Nwankwo’s misdiagnosis of Nigeria’s problems

Last week I reproduced a shortened version of the keynote address I’d delivered in July 2012 on the occasion of the 4th Media Lecture Series of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism, Lagos, under the title “Food for thought from 2012.” The address itself was headlined “Media and civil liberties when the cloud of fear gathers”.

I reproduced it believing that it contained lessons for the media about the way it has been reporting – more like one-sided misreporting – the much-ballyhooed herdsmen/farmers clash. At least one reader, Aladetohun Moyosore, seemed to agree with me through his text but offered one more food for thought which, he said, was from an inside story in The Nation, also of May 4, which quoted the Oloro of Oroland in Irepodun Local Government Area of Kwara State, Oba Abdul Rafiu Oyelara, as saying ”The herdsmen boasted that they have people in government who will rescue them. These days herdsmen carry AK47 guns.”

Moyosore’s question then was “Who arms them with AK47 and who are their sponsors in government?”

Many a newspaper pundit and Southern politician apparently believe there is a clear and simple answer; the Northern elite is the chief, if not the sole, villain.

Funke Egbemode, managing director of Telegraph and an accomplished satirist, said as much in her back page column of Sunday Sun (May 1) entitled “The farmer and his Fulani herdsman”.

Using the literary devise of dialogue, she had a fictitious farmer in the South ask his presumably marauding Fulani neighbour why his cows are no longer content to eat northern grass. “Does the southern grass have sugar?”, the farmer asked, obviously tongue-in-cheek.

Fulani: The grass is greener here.

Farmer: No. You just need to get out from under the thumbs of your slave owners who send you into the wilds so their children can ride brand new cars and eat chocolate on imported sofa in air-conditioned houses.”

What Egbemode was clearly saying through the mouth of her fictitious farmer was that the problem with this country is the North’s feudal system. However, if hers was a satirical dig at the Northern elite, Tatalo Anamu, the well-regarded columnist at The Nation on Sunday – real name Professor Adebayo Williams – made the same point with a direct hit. “While the northern master-class send their children to the best school in the world and enjoy luxury of the latest western consumer goods,” he said in his column also of May 1, “the underclass are the herdsmen who are armed to roam the length and breadth of the nation tending their cows.”

This theory of Northern feudalism as the problem with Nigeria looks appealing given the region’s dominance of Nigeria’s politics since Independence nearly 56 years ago. Certainly it is popular in the south. However, on closer examination few explanations of Nigeria’s problems can be more simplistic and untenable.

Worse, fewer still are more dangerous as a basis for finding solutions to these problems. Take, for example, the claim by Yinka Odumakin, the voluble spokesman of Afenifere, in an interview in Sunday Vanguard (May 1), that the attacks by alleged Fulani herdsmen have never taken place in the overwhelmingly Hausa/Fulani North-West geo-political zone.

He made this claim while condemning a press conference by the Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum and the Governor of Borno State, Alhaji Kassim Shetima, during which the governor cautioned Nigerians against profiling Fulani herdsmen and blaming all recent farmer/ herdsman clashes on them. For simply stating the universally accepted truism that it is wrong to visit the crime of anyone on his entire ethnic group, religion or race, Odumakin said the governors should all “bury their heads in shame.”

“If,” Odumakin added, “the attackers are not Fulani herdsmen, where have they stuck in the North-West? Why are their activities only in the Middle-Belt and in the South? That is the question these northern governors should answer.”

Their answer would simply be that either the Afenifere spokesman had been away from Nigeria, at least since 2011, or he had chosen all this while not to be bothered about news, lots of news, in our media, old and new, about how cattle rustling and the wholesale sacking of communities had become endemic in the entire North all these years.

However, if Odumakin’s claim is untenable and dangerous for the unity and harmony of this country, it is mere child’s play compared to a 4224-word article in saharareporters.com by the septuagenarian Dr. Arthur Nwankwo whose self-portrait on his own blog says he is “a publisher, award winning author, political scientist, historian and chairman of Fourth Dimension Publishing Company, the largest publishing company in Sub-Sahara Africa with over 1,500 titles.”

For a self-proclaimed political scientist and an historian it was truly amazing how he could take so much liberty with facts and stand logic on its head as he did in his article which he gave the rather sensational title “The National Grazing Reserve Bill And Islamization Of Nigeria: Matters Arising.”

Against all evidence that there is no such bill before the National Assembly Nwankwo went ahead full blast to try to make a straw man out of President Muhammadu Buhari the easier to destroy him. Of course, Nwankwo is only one of so many Nigerians who have come out to condemn the bill – and with it the president as its alleged sponsor – but the gentleman stands virtually alone as someone who has chosen to denounce both bill and its alleged sponsor with a pretense to the vigour scholarship requires.

The bill, he claimed, was a deliberate attempt by Buhari, “to take our lands and hand them over to the Fulani cattlemen since it is only the Fulanis that rear cattle in Nigeria.” Not only that, Buhari, he said, was also intent on Islamizing Nigeria through the bill, presumably because all Fulanis are Muslim.

First, for someone who lays claim to scholarship you would expect him to respect the dictum that he who asserts must prove. He says there is a bill before the National Assembly and in spite of the denial by the spokesman of the Senate which he praised, he still refuses to let the fact get in the way of his decision to attack Buhari and his religion and region.

Yet all he needed to do to save himself the embarrassment of looking like a Don Quixote attacking non-existent windmills was to go to the website of the National Assembly where he would have found out that the bill in question was initiated by Senator Zainab Kure who lost her seat in the last election and the bill, in any case, died after its second reading long before the end of the Seventh Senate.

Second, for someone who claims to be a political scientist and a historian it is truly amazing that he can assert that only Fulanis rear cattle in Nigeria and also assume that there are no Fulani Christians anywhere who would resist any attempt by anyone to Islamize Nigeria.

Again, even for a layman it is truly incredible that anyone can claim with absolute certainty, as Nwankwo did in his article, that Boko Haram is a “Fulani-dominated insurgent group.” I’d thought every Nigerian knew Boko Haram was essentially a Kanuri phenomenon and that historically the older Borno Empire and the bigger Sokoto Caliphate have been rivals.

Because he’d obviously made up his mind to attack Buhari and his religion and region regardless of the facts and of logic, it was not surprising Nwankwo would succeed only in making a laughing stock of himself before any intelligent and reasonable person.

“The whole essence of Islam” he said in his article, “is Jihad or simply put terrorism.” I would’ve thought such a piece of demagoguery was beneath anyone who lays claim to scholarship. For, Jihad, as any scholar of Islam and Arabic knows, simply means “struggle” and it has more to do with the struggle with one’s inner demons than converting people to Islam at sword point.

After all, as the Qur’an says in Chapter 2 Verse 256, “There is no compulsion in religion…” The same Qur’an also makes it abundantly clear to Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) in chapter after chapter, verse after verse, that what is incumbent on him, or on any prophet for that matter, is merely to deliver God’s message; that his is not guardianship over humanity.

Of course the Holy Book, as Nwankwo said from several quotations, does enjoin Muslims to fight unbelievers. In doing so, however, it is merely in the good company of most other religions, especially those, like Christianity and Judaism, that lay claim to universality. Even then nowhere in the Qur’an, as Nwankwo claimed in quoting Chapter 4:89, did God say “Those who reject Islam must be killed”!

It does say Muslims should fight and kill those who reject their religion, as he quotes from the verse. But then if he was honest with himself he would also have quoted from the very next verse which says a Muslim must desist from fighting a non-Muslim who does not persecute him and, instead, is willing to live with him in peace.

What is true of Nwankwo’s quotation of Qur’an 4:89 was also true of all his other quotations from the Holy Book; he either misquoted them or did so deliberately out of context.

Because, like so many other Nigerians, Nwankwo has misdiagnosed Nigeria’s problems, it is not surprising that he has come up with the wrong prescription for their cure.

Next week, God willing, we shall examine his cure.