By: Femi Fani-Kayode
Permit me to begin this contribution with an aside. The barbarians that
launched a terror attack in Westminster, London yesterday in which four
people were killed and many more injured are the same type of people that
attacked and beheaded the sons and daughters of Ile Ife in their own homes
and on their own land earlier this month.
They are also the same type of people that butchered the people of
Southern Kaduna on Christmas eve and Christmas day, that massacred the
people of Agatu last year and that butchered the people of Zaki Biam a few
days ago.
They are kindred spirits with those that have dedicated their lives to
violence, carnage and cold-blooded murder and terror is their language.
My heart goes out to the people of London and indeed the whole of the
United Kingdom. May the souls of those that were killed rest in peace.
Now to the meat of this essay. Let me make myself clear right from the
outset. I do not regard the gallant sons and daughters of Ile Ife that
were arrested, taken to Abuja and shamelessly paraded before the
television cameras and the media by the Nigerian police a few days ago as
violent criminals or murderers: I regard them as prisoners of war.
I do not believe that they have done ANYTHING wrong other than perhaps
defend themselves and their community from a vicious and barbaric attack
from a bunch of merciless and blood thirsty barbarians and I believe that
at the end of the day they will be vindicated and set free.
I must commend Afenifere for not only stepping into the matter
expeditiously and putting the Nigerian police and the Federal Government
on notice but also for raising a powerful team of 21 Yoruba lawyers, which
includes Wole Olanipekun SAN and the great Ahmed Raji SAN, to defend them.
It is no longer news that no Hausa/Fulani person has been picked up,
detained, paraded before the television cameras or slated for prosecution
by the police after the carnage that they unleashed on our people.
Many sons and daughters of Ife were brutalised and slaughtered in the
crisis and yet the police have not arrested any Hausa/Fulani man or woman.
Can you believe that? That is President Buhari’s Nigeria for you.
One wonders if the police are trying to suggest that the gallant Ifes that
fell and lost their lives during the course of the battle actually killed
themselves?
Are they trying to suggest that nobody from the Hausa Fulani community
committed any crime? Are they trying to suggest that the Hausa Fulani did
not provoke the whole incident and draw first blood? This shameless pefidy
is wholeheartedly unacceptable.
The whole crisis started when members of the Hausa Fulani community beat
up a young Yoruba woman and stabbed her husband. They went further by
killing another young man and displaying his badly mutilated body all over
town in a wheelbarrow.
Finally they publicly beheaded yet another young man and jubilantly
paraded his head in triumph on a long pole through the streets of the
Hausa Fulani community in Ife known as Sabo.
The good people of Ile Ife, rightly, found this affront outrageous and
unacceptable and they reacted violently. At the end of the day many people
on both sides of the divide and FAR MORE than the police and the Nigerian
media dare or care to admit were killed. Furthermore virtually the whole
of Sabo was burnt to the ground.
These are the facts yet sadly the handling of the whole matter by the
Federal Government and the way that they have distorted the facts,
befuddled the issues and established a false and misleading narrative
betrays a high level of deceit, deception and partiality.
The police should not be selective in this matter and the Federal
Government needs to be careful with the way it treats Yoruba people.
If nothing else the events of 1966, 1983 and 1993, all in the south west,
which brought our country to a standstill, truncuated democracy and
resulted in horrendous violence and a change of government proves that.
The truth is simple and clear: when it comes to a fight the Yoruba never
back down and neither do they bow down to an insult or turn their backs on
a challenge.
Afenifere has spoken for us all. Gani Adams of the OPC has done the same
and so has the reverred Pa Ayo Adebanjo who has been in active politics
for the last 67 years and who has seen it all.
I have also spoken in a two-part article titled “The Hausa Fulani, The
Yoruba and The Slaughter In Ile-Ife” and so have many others.
And what we are all saying is simple and clear: the Yoruba will not accept
a situation whereby we are made second-class citizens in our own country.
If you do not accept that we are all equal before the law and before God,
then we will no longer accept the concept or notion of one Nigeria. It is
as simple as that.
When these same Hausa Fulani people slaughtered the indegenees and people
of Southern Kaduna, Benue, Taraba, Plateau, Kogi, Kwara, Abia, Enugu,
Delta, Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Lagos and elsewhere none of them were arrested.
The police did not parade them before television cameras, they did not
arrest their Emirs, their traditional title holders or their sons and
daughters and they did not claim that they had committed heinous crimes.
As a matter of fact in most cases it was their victims and those that
they attacked that were rounded up and arrested simply for defending
themselves.
This has to stop because that is what the police are doing in Ile Ife.
They are rounding up the victims and claiming that they were the
aggressors and they are protecting the aggressors.
This is reckless and dangerous. The Federal Government is playing with
fire. And as Yinka Odumakin, the spokesman of Afenifere, wisely counselled
just two days ago, the Buhari administration would do well “not to pull
the Yoruba tiger’s tale”.
Yet sadly, as serious as this whole matter is,
some irresponsible miscreants and shameless elements in our midst, both in
the government, the media and in the political class, have said that the
whole thing was not an ethnic crisis and conflagration but rather a clash
between a handful of Yoruba and Hausa Fulani miscreants and touts.
They have run to their friends in certain sections of the media who are
more than ready to feed the Nigerian people with their usual “fake news”
and false narrative in a scurrilous and futile attempt to becloud the
fundamental issues and cover the whole thing up.
Yet if this is not an ethnic clash I wonder what is? You have the Yorubas
on one side and the Hausa Fulani on the other. Both sides lost many people
in the fighting. Then at the end of it all you only arrest the Yoruba and
say it was not an ethnic clash.
You also arrest a Yoruba traditional ruler from Ile-Ife, Oba Ademiluyi,
remove his beaded crown, handcuff him, take him to Abuja and parade him on
national television as a murderer. One wonders whether he too can be
described as a “tout and a miscreant?”
This whole affair and the way the authorities are handling it is utterly
sordid and one is constrained to ask the following question: who is
fooling who?
This shameless cover up by the Federal Government and the Nigerian police
has to stop.
This dangerous recourse to political correctness by the friends and
functionaries of the Buhari administration and this perfidious attempt to
bury the whole matter and cover up the atrocities of the usual suspects
also has to stop.
Let us admit that we have a major problem on our hands and that in order
to solve that problem the Government must stop protecting those who are in
the habit of attacking and killing people that welcome them with open arms
and allow them to settle in their communities.
The application of selective justice and the toleration of genocide, mass
murder and ethnic cleansing by the Buhari administration must stop.