By Ochereome Nnanna
IN our first part of this topic on  Monday, we analysed the ingrained factors which stand between us and the much-desired abolition of the indigeneship factor from our body politic.

Today, we will show that the fear of Minorities and vulnerable groups are real and must be addressed to get what we desire. These groups live in utter trepidation of the day the policy will become a reality.

A graphic depiction of this fear took place during the National Conference when a female delegate to the National Conference who represented Plateau State, stridently kicked against the abolition of indigeneship, with very cogent reasons.

The sentiment she peddled was emblematic of the age-old fears that Minorities and vulnerable groups have always entertained in Nigeria even before independence. This was why the famous Willinks Commission was set up by the departing British colonialists to address the fears of the Minorities, which constitute nearly half of the population of the country.

The delegate said if the indigeneship factor is taken out, it will put the Minorities in a place like the Plateau region at the mercy of their Majority neighbours.

The neighbouring Muslim Hausa/Fulani Majorities would eventually move in, en masse, with their population, more especially as their religion and culture encourage them to have many wives and children.

Some of them are known to marry, divorce, remarry and procreate indiscriminately, even leaving some of their children to roam the streets of major towns as beggars or al majiri. Over a few decades, they will turn the table against the local indigenous people with their population, take over their land, Islamise their culture or repress those unwilling to accept their culture.

Thus, the future generation of today’s Plateau people, said this lady, would be dispossessed of their patrimony by their highly invasive Muslim Majority neighbours. Thus, the tension and violence that reign in the North Central belt will eventually end in the obliteration of the Christian/Animist Minorities.

This may sound outlandish,  but the lady delegate was not the first to see a future in which population could be used by an invasive foreign culture to dispossess people of their land through the exploitation of the liberal policies.

Al Qaeda Islamic Network, which is waging war against Christians, Jews, Moderate Muslims and the West, in 2011, predicted that by 2050, England would no longer be under the Queen of King of England. Rather, they bragged, the English throne will be occupied by a Muslim Sultan!

They admitted that it will not be by conquest on the battlefront. Rather, the Muslims of the Middle East and Asia (perhaps added to by those from Africa) who have become English citizens will ramp up mass production of their offspring. Pitched against an indigenous White population which is rapidly declining as a result of loss of interest in having children, worsened by the apocalyptic spread of homosexualism and lesbianism in Western societies, the emergency of a Muslim Sultan of England (Englandistan?) is a probable event waiting to happen. What they failed to achieve through the invasions that triggered the Crusades in the Middle Ages, they will get by exploiting the liberal laws of the West through sheer population terrorism.

If you arrive at Charles De Gaulle International Airport in Paris or Heathrow Airport in London, you will notice that up to 70 per cent of the people flooding in are mostly of Arab, Indian, Pakistani, Persian, Malay, Chinese and African descent, majority of who are Muslims who have become citizens of these European countries.

It is true that the Hausa-Fulani of Northern Nigeria and the Igbos of Eastern Nigeria are perceived as very invasive by their Minority neighbours. Yorubas are less so because they have comprehensive geographical advantages. It is in the North and East that Minorities might look over their shoulders at their Majority neighbours and feel threatened that with time they will be swamped out when indigeneship is abolished.

The only way to set the minds of the Minorities and vulnerable people among us at rest is to do a thorough think-through of implementing full citizenship rights for all Nigerians irrespective of where they reside. It should be done, BUT WITHOUT IN THE PROCESS, ENDANGERING THE RIGHTS AND CORE INTERESTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. Nigerians who settle among a new group of Nigerians must seek to make themselves at home. This can be done through learning their language, respecting their culture, marrying into them and allowing them to marry into your family, showing active interest in the development of the community and supporting worthy causes, such as giving jobs and scholarships to the youth if you can.

If you show enough healthy interest in your new locality, they are likely to accept you as one of them, with time, especially if state policies (such as the indigeneship factor) are not there to discriminate between you and people of the locality.

We must never go to another man’s land or community and seek to lord it over them. That is a recipe for disaster. We must never go with a conquest mentality, or sidle surreptitiously towards becoming their overlords. Most people do not really hate strangers coming to settle among them. What they hate is someone coming to impose on them or push them out. They will fight back.

Unfortunately, some Nigerian settlers often go to another community with conquest or born-to-rule mentality.

In reaction, the people of the locality become hostile. We need reorientation to correct these excesses. Alhaji Umaru Altine became the first Lord Mayor of Enugu in 1952 because he was a committed Zikist who went to jail as a faithful of the National Council for Nigerian Citizens (NCNC). Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe nearly became the Premier of the Western Region because he invested his youth, wealth and intellect in Lagos, acclimatised with the Lagos society and is still seen today by Lagos people as “one of us”.

While government works to remove the indigene factor, we, the Nigerians, must love and respect one another, whether we are settlers or natives.