Former
Nigeria’s envoy to Canada and Mexico, Prof Iyorwuese Hagher is a blunt
Nigerian who tells it as it is. In this exclusive interview with
Saturday Sun, the erstwhile Minister of Steel spoke on his January 5
open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, which went viral three days
after; the current herdsmen-farmers’ crises and the heating up of the
polity, among others. He spoke with IHEANACHO NWOSU in Abuja.
You seem to understand the herders-farmers’ conflicts; kindly provide some insight?
I am a scholar, a professor of
development theatre, in my intellectual career it is my responsibility
to study communities and phenomena and I have over the years made it a
point of duty to deal with issues like crises within the communities and
I have been involved in observing the phenomena of ethnic crisis,
communal crisis, farmers’ crisis, within the middle belt which has been
subsisting for decades now. I have been a peacemaker, a peace builder, I
am a total pacifist; I hate violence in any form including verbal
violence. So, in observing the trend of the crisis between herdsmen and
farmers within the middle-belt area from 2013; I was alarmed when I
noticed that in 2015 there was a sudden jump in escalation of the
incident that increased since President Buhari took over in 2015, I
noticed that this escalation was based on a systematic process where it
was not just all Fulani herdsmen and the farmers. There was now a new
dimension to the crisis, the new entry was commando-style execution,
gruesome murders of the farmers, the barbarity which showed that there
was a disturbing trend towards the genocide that was now the possibility
and the reality. As there was increased violence because much more than
the usual struggle of the incident of cows being killed and therefore
the grazers come in respect of the killing of their cows or that a
cattle has been rustled and then they come pursuing revenge over the
loss of cattle.
There was an upsurge in attacks in which
the target communities in Southern Adamawa, Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa ,
Plateau, Southern Kaduna and Taraba states was where I found the
phenomena that was really disturbing. The equally disturbing scenario
was that in most of the places where these attacks were being unleashed,
it seemed to me that they were mainly where Christians settled and when
I looked at the fact that when President Buhari took over he had a very
efficient approach towards the Boko Haram. So, I began to study the
possibility of the Boko Haram having diffused itself to become a Plan
‘B’ because the herdsmen terrorism was no longer the usual clashes, this
was terrorism at monumental scale, this was terrorism; that was a world
class definition of terrorism. The herdsmen became the force classified
as the 4th most deadly terrorist group on earth. I was alarmed that it
was not just this area but it was a proliferation, country wide where
herdsmen were conflicted and I became equally disturbed to learn that
the organization had the sultanate and the emirate of Northern Nigeria
which were Fulani in origin and also the President of Nigeria was even
considered as a patron of the Miyetti Allah and I said wow! This is a
pretty heavy stuff and I began to analyze the conversations that were
going on that time and I became alarmed and disturbed because they were
too few structures on ground to prevent the genocide, structures like an
effective legislature, an independent judiciary, an effective national
human rights institution or independent media or a neutral security
force because the more I studied about the phenomena, the more I
discovered that the police and the army that were supposed to be neutral
security forces were recording incidents in which the arms used by the
insurgents were coming from the Nigerian armoury and the corruption that
began to be unveiled of politicians and the easy supply of arms across
the country, with arms market all over; if you go to Niger, you buy an
AK47, it is completely on display, if you go to certain parts of this
country you will see arms being freely sold. I studied the motivation of
the leading actors and there was considerable motivation because the
issue of land in the middle-belt and the fertile land that is irrigated
by the River Niger and the River Benue. The desertification has taken
place in the north and global climate has affected this area and no less
than 20,000 cattle looking for water sources especially in the dry
season, looking for grass and then I looked at the phenomena of
displaced people of Nigerian stock in Darfur, in Libya who are pushed to
come back; who are herds people and if they came back, what would be
means of their livelihood, these people are fighters for decades, they
have been fighting in those environments and as they fight in those
environments, the psychology of instability is already imbedded in them,
they are insurgents and wherever they go, insurgent mentality prevails
in their mind. They want to come back to Nigeria, they reach out to some
Nigerian leaders, Nigerians lived for years in Darfur and now Northern
Sudan doesn’t want us; they are making slaves of us, where do we go? The
only place we can settle is in the Benue valley, people who are there
are not even Muslims, so it makes it easy, considerable motivation for
ethnic cleansing and the borders are porous. So, when I started putting
all the pieces together, I saw that it was possible for genocide of
unprecedented magnitude to creep in on us in a manner in which we are
unprepared. We underestimated the Boko Haram and it grew up like a
phantom into a reality, which we were not able to control till this
moment effectively.
So, was this the reason for your recent letter to the President?
When I wrote the letter to the
President, I was writing to him as a patriot, as a citizen who has
experienced not just at the ordinary level as a legislator or a former
minister; diplomat. I was writing to him with the eye of somebody who
deeply loves this country and know the immensity of expectation for a
great and glorious Nigeria by the international community. Nigeria has
continued to disappoint the world, if we leave outside this country
there is an enormous amount of insult the Nigerians in diaspora receive
constantly on behalf of Nigeria. So, the world is impatient of a Nigeria
that is still sluggishly trying to contain the most basic element of
governance that is to guarantee life and security of the citizens, we
are not talking of a country that has failed to provide infrastructure,
failed to provide electricity, failed to provide water for the citizens.
There are few state capitals in this country that are able to provide
water, ordinary drinking water to the citizens not to talk of an
infrastructure that has collapsed. There are no roads in this country, I
love traveling by road and there are no roads. I recently travelled
from Ado-Ekiti to Abuja and the roads were hell holes, I’m not talking
about Benue which is on the margin of national consciousness because
there is not a single road in Benue that is motorable; when you drive
there, you wished you carried your car on your head instead. The rich
fly in helicopters, they make use of the most expensive bulletproof
SUVs; so, they don’t understand what the masses go through. I had
thought that perhaps if Nigerians were provided with security of lives
then they would pursue their happiness with whatever they can,
struggling and smiling and being told by the leadership to have patience and
they wait but all to no avail. So, I was frustrated and angry that this
was so and the main reason I was upset was that when I received a
letter from the Presidency, a letter which was dated 28th of September,
2016, I was so excited because as a scholar and a public intellectual, I
have written to Presidents both now and in the past because that is
what I love to do. If I observe a phenomenon in any African country as
the President of African Leadership Institute, I’ll write to that
country, sometimes I receive good replies; sometimes not and so I was
very ecstatic that my country’s President wrote to me and thanked me for
my valuable suggestions towards addressing some critical challenges
facing Nigeria. The most critical challenge facing Nigeria in this
letter was to stop the genocide which was certainly being read and which
I predicted was going to take place in particularly Benue and Plateau
states within the next 18 months and so when this genocide took place in
the 17th month, I was very angry. I was angry because the loss of one
life in a democracy through genocide is one life too many and killing as
a genocidal act is different from an ordinary killing. Genocide is a
deliberate plan to eliminate a hated group, whether it’s a race or
ethnic group or a people identified and targeted and what happened on
New Year day in Benue was not an ordinary killing, it was not a communal
clash, it fully fulfilled what I had warned about ‘a horrendous
genocide that will shock the world.’ I had warned about this because the
killings were thoroughly shocking, people sleeping in the night were
being butchered and slaughtered; even the Geneva Convention would not
accept a normal combat during the war where women and children are being
targeted. It is only genocide that kills women and children to stop the
procreation of the hated tribe or ethnicity and to stop the future
generation. So, I was angry, particularly when I saw the reaction of a
country totally numb without a conscience.
We expected sympathy, sympathy for
citizens who were killed in their sleep, sympathy with government of
Benue state as a result of the invasion of the state, leading to the
massacre of individuals, sympathy doesn’t cost anything.
But the President condemned it…
Condemnation is not sympathy; sympathy
is to identify with the suffering. The President was condemning at the
same time receiving Governor el-Rufai and other governors asking him to
go for a second term, the second term agenda became more important than
the lives of citizens that he swore to protect under the constitution of
the Federal Republic of Nigeria but it was worse because I do not
remember any of the northern governors paying a courtesy visit to
commiserate with their colleague for that which had happened in the
state regardless of whoever Ortom is to them, he is their colleague and
it is instructive that the Nigerian Governors should have reacted to
this, although it is an ubiquitous phenomenon. Now, nobody cares; the
lives of Nigerians are so cheap; nobody cares about Nigerians’ lives.
There’s so much lives being wasted in Nigeria, so, I was horrified
because I would have thought things would be done in a separate way. The
President is well; he’s not sick, he could have taken 30 minutes to fly
into Makurdi and pay a condolence visit to Governor Ortom or he could
have sent his Deputy instead; the next thing we saw was a Government in
denial, these are the things that made me very angry but my letter was
not an angry letter.
That means you wrote President Buhari out of anger?
My letter did not express anger, I was deeply disappointed and
I tried to give the President advice that would make him leave a
legacy, I did not insult him. In my letter I never mentioned the word
Fulani like in my previous letter I tried to situate him and his
ethnicity and asked him to protect the Fulani. I am not just talking on
behalf of Benue; I am talking on behalf of Nigeria and Africa. When
Donald Trump talks bad about this country, it affects me too. How can
our leaders be so clueless and visionless, so insensitive and oblivious
to the fact that the masses put them there to do a job? It is like when
you give a man a contract to do a job and then he does the foundation
level and decides to go and build another house without finishing the
first one; that is the Nigerian mentality. Go and ask people, who are
given contracts, they never end, they always ask for valuation so when I
see that in the leadership it worries me. If you are a leader it means
that you are answerable to the citizens, democracy is a government of
the people, which means those who are in power answer to the citizens of
the state. Democracy is a social contract made between the chosen
leaders and the citizens in order to protect the masses. If you allow
the people that voted you to be killed then you have betrayed democracy.
What you mean is that the Federal Government failed in this instance?
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