Former Aviation Minister, Femi Fani-Kayode has revealed in an interview that President Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t appear disturbed by the spate of killings of innocent Nigerians by Fulani herdsmen. In this two-part series of interview, Fani-Kayode spoke on a wide range of issues.
Read the interview below:
How is your health now?
We give thanks to God. It was tough and I was out of circulation for about three weeks but I am much better now and I am getting stronger by the day.
I praise God for healing me, for preserving me and for protecting my life. The counsel of the ungodly shall not stand.
How would you rate the handling of suspected Fulani herdsmen attacks in the country by the government and security agencies?
Shameful and unacceptable. I believe that the fact that the security agencies have not been able to apprehend and bring to justice even one terrorist herdsman means that they are complicit in it. Buhari has no interest in protecting the Nigerian people from the Fulani herdsmen.
Thousands of innocent people have been butchered and slaughtered under his watch and under his very nose genocide and ethnic cleansing is waxing strong.
I don’t know how he can possibly sleep well at night. History and God will judge him harshly for his indifference to and complicity in this great evil.
The Defence Minister, Mansur Dan-Ali, recently blamed the killings by suspected Fulani herdsmen on anti-open grazing laws and the blockage of grazing routes. Do you agree? What do you think about his comments?
He is a Fulani man himself and he has spoken up and stated a case of his Fulani herdsmen brothers. His comments simply confirm the view that many have that the Buhari administration are supporting the terrorists and they don’t care.
terrorists and they don’t care.
I think that his comments are reprehensible. Trying to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing and blame it on the victims rather than the perpetrators is unacceptable. The Minister of Defence should bow his head in shame, apologise to the people of Benue state and ask God for forgiveness.
Do you the killings going on in places like Benue and Taraba are resulting from clashes as the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, once said?
No, I do not agree with him. What is going on there are not clashes but carefully orchestrated mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the indigenous Christian population by well-armed and well-supplied Muslim Fulani militias which are being supported and funded by very powerful people.
A number of states have passed anti-open grazing laws and some others are in the process of passing such a law. Do you think that will solve the problem of attacks by suspected Fulani herdsmen or not?
It is a good step in the right direction and it will certainly go a long way in returning sanity to the situation. However given the determination of the terrorists, the herdsmen and those behind them far more needs to be done.
For example, Miyetti Allah should be proscribed and declared a terrorist organisation and its leaders ought to be arrested and charged with murder.
The Federal Government, through the Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, talked about the need to have cattle colonies in states. Some states have said they are not interested and some have shown interest. Do you think the states that are opposed to it have good reasons to do so?
Yes, they have a very good reason to oppose it and I am glad they have done so. The whole idea of cattle colonies is unacceptable and there is far more to it than meets the eye.
It is a subterranean and covert attempt to establish not just cattle colonies but Fulani colonies all over the south and the Middle Belt.
10 years from now any state in the south or Middle Belt that accepts cattle colonies will wish they had never done so.
Find out what the root cause of the problem in Jos and Plateau state is between the indigenous Berom people and the Fulani settlers.
They will not just come with their cows but also with all their people. They will multiply like rabbits and after some time they will not only outnumber you but they will also claim the land as theirs.
Next, they will insist on having an Emir then they will impose their faith, their ways and their culture on you and try to dominate and control your everyday life.
They will arm themselves very well and after some time they will insist on political control of your entire community, act as if they are no longer guests and settlers but rather the original owners of the land and everyone else will be treated like second-class citizens and filth. And if you attempt to resist them they will threaten you and kill you.
That is where this cattle colony thing will all end and that is what it is designed to achieve. It is simply a handy and subtle vehicle for Fulani expansion, assimilation and conquest and it is being promoted and encouraged by Buhari’s Fulani Government.
I say shame on this government and particularly on Audu Ogbeh for trying to introduce such a repugnant idea even when those that asked him to do so are slaughtering his own people in Benue state.
The proposed introduction of cattle colonies is a rubbish suggestion, of a rubbish idea, from a rubbish Minister, who serves a rubbish Government.
Audu Ogbeh was Minister in 1983. He is clearly too old for the job now, he has lost touch with reality and he no longer knows what he is doing. He needs to resign.
Saturday PUNCH recently had an interview with Professor Umar Labdo of Maitama Sule University, Kano in which he described the Fulani people as being destined to rule Nigeria. What are your views on that? Do you think the Fulani were destined to lead?
only is what Professor Labdo said false but it also an insulting view and a deeply offensive assertion. I say this because what he is in essence suggesting is that the rest of us are nothing but slaves that must bow at the feet of the Fulani and serve them in perpetuity. Such views are unacceptable. They have no place in a civilised society and they must be condemned by all men of goodwill.
If, as Labdo has suggested, the Fulani are “destined to lead” or are “born to rule” the logical deduction and clear implication is that every other ethnic nationality in the geographical space called Nigeria including the Yoruba, the Ijaw, the Igbo, the Tiv, the Hausa, the Kanuri, the Berom, the Idoma, the Urobo, the Isetkiri, the Isoko, the Efik, the Ibibiyo, the Kalabari, the Nupe, the Gwari, the Bachama and everyone else were “destined to slavery” and “born to serve” and that they were “born to be ruled” by others.
I reject that notion and I find it deeply repugnant, obnoxious and offensive. I do not believe that that is God’s plan or purpose for any Nigerian or any of out numerous nationalities and such views are the closest things to the Nazi philosophy and way of thinking that I have ever heard.
The Nazis believed that God gave the white ‘Aryans’ of Germany the earth and all of humanity to dominate and rule over in perpetuity and Adolf Hitler enunciated those dangerous views very well in his famous book titled ‘Mein Kampf’ (meaning ‘My Struggle’).
In a similar way, Labdo believes that God gave the Fulani the nation and the people of Nigeria to lead, rule and dominate in perpetuity and he has enunciated those views in his famous interview with the Saturday Punch Newspaper.
Both Hitler and Labdo and indeed all those that think like them are deluded and dangerous and they must be confronted and exposed for what they are: self-serving racists and ethnic supremacists of the highest order.
The white Afrikaans-speaking Boer settlers and farmers of apartheid South Africa, who were originally from Holland, also had those views and a few of them still do.
They believed that God had given them South Africa to rule over and dominate in perpetuity and that the black Africans that they met there when they arrived in the Cape in 1604 were, in Van Riebeeck’s famous words, nothing but “stinking black dogs” who were destined to be treated as the biblical “carriers of water and hewers of the wood”.
In other words, they were nothing but slaves and even close to being sub-human. That is how people like Labdo see the rest of us that are not Fulani in Nigeria.
No matter how well-educated or prosperous we are and no matter what we may have achieved in life they see us as underlings, serfs and slaves that were ordained by God to live, serve and die for them.
They believe that we live at their leisure and at their pleasure. I believe this is unacceptable and that such thinking has no place in a civilised society. It is wrong, it is false and it is ungodly.
My full response to Professor Labdo was articulated and documented in great detail in my official rejoinder to him which is titled ‘The Dangerous Delusions Of Umar Muhammed Labdo”.
It was published in the Punch Newspaper itself and in numerous other mediums. I would urge all those that are interested to google it and read it so that when other Fulanis make such bogus claims they know exactly what to say to counter them and shoot down the reckless rhetoric and dangerous propaganda.
We must not allow Labdo’s lies and delusions to go unanswered and we must not make the grave error of assuming that he speaks only for himself or that his view is a minority view.
The truth is that he speaks for many of his people and his views are widely held even if not voiced out publicly by many Fulani leaders. That is the bitter truth and we must accept it.
We must also expose it, confront it, discredit it, overwhelm it, overcome it and finally bury it. We refuse to confront it or shy away from doing so at our own peril and at great risk to our collective future and the future of our children and generations unborn.
Unlike Labdo I believe that all men and women, regardless of their tribe, ethnicity, race, faith, colour, gender or nationality were created equal before God and I believe that anything outside of that is evil.
He said that Fulani people are saddled with the burden of leadership and that they have to shoulder that responsibility because they are more educated and qualified for it than anyone else.
He also said that the Fulani were reading books and ancient transcripts 500 years ago before any other nationality in Nigeria could read or write.
What do you think about these assertions?
Again this is false. Qualified how? As a matter of fact, some would argue that in terms of history they are the least qualified and the least deserving to lead and rule. If it was simply about qualifications and not a brutal show of power and the force of arms they would be nowhere because there are many nationalities in Nigeria that are far more qualified to take the lead than they were or are.
The Fulani are not amongst the most educated in Nigeria and if the truth be told education came to them very late.
They were so uneducated and unenlightened that they were terrified of Nigeria gaining her independence from the British in 1953 when the first motion for Nigeria’s independence was moved because they knew that they could not compete with ANY of the southern ethnic nationalities in a newly independent Nigeria.
That is why they said 1953 was too early for our nation to have independence. Imagine someone saying it was too early to be free and to break the yoke of bondage and colonialism
