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Armed to the teeth, they invade sleepy communities in the dead of night. They kill, maim, steal, rape, burn down houses, destroy farms and sack whole communities. They destroy lives and livelihoods, leaving a trail of blood, tears and woes.
It is the same pattern everywhere they go – Benue, Taraba, Plateau, Nasarawa, Edo, Delta, Ondo, Ekiti, Enugu, Abia or wherever. Theirs is a reign of terror and blood.
The pattern of their murderous campaigns indicates a southward push to gain control over land or territory.
Early in March, community leaders in Mbatoho, an island community at Mbalagh council ward of Makurdi Local Government Area, Benue State, recounted how herdsmen invaded the island and quietly ordered the locals to vacate their ancestral homes without putting up any resistance or face death. The invaders said their intention was not to shed blood but to occupy the land.
Consequently, over 5,000 inhabitants of the vast island were uprooted from their ancestral homes and went to take refuge in Makurdi town.
“They came in their numbers with their cattle into island from Guma Local Government Area and other places on foot some weeks ago because the water level of River Benue has dropped significantly so they could easily assess the island on foot,” Peter Tachie, one of the community leaders of the island and tax collector of the inner segment of the island, narrated on March 3.
“Four days ago they started destroying our houses, farmland and food barns and also taking over the LGEA Primary School in the island and converting same for personal use. As we speak, no Tiv person is on that island at the moment. They have taken our farms and also uprooted our cassava from our plantation to feed their cattle which are also grazing freely on our farmland. They have destroyed all that we spent years to acquire,” Tachie said.
On March 16, Ifeanyi Okowa, Delta State governor, narrated how herdsmen have laid siege to three communities in Uwheru, Ughelli North Local Government Area of the state, demanding payment from farmers before they could be allowed access to their farms.
“And this has been going on for several years but it has gotten worse of recent,” Okowa said while playing host to the Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) in charge of Zone 5, Rasheed Akintunde, in Asaba, the state capital.
Stories like the above are leading to questions regarding who the so-called herdsmen really are. Are they cattle herders, jihadists or terrorists in disguise?
The Fulani have herded cattle over the centuries and have coexisted harmoniously with their host communities. How the herders who used to carry sticks turned around to carry AK-47 rifles has remained a source of worry to many.
“You can agree with me that these herdsmen cannot afford the amount of money with which they can buy AK47. So somebody is funding them and somebody bought these things for them,” Fide Ozichukwu Chukwu, a former People’s Democratic Party national vice chairman, South-East, told BDSUNDAY in a phone interview.
“But the most worrisome is not whether they have it or not, it’s how they get it, who gave it to them, and why is it that all this while the security agencies left them to wander about with it harassing, destroying, maiming and raping innocent citizens?
“Even if they purchase them by themselves, are they allowed by law to carry them? If they are not allowed by law to carry them, why is it that the law enforcement agents all this while have allowed them to wantonly go about destroying people, destroying property, and destroying people’s livelihood? Is there nothing that can be done?” Chukwu said.
Jihadists or terrorists?
Long before now, many knowledgeable Nigerians had described the menace of herdsmen as perhaps the most dangerous threat to safety of lives and property in the country. In 2015, a global report classified killer herdsmen as the world’s fourth most lethal ‘terrorist group’ measured by number of people killed.
Just on March 15, while speaking at the maiden edition of the Ripples Nigeria Dialogue in Lagos, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka decried the levity with which President Muhammadu Buhari was treating the killer herdsmen and challenged the president to declare the herdsmen terrorists.
“We expect the president to have the courage to declare such monsters as terrorists and enemies of humanity with the same dispatch in which he declared the far less violent, albeit, disruptive IPOB terrorists. We expect a culture of even-handedness,” Soyinka said.
Simon Abah, a public affairs analyst, told BDSUNDAY in Port Harcourt that he is not in doubt that the killer herdsmen are nothing but terrorists.
“A global terrorist report years back ranked the herdsmen as the fourth most dangerous terrorists in the world. They are people who defy the state and kill a particular class of people without love of universal brotherhood. They are terrorists in my view,” Abah said.
Elijah Adakole, a Port Harcourt-based media and communications research expert, is also of the opinion that herdsmen should be classified as terrorists.
Going through some definitions of terrorism, Adakole argued that it involves political aims and motives; is violent or it threatens violence; and is designed to generate fear in a target audience that extends beyond the immediate victims of the violence.
He said terrorism also includes “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives; it is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear, intended to coerce or intimidate governments societies as to the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious or ideological”.
“All the characteristics of terrorism (ideology, economic, political and in most cases religious) were physically present in the modus operandi of Fulani herdsmen attack,” Adakole said, concluding that “the Fulani herdsmen are a terror group with a clear and distinct leadership known as Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association as well as its ancillary associations”.
On whether they are jihadists as well, Adakole said even though religious reasons cannot be completely ruled out, it would be wrong to classify the herdsmen as jihadists since religion was not their visible motive.
“Again, Muslims were not insulated from their ferocious attacks in all the communities visited,” he said, citing that in the Agatu massacre of 2016, the people of the locality were predominantly Muslims just like in Zamfara.
“If their atrocities were propelled by religious factors, then these communities ought to have been spared,” he said.
But Chinweizu, renowned scholar and author of the revolutionary book, ‘The West and the Rest of Us’, believes differently.
“While Nigerians are being distracted by the diversionary hoopla about corruption, the Jihadists are going relentlessly forward to implement their long-prepared Arab imperialist agenda,” Chinweizu wrote in a 2016 article.
“By the time the entertainment is over, non-Jihadist Nigerians will wake up in the Caliphate Jihadist prison where the Christians are reduced to the dhimmi status of permanent second-class citizens; and the polytheists are wiped out or enslaved for paganism, as prescribed by Islam,” he said.
“Recall that in 2001, at an Islamic seminar in Kaduna, Buhari had reportedly told his Muslim brothers, ‘I will continue to show openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is sweeping all over Nigeria. God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the country’,” a source that does not want his name in print told BDSUNDAY.
As regards Adakole’s argument that if the atrocities of the killer herdsmen were propelled by religious factors, then the communities that are predominantly Muslim would have been spared the onslaught, historians recall that during the Jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio, the jihadists launched attacks in the Kanem-Bornu Empire, even though the area was dominated by Muslims. This prompted the well-documented letter to the Caliphate by the then El-Kanemi of Bornu querying why Kanem-Bornu, a Muslim territory, should be attacked by those who claimed they wanted to extend the kingdom of Islam.
Presidency’s inaction smacks of tacit support
More shocking to Nigerians has been the Federal Government’s failure to take any concrete action to halt the herdsmen’s murderous campaign.
“Government’s posture to the menace of Fulani herdsmen has been simply shocking and almost amounts to official endorsement of what looks like a strategy of terror and pillaging to achieve an expansionist and hegemonic ambition,” said Opeyemi Agbaje, a public policy analyst.
“President Buhari’s refusal to comment on the issue reflects his ‘body language’ on the issue and itself speaks volumes. The activities of these herdsmen will contribute to future political instability and may already be affecting agricultural output all over the country, but particularly in North Central Nigeria,” Agbaje said in an article in 2016.
While many Nigerians called for deployment of soldiers to the hotspots of the herdsmen killings, especially in Benue State, the Nigerian Federal Government maintained a tacit silence. Even the order to Inspector General of Police to relocate to Benue was disobeyed, by President Buhari’s own admission. Yet, the IGP remains in office without any sanctions.
When matters had got out of hand, the Federal Government finally deployed military troops in an exercise called Ayem A’ Kpatuma, or Cat Race, aimed to end herdsmen incursions in Benue State.
Earlier this month, however, the Independent Human Rights and Crime Monitoring Group (IHRCMG) accused the military of encouraging the influx of cattle into Benue State and aiding the herders to take over Benue communities by violating the Open Grazing Prohibition Law of the state.
In a preliminary report on execution of the exercise in Makurdi, Solomon Adodo, team leader of IHRCMG, regretted that the state had witnessed more killings, destruction of farmlands and houses despite the coming of the military.
“Exercise Ayem A’Kpatuma is causing more harm than good to Benue communities. Rather than bring peace and move people back to their ancestral homes, the military has been encouraging more herdsmen to move into Benue communities.
“The military encouraged herdsmen with a handbill, which they used at the launch of the exercise. They circulated the handbill misinforming the general public and giving a perspective that was not true.
“And Federal Government appears to be complicit in the Benue killings in all its ramifications. The actions taken so far by the government do not show any political will to end the killings.
“We, therefore, recommend that the military should reassess its operations and sincerely help Benue to enforce the Open Grazing Prohibition Law of 2017,” Adodo said.
Shocked at the silence from the Aso Rock Villa in the face of the systematic massacre in Benue, Governor Samuel Ortom, while addressing President Buhari while on a visit to the state recently, said: “On 30th May, 2017, the Miyetti Allah KautalHore in a ‘World Press Conference’ held in Abuja, opposed the Ranching Law. They called on Fulani herders in all of West Africa to come into Benue to help them reclaim their land. In the same vein, Miyetti Allah Cattle Herders Association in their Press Conference declared that more blood will flow in Benue if the Ranching Law is not rescinded.
“Your Excellency, as a President that supports the Rule of Law, you will most certainly be offended by these Hate Speeches that may have crossed the red line. Your Excellency, how can a group claim responsibility for the killings that happened and are going about scot free? How can a group make public these inciting and criminal declarations in an organised society and are not arrested by the Police?”
Ayo Opadokun, a pro-democracy activist and former secretary of National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), who spoke with BDSUNDAY, said: “I never imagined that it will come in my life time that the Nigerian security and intelligence will fail abysmally and will pretentiously not to be able to deter herdsmen from killing and exterminating communities from their land and taking over their land and the Nigerian state has failed to be able stop it and stamp it out completely in spite of the loud promises made by President Buhari.”
According to Opadokun, “I even wonder why the Nigerian presidency has led itself to be so distrusted when his own minister of defence, his own interior (internal affairs) and the Inspector-General of Police claimed that the events in Taraba, Benue, Nasarawa and Adamawa were communal clashes. Ordinarily, if there is sense of justice, equity and fairness; in this age, if there was nothing behind it; if there was nothing more to it; if there were no personal interests residing in the Nigerian security and intelligence and the presidency, all those ones ought to have been retired immediately to assure Nigerians that we are still together.”
In the face of all this, some Nigerians are digging up some comments attributed to President Buhari long before he became president.
Knowing the difference
Some school of thought has called for the separation of the real herdsmen from the killer herdsmen, arguing that criminal elements may be hiding under the umbrella of herdsmen to wreak havoc on innocent communities.
“Not all herdsmen are jihadists or terrorists,” said a source who pleaded anonymity. “There may be genuine herdsmen who are plying their trade without causing trouble, but the challenge is how to separate innocent herdsmen from professional killers hiding within them,” the source said.
He, therefore, called on the Federal Government to begin a profiling of herdsmen and try as much as possible to separate the true herdsmen from killers in order not to tar all of them with the same brush.
“Herders must be profiled, identified and labelled to save them and their trade by separating them from killers and terrorists. Attention must also be paid to their complaints that they are being attacked. There is no shortage of those who would want to attack them – rustlers to get free meat for sale, rascals who hate them and would want to harm them in the bushes, and farmers who may overreact if their crops were damaged,” the source said.
“They also need to be trained on how to have concern and respect for the crops of the farmers. It could be the neglect of these matters over the years that may have forced herders to develop self-help mechanisms, and may have also made farmers to defend their crops at all costs, thus creating a hostile relationship that has now exploded in violence and total intolerance. It is absence of governance action that allows too many evils within people,” he said.
CHUKS OLUIGBO & IGNATIUS CHUKWU, Port Harcourt
