As I write this at exactly mid-day on Monday, it’s been hours since the abducted worshippers of the CAC Church in Eruku town of Ekiti Local Government Area of Kwara State were released by their Fulani captors. At this point, it is futile for anyone to continue to deny the evidence before us about the identity of those terrorising Nigeria. Whether they are indigenous to this country or stragglers left from among those imported into the country for political reasons by disaffected Northern politicians, what nobody can deny as far as the latest Eruku abduction demonstrates, is that the terrorists are mostly Fulani.
Their appearance and physique (as announced by the still cameras that beamed the infamy to the world) say it all and the words of the abductees confirmed it. The Eruku terrorists alongside their blood-thirsty cousins, Fulani or Hausa, who abducted the Catholic School girls in Papiri, girls of the GGCS in Danko/Wasagu and the murderers of Brigadier-General, Musa Uba, are basically all products of an accommodating Northern political environment that cultures and nurtures social deviants.
Let the uninformed and those who must play politics continue in their illusion that the sudden increase in insecurity, signposted by the return to a largely bygone era of mass abduction of school girls and attacks on defenceless worshippers, indexes the incompetence of the Bola Tinubu administration and no more. They are welcome to play the game as President Tinubu and his associates played it in their years in opposition. It’s payback time, yes; except that we all know now what was not known or fully comprehended then.
The same playbook has been opened and you need not be a diviner to know. Realising that what we are grappling with is orchestrated violence to create an air of insecurity- knowing this and flippantly calling for the resignation of the President as if that would correct our security failure is to be shortsighted. It amounts to enlisting our children in the murderous game of demonic forces who stay in the dark to shoot arrows into our homes. It’s mortgaging the future of this country to the caprice of shadowy people sworn to uphold the destruction of nihilistic ideology.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s shortcomings were not just about incompetence. Muhammadu Buhari’s failures might not entirely have been about personal inadequacies too. Although, he was an enabler of the espousal of the anti-life philosophy of fringe groups like Boko Haram and Fulani terrorists to the extent he was prepared to sit on his palm and literally did nothing as these groups’ madness raged. This outbreak of insecurity is also not about Bola Tinubu- except again to the extent he lacks the political will to act now that the evidence is starkly before us that our problem is mostly manufactured, a borrowed baggage that some people have weaponised into a strategy through which their will is imposed on Nigerians.
Let us face it: Nigeria has a problem of the North which can only be resolved once the dominant strand of the Northern political establishment, which includes its religious elite, decides it is time to do so. As the saying goes, you cannot wake a person pretending to be asleep. There is no way the rest of us can provide a solution to a problem the North freely brought upon itself and is not prepared to resolve. Rather, it fashions it into a tool to negotiate power by either supporting or discrediting leaders of Southern extraction.
But for the warped political formation we run in the name of a federation, there is no reason the rest of the country should share in or take upon itself a problem the North created and is happy to cuddle for as long as it makes it the sole kingmaker of the country, enthroning and dethroning leaders as it pleases. Remove Tinubu today and install ten Peter Obi multiplied by twenty Atiku Abubakar and the problem will remain because it was manufactured by those afraid of losing the levers of power.
The consequences of their choice, which are the symptoms of the problems we struggle to manage in the form of violence that has overtaken the land in various shades and shapes (targeted killings, kidnapping for ransom, ethnic cleansing and land grabbing, etc.), are real. The problem itself, as impregnable as ever, resides in the malformed polity misnamed a federation, a bequeath from the military misadventure of 1966.
The solution to all of this will be found in a restructured Nigeria where power is devolved from the all-powerful centre to the sub-national units. But it’s the same people, the same Northern political establishment, that has made this impossible. Even though the ruling party committed to the restructuring of the country before it assumed power, even setting up bodies like the Nasir el-Rufai committee, that blueprint is yet a matter of policy statement. Buhari got into office and summarily forgot about it. Tinubu took over and has remained silent, leading some critics to conclude that the Yoruba intelligentsia has gone silent because their “man” is in power. The Yoruba, however, didn’t wait for these critics before championing the call for restructuring the country in the first place.
And all the critics have to do is to take up the call (assuming the Yoruba have sold out) rather than pointing fingers in the wrong direction. They choose not to see that the North is still vehemently opposed to the restructuring of this country and has been blocking every avenue to achieve that. Obviously realising this, the Tinubu administration took a different route to make certain fundamental changes that address some of the structural imbalances that have hobbled national growth and development. This is what brought about the tax and fiscal reforms of the present administration. It’s the reason for the executive arm action that culminated in the Supreme Court decision mandating the payment of monthly allocation directly to the local governments without interference from the states. The executive was also able to win the governors to its side in its bid to give constitutional backing to the establishment of state police.
It’s been more than a year since the Tinubu government triumphed at the Supreme Court and won the governors to support the establishment of state-based police. Both achievements have been dead on arrival due to opposition mostly from the North. The tax reforms take effect in January 2026, but how do we explain the opposition that preceded their introduction from the North? What connects these structural reforms to the resurgence of insecurity? These are the questions the Fulani North must answer. They laid the foundation of today’s sectarian crisis with the promotion of political sharia in the 2000s. Without realising it, they may have laid the foundation for the disintegration of Nigeria.
The post Nigeria’s problem comes from the North, by Rotimi Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.
