Obasanjo, Fulanisation and Islamisation

When I read the statement credited to former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, on the present national security muddle, I almost chocked from bewilderment. It was a statement he made at the Cathedral Church of St Paul Anglican Church, Oleh in Osoko South Local Government Area of Delta State and because of his stature as a former President the statement went viral immediately in all the media platforms.

He was quoted to have said that the deadly activities of the Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East, plus kidnapping and the herder and farmer entanglements in many parts of the country is no longer as a result of lack of education and employment of youth in Nigeria, which it began as. It is, as he claimed, as a result of West African Fulanisation, African Islamisation and global organized crimes and human trafficking, money laundering, drug trafficking, gun trafficking, illegal mining and regime change. He said that the twin evils of Boko Haram and marauding cattle herders were initially treated with kid gloves before they reached the present level.

I wonder what came over the great statesman to make such utterances that can only be construed to stigmatize a whole race and a religion. Stigmatization and labelling are deeply frowned at all over the world because of historic consequences. Such infractions even attract sanctions by international courts. Understandably so it was close associates of Obasanjo who were the first to advise him to desist from embarking on that unwholesome road to bigotry. Sule Lamido a former Governor of Jigawa State and Foreign Minister in Obasanjo’s government had been a close ally of Obasanjo. Even lately both have been critical of how President Mohammadu Buhari’s government had been handling the economy as well as the security situation.

But in a letter Sule Lamido sent to Obasanjo he asked him to withdraw the statement credited to him that Boko Haram has an agenda of ‘Fulanisation and Islamisation’ of West Africa. He advised him not to allow his disappointment with the current administration to turn him into a religious and ethnic bigot. His advice was almost plaintive when he begged: ‘Please sir do not allow your disappointment to with a sitting President turn you into a bigot. You must not abandon the national stage.’

Probably no one was more taken by surprise than this reporter who had written extensively on the nationalist credentials of Obasanjo. In 2017 when he was celebrating his 80th year, I recalled my initial misgivings when he took over from General Murtala in 1976: “I was in my final year in Kongo campus of ABU Zaria, and I recall watching on television in the student’s common room, with a deep frown of disapproval on my face, General Olusegun Obasanjo taking the oath of office. He was dour-looking and the speech he made immediately after he was sworn in was uninspiring. It didn’t help matters when in that inaugural speech he admitted that, ‘I have been called upon, against my personal wish and desire, to serve as the new Head of State’.

“I felt he was a poor substitute for a person like Murtala whom we genuinely admired as a dashing, fiery speaking leader who was patently nationalistic. Fortunately for Nigeria’s fate and to the astonishment of many of us who were cynical ab initio, General Obasanjo settled into power like duck to water, his feet filling up the shoes of his predecessor with relative ease. He faithfully kept to the programme they set out to implement, step by step, fulfilling virtually all of them, and finished up by leading his team to hand over to a civilian administration in October 1979.”

It was an impressive finish and helped garnish Obasanjo’s credentials as a nationalist. In time he established the Africa Leadership Forum (AFL) in his Otta farm which became a centre for leadership advocacy and training. One of the programs he ran was the Farm House Dialogue which became famous in 1980s as an informal platform which facilitated interaction between groups within Nigeria and across African countries. Prominent leaders such as former US President Jimmy Carter, former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, former World Bank President Robert McNamara and former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt came calling at Otta to participate.

All these activities and interactions helped to keep Obasanjo abreast of happenings and interpret events not only as they occurred in the country but across Africa and the wider world. Subsequently Obasanjo grew in stature to transform him into an international citizen and his impressive cv was times and again presented by Nigerian Governments for high offices in United Nations organizations and the Commonwealth. This run of successful transformation was to receive a rude stop during the Abatcha regime when Obasanjo was fingered to be muddled up in a coup attempt. He received a death sentence by a military tribunal and was only saved by providence when the Head of State General Sani Abatcha died suddenly in June 1998. His successor General Abdulsalami Abubakar granted him clemency. And as the country was once more returning to democracy Obasanjo found favours with the power brokers and got himself hoisted as the flag bearer of one of the major political parties and was elected President.

Out of office in 2007, Obasanjo kept himself up and coming in national affairs. He kept making efforts to mediate in many communal feuds. I recall his visit to Maiduguri in 2011 to commiserate with the family of Mohammed Yusuf the slain leader of Boko Haram and his efforts to placate the group from their heinous campaigns of bombings and murders. There are reports that about the same period Obasanjo had visited Plateau State and a number of other scenes of communal violence to help in dousing frayed tempers. Besides these personal solo efforts Obasanjo must have received special briefing on all security matters as a former Head of State and a member of the Council of State. And I guess he must have been making official inputs at various stages of interventions.

So why is Obasanjo engaged in this brouhaha of hate speech and name-calling at the most unusual venue of a church? No wonder Lai Mohammed, the former Minister of Information expressed disappointment at Obasanjo’s outbursts calling them ‘divisive and depressing’. Lai Mohammed even pointedly observed that: ‘It was tragic that Obasanjo who had fought to keep Nigeria one, is the same person seeking to exploit the country’s fault lines to divide it in the twilight of his life.’

Obviously former President Obasanjo knows that the areas over-run by these bandits are in the northern-most parts of the country mostly populated by the Fulani and Muslims. They are the ones whose villages and towns are visited with mayhem and their roads made impassable by bandits and kidnappers. Yet they are the ones being stigmatized by Obasanjo, not the criminal gangs.

We shall return to the subject next week as we examine if Obasanjo had other motives for these unkind remarks. Keep a date with this page.