I set my eyes on President Muhammadu Buhari for the first time in 1981. He cut the figure of what a military man should be: smartly dressed, trim, no flesh to waste etc. He was a commanding officer then on tour of my state, Gongola, which fell under his command with its headquarters in Jos. I was a news reporter for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) covering my state. Since then we met at other times and my opinion about him as a military man never changed. Sadly when he became an elected President it did. We shall return to that in a moment.
It does even look as if he has changed his opinion of himself too. If he has not, how else could one make sense out of his resent lamentations at the Palace of the Sultan of Sokoto.
“Every day, we are worried about what is happening in the north-west. What is happening now in the north-west is what has honestly overwhelmed me,” Buhari said.
“The same people, the same culture, killing each other, stealing each other’s property.”
The Buhari I met in 1981 and followed to battle in 1983 (the only Nigerian news reporter to do so) when he carried an extra ordinary military expedition in which he routed Chadian renegades who invaded Nigeria, pursued them hotly, literary knocking at the gates of the presidential fortress in Ndjamena was not a man to be overwhelmed militarily so easily. He was tougher than he sounds today.
That is how we often miss the point, the President inclusive in understanding social anomies like the on-going social upheavals in Nigeria. Early in the days of the resent upheaval, many of us were misled into seeing it as a revival of the Islamic Jihad with its original intention of overrunning the Middle Belt and dipping the Holy Quran into the Sea. With such a mindset it was easy to see the farmer, cattle grazer’s conflict which was exploding in deadly violence in the narrow and limited perception of a religious problem Some of us were saved from this misperception by a prominent Nigerian journalist named Haraun Adamu..
Born in Tiv land of Fulani parentage, Malam Haroun grew up as a normal Tiv lad. He spoke and still speaks Tiv fluently, more fluently than yours sincerely. For a very long time, I myself thought he was a Tiv man. There is hardly any Tiv public figure of his age group that he has no intimate knowledge of. From Joseph Tarkaa. Godwin Daboh to Atom Kpera, Haroun Adamu knew them all as school/playmates as they grew up together in the 50s and 60s. Thus he became very upset when he got to Makurdi during the Buhari administration to meet an avoidable charged atmosphere. The state government led by Governor Samuel Ortom was clearly on t offensive charging at President Buhari and accusing him of leading a war of genocide against his Tiv people.
President Buhari himself was either unwilling to or too reticent to engage the governor in a squabble. The state and the country watched in amazement as Ottom staged an endless road walk in which at every turn the Fulani were blamed for everything that went wrong with his state and its government. His failure to implement his campaign promises, pay salaries, pensions etc. were roundly blamed on the Fulani. Certainly when you have a mind that is intellectually quarantined the way Ortom has, you are bound to go to go that way.
It was at Haroun Adamus instance that a patriot in the state raised a committee to carry out a tour of the far north to verify accusations of a new Jihad and genocide against the Tiv people. I was lucky to be a member of the committee. It was during our interface with opinion leaders in the north that we began to understand the true nature of violence in the north. It was clear to us that areas in the north with heavy Christian populations were targeted. And as we spoke to leaders of Muslim communities we discovered that they were not spared either. In certain cases, the attacks on Muslim communities were more ferocious and mindless than those at Christian communities. Certainly, this could not have been a religious war even if it may have been easy at first glance looking at the attacks on Christians in exclusion to say so.
On several occasions during our discussions the issue of foreign pastoralists came up. The Tiv have a tradition with the Fulani which they respect and they expect the Fulanis also to respect. These traditional practices and even jokes have been there since time immemorial and the Tiv of Nigeria and the Fulani of Nigeria know them. But not the new breed of Fulani whose rude minds are incapable of understanding anything except blood, war and rape. The presence of this type of Fulani was of much concern to us and the Fulani groups themselves. Even if their presence in our midst was quite disturbing and clearly against the Nigerian national interest, it was better understood now that it was explained.
It all started during the second republic 1979 – 1983 when in search of populism, the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) whimsically abolished community and cattle taxes. These forms of taxation had been there since colonial times in both British and French Colonies of Nigeria and Niger even as they were very unpopular with the local population in both countries during colonial rule and after independence. By abolishing them, the PRP gained instant popularity and thus introduced a sort of beauty contest in the politics of the north. I remember in those days if you dared oppose the abolishing of the taxes, you were instantly tagged a conservative who hated the people. Everybody, every political party wanted to look good so we all joined the race to ban taxes. Little did we know that we were inviting trouble to our country.
Before the time of the tax free declaration, draught had ravaged the Sahal region making it difficult for the people to feed themselves let alone their cattle. Asking such people to pay tax on their cattle was like a form of wickedness. So when the news came to the unfortunate people in those draught ravaged countries that if they moved to Nigeria, they did not need to pay the hated taxes, they just crossed over to Nigeria in millions. It took some time before the new Fulani men became a menace and their nuisance value began to be felt as it is today. They have brought a burden we can no longer bear. The Nigerian Fulanis after the 1804 established their own administrative structures from the Ardo to the Emir. The new Fulani men had no time for that as they simply sidelined the old system or in certain instantly violently overthrew them and imposed their own leaders. In those days, taxes were not only sources of revenue to government. They were a source of intelligence on who was a new immigrant to a community, to Nigeria. Today you move in and out of Nigeria as you like. Nobody cares. It is the only country in the whole wide world that offers this kind of freedom.
When my President yells out today that he has been overwhelmed by the anarchy in the North West of Nigeria, he may not have my sympathy and support but he has my understanding. I understand that aspect of Nigerian life. I do. Perfectly. Thanks to Haroun Adamu.
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