Tinubu, defender of the Fulani

Abimbola Adelakun

This is, undoubtedly, a difficult time for Afenifere leader,
Baba Reuben Fasoranti. He has suffered a grievous loss of his
daughter, Funke Olakunrin, in untoward circumstances. The loss of
one’s child is a painful and traumatic experience. My prayer for
him and his family is to find strength at this trying time.

Now, the death of Mrs Olakunrin is bad enough; the
politicisation of the grief is grossly unfair to the family of the
deceased. We have always known that some of our leaders have bad
manners, but this incident has further exposed them as lacking the
ethic of charity. When the news of the death was first announced,
the President’s media aide, Femi Adesina, hastily jumped on Twitter
to say her killers were “those described as armed robbers by Ondo
State Police Command.” Adesina cared little about the deceased; his
obsession about roughening up the narrative was to preempt people’s
angst that would be directed at his paymasters. If he cared about
the poor woman and he respected the Fasoranti family, he would have
hesitated and not tried to stuff words in the mouth of the police.
The bereaved family not only have to contend with their pain, they
also have to deal with the irritation of their daughter’s name
being evoked each time we bring up the petty politics of shameless
politicians who are using the sad incident to burnish their
credentials as bona fide national leaders.

One of these Job’s comforters is the All Progressives Congress
leader and former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, who
answered some journalists’ questions during his visit to the
Fasoranti family. First, he downplayed the circumstances of
Olakunrin’s death by suggesting that she could have died in a road
accident if it was duly fated. This line of reasoning is about one
of the most uncharitable things one can say to the hearing of a
bereaved family and, frankly, unbecoming of someone who wears the
label of an elder. Such misspeaks bolster my conviction that the
withdrawal of the permanent pass that some folk have awarded
themselves as Yoruba leaders is long overdue for withdrawal.
However manner Olakunrin might have died, the fact remains that she
was killed and allegedly by herdsmen. To even overlook the
circumstances of her death, sidestep the tense reactions by the
exasperated populace, and begin to meander logic through bush paths
is moral cowardice.

For a while now, Nigeria has been in a difficult situation
because of the activities of killer herdsmen. Mind you, these
herdsmen have been labelled as the fourth deadliest terrorist group
in the world by the Global Terrorism Index. They have carried out
massacres in rural and agrarian communities, and have been
emboldened enough by the slackness of state security forces to move
into urban settings. Tinubu only needs to go to rural areas in
southwestern Nigeria, and his ears will be filled with stories of
assault, kidnapping, and vicious murder. People are no longer at
ease. They have lost their lives and entire investments in farming
to the herdsmen menace. Those that have survived deadly encounters
live in fear of the herdsmen. The fact that death is cheap in
Nigeria does not mean we should refuse to label an issue for what
it is. There is a context to the suspicion that Olakunrin might
have been killed by herdsmen; why try to obfuscate matters by
pointing out other ways she could have died? Why not just tell the
bereaved you are sorry and go home?

The herdsmen nuisance got to the point that Adesina told Benue
people to yield their land to their killers or continue to lose
their lives. How can anyone look at all of these stories –
including the “your land or your life” propositions to the poor
hapless and undefended Nigerians – and merely shrug and say death
could have come by a road accident anyway? We all know death is
inevitable, but nobody throws their life outside the window for the
fun of it. Otherwise, why does Tinubu himself travel with an armed
escort and in a bulletproof vehicle too? Why can he not test his
fate by stripping himself of the paraphernalia of defence and let’s
see what happens?

While responding to the press, Tinbu tried to deflect, engaged
in a rhetorical strategy called ‘whataboutism’ for no other
discernable reason than not wanting to address the hippopotamus on
his laps. The question at hand was the issue of insecurity – the
kidnappings and killings by herdsmen – but somehow, he managed to
drag in another issue entirely when he alluded to the alleged
kidnapper, Evans, who was arrested a while ago. What has Evans’
kidnapping career got to do with herdsmen who did not even start
their crimes with kidnapping but massacres and displacement of poor
villagers whose farms they raided? Why stop at Evans when he could
equally have raised other issues such as Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo’s
pending lawsuit and even climate change? He even threatened to give
us a history of kidnapping to show us that what we are presently
dealing with is an imitation of the criminal proclivity of
southerners.

All of the above bring me to the point that baffled me most and
which summarises all of the rhetorical acrobatics he did at the
Fasoranti’s house: the needless defence of the Fulani by Tinubu. By
now, everyone would have noticed that the most strident defence of
the Fulani over the herdsmen issue has come from southerners,
particularly the Yoruba. On the question of whether the Fulani
deserve the stereotype of cold-blooded killers or not, the Yoruba
people have wept louder than the bereaved. The Fulani themselves
are an ethnic group with enough power to take over the media in
their own defence, but they do not do so. Today, the Fulani are
resented, and not just because of the herdsmen issue but also
because of the clannishness and tribalism of President Muhammadu
Buhari who has more or less driven collective benefits in the
direction of a selected class. Why have they not refuted the
narrative about them, considering that they have the necessary
clout to challenge the demonising of their ethnic identity? They
can use the airwaves and other media forms to vehemently denounce
the herdsmen who attack undefended populations. They can rebuke
Miyetti Allah group over their inflammatory statements, and also
condemn the actions of reprobate groups such as the Coalition of
Northern Groups who gave governors a 30-day ultimatum to enforce
RUGA and students of Usman Dan Fodio University who insisted that
RUGA must be established in all the 36 states of Nigeria.

They are so many crisis-management strategies the Fulani ethnic
group can deploy to manage their image being battered all over
Nigeria because of the spate of herdsmen attacks. If the Fulani
themselves are not engaged in activities to refurbish their image,
it is because they are too self-secure in their political power and
privileges to be bothered about the long-term implications of
ethnic stigmatisation. They probably also do not concern themselves
so much with pushing back against stereotypes because their lackeys
in the South run those errands on their behalf.

Tinubu, in rounding off the interview, made a rather curious
statement cum question, “I don’t want to be political, but I will
ask, where are the cows?” If by that he means that the crime of
murder could not have been committed by herdsmen because there were
no cows at the crime scene, it means he has reached the end of
reasoning. I do not want to be political either, but the question
of where the cows are has already been answered by none other than
Tinubu himself. The cows are everywhere. If some people look into
their mirror, they will find those cows staring back at them in all
their bovine glory.

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