In 2020, a report titled “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter: Genocide in Nigeria and Implications for the International Community,” was presented to U.S. vice-president Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The 312-page report chronicled a series of premeditated murders and terror attacks that have killed more than 90,000 people across the north and Middle Belt since 2010.
The purpose of the report was to collate and contextualise this violence, using th clear patterns it showed to prove that this series of murders going back over a decade could legally be described as a genocide. Under international law, “genocide” is described as an intentional action to destroy in whole or in part, a group of people who can be defined as an ethnic, national, racial or religious group. The word “genocide” is often conflated with “massacre”, which creates the misunderstanding that something on a scale to rival Rwanda or Auschswitz must take place before the word can be correctly applied.
This report showed that far from simply murdering millions of Middle Beltans and northern minority groups, which is logistically impossible for Fulani militia and Boko Haram terrorists armed with AK-47s, using terror to displace them permanently from their land achieved the same effect. In other words, without physically wiping out entire populations using the efficiency of the Hutu Interahamwe or German SS, the attackers could still have been said to have committed a genocide using economic strangulation and cultural destruction.
Taking the “Silent” out of “Silent Genocide”
Seeing Nigeria’s president put out a scarcely-believable tweet threatening a repeat genocide against an unspecified enemy that will almost certainly end up being innocent civilians in the southeast was a shock for many. For me, following my involvement in putting the Silent Slaughter report together, it was merely a more visible part of the buildup to the logical conclusion of the conventional genocide.
Typically, the process starts with classification and symbolisation. In this case, that means blurring the difference between the terms “Igbo” and “IPOB.” Once that has been done successfully and everyone named “Chukwuma” and “Onyinyechi” are automatically classed as separatist militants, the next stages are discrimination and dehumanisation. Nigeria’s anti-Igbo discrimination is hardly headline news, but the dehumanisation is more recent – the videos of civilians in Imo and Anambra forced to disembark from their cars and walk past military roadblocks with their hands in the air; the gratuitous arrests and summary executions of ordinary people labeled as “IPOB.”
Then come the organisation and polarisation stage where special military attention is given to dealing with the “problem.” In some cases such as Rwanda, special paramilitary units were created and armed with machetes. In Nigeria’s case, special army units and operations have been created to take the proverbial hammer to the fly – because the point is not really to engage IPOB/ESN, but actually to inflict a genocide on Nigeria’s southeast. Then come the preparation and persecution stags, where the public is primed for the violence that is to come.
Buhari’s tweet – which Twitter removed for violating its TOS – falls squarely into the preparation category. The minds of the public are being prepared to witness extreme violence and cruelty – and to rationalise it. After this stage, the only stages left are the actual extermination, followed by the inevitable denial. It is no coincidence whatsoever that the preparation stage where we currently are, also included a secret memo from the Attorney General recommending that the president exercise a power he does not have to suspend Chapter IV of the 1999 constitution which includes the Right to Life. Nigeria might have spent 10 years experiencing a silent genocide in the Middle Belt, but Buhari’s planned genocide in the southeast is intended to be anything but silent.
A Message to Major General Buhari
Dear Mr Buhari, it’s me again. Yes me, the foolish noisemaking journalist from Lagos who won’t allow you to drink water and drop the cup because he has notions of “justice,” “Human rights,” “democracy” and “economic literacy.” You are no stranger to my irritating lack of silence, and I am no stranger to how you deal with people whom you dislike. If the Shia slaughter in Kaduna didn’t convince me, the Lekki Massacre in Lagos certainly did. That is why I packed a bag and hightailed it out of Nigeria on foot – I would still very much like to avoid the Dadiyata experience if possible.
After butting heads with your administration over your self-confessed terrorist Minister of Communications who doubles as your personal Imam, I fully understand that intransigence and stubbornness is as much your trademark as your tall, slender frame. At your age, you are certainly not going to change either. You are what you are, and many Nigerians have simply accepted this and chosen to wait you out. Objectionable as we might find you, we love our democracy more than we dislike you. That is why in the face of your open thuggery, human rights violations, war crimes perpetrated on civilians, and woeful mismanagement of the economy, Nigerians have by and large, chosen to put their heads down and bear it.
The recent posturing however, has taken it too far. A military general of all people, should be able to know when he is overplaying his hand and jeopardising the entire country because of one foolish vice he cannot get rid of. Mr Buhari, the problem is not so much that you thought that putting out a message threatening a rerun of a genocide against a quarter of Nigeria’s population was a smart and presidential thing to do. We are already used to you, so seeing the president of Nigeria tweeting angry threats against an entire ethnic group like a faceless thug posting on Nairaland is hardly a surprise. You are the coup plotter you have always been.
The problem, Mr Buhari, is that you genuinely seem to think that this is a fight to pick. You really somehow imagine that in the world of 2021, you can set your armed forces on Nigeria’s Igbo population so as to remind them of their place which you imagine they have forgotten – and it will end well for you. You really believe that as it was in 1968, you can have a Murtala Mohammed here and a Benjamin Adekunle there, casually exterminating Igbo civilians to satisfy your parochial and racist hatred of a group of people who have never done anything to you.
You actually believe, without any shred of doubt, that focusing the creaking Nigerian military against 50 million relatively well educated and economically empowered people will have the same outcome as that of 1970. You are a military general who has managed to completely lose all semblance of territorial control to a few dozen thousand militants and terrorists armed with light armament in the Sahelian expanse – but somehow you think that an urban war against 50 million of Nigeria’s most ferociously entrepreneurial people will end well?
For the avoidance of doubt Mr. Buhari, let it be known that this is NOT 1967. The Middle Belt and the southwest of Nigeria will not assist or stand idly by while you instruct soldiers to enact a genocide on our Igbo friends and neighbours, with whom we have intermarried for generations and become indistinguishable from. We are them, and they are us. If you are expecting mass Igbophobia on the part of ordinary Nigerians in the south and Middle Belt to assist the tepid, unmotivated, compromised and incompetent military in murdering 50 million of the people you detest so much, you need to think that through again.
Furthermore if you think that the ethnic group with possibly the largest Nigerian diaspora in the world is not more than capable of defending itself against your unprovoked aggression and obsessive racial hatred, then – not for the first time in your career – the validity of your military credentials must be questioned. You see, you are not a god, Mr. Buhari. You are a man. A mere mortal man. The last time a Nigerian Head of State forgot that basic universal truth, it was a blue pill the size of a paracetamol tablet and a fatal heart attack that reminded him finally. I’m sure you remember this very well because he was your boss.
Mr. Buhari, leave Igbo people alone and stop constantly trying to murder them or set them up to be murdered. Stop trying to perpetuate yourself in power and fiddle with the already imperfect Nigerian constitution so that you can have more time in power to kill Igbo civilians. These ambitions are beyond you. Enjoy the time you have left in office and then on May 29, 2023, do the only good thing you would have ever done for Nigeria and just go away. That is all anybody needs from you at this point.
Do your time and then just go away.
