on the orders of the late Umaru Yar’Adua in July 2009, is not capable of this terror campaign that we’re witnessing. (Even there is good evidence that the original Boko Haram and similar radical Muslim groups in the North were created to fight Obasanjo’s third term agenda and ensure power shifted to the Muslim North.)

Why should Al-Qaida be interested in Nigeria? What would be its strategic interests in Nigeria? Again Boko Haram is said to desire an Islamic state, but Yobe and Bornu where their activities are most intense have a sharia system in place. No attempts have been made to establish the main ethnicities of the Muslim victims of the mayhem in these states. We must be more dispassionate in looking for the direct commanders of the evil war that these invisible forces are waging against us and we must begin to ask many questions.

Ethno-racial group

It’s very obvious that we’re under a full-scale war to intimidate Nigerians to submit to the domination of an ethno-racial group in Nigeria. It’s a war that started more than 200 years ago and which continues to be waged on an unwilling people. The government should not seek solution to the Boko Haram war on the basis of religion by calling together religious leaders. They should call a congress of ethnic and political leaders. Muslims in Yorubaland or Edo State or Kogi State, for example, do not want to kill anybody and are not fighting Christians. Many have parents, wives, husbands and children who are Christians.

So calling for peaceful religious cohabitation will sorely miss the point. The problem is a Hausa-Fulani one and hence a meeting should be organized so that the leaders of the Hausa-Fulani nation, of the non-Muslim peoples of Northern Nigeria and our various ethnicities in the other parts of the country should gather to discuss the future of Nigeria. That is the only solution. Holding a religious conference plays into the hands of those who have always sought to foist a religious division on us. We should not accept that.

Akeem Kola Adebayo wrote in from Dublin, Republic of Ireland