In 1958, the Chinese government of Mao Zedong designed a campaign to rid the country of four undesirables—mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. China’s quest for rapid industrialisation, or the ‘Great Leap Forward’ must not be hindered by these ‘pests,’ believed to be affecting crop production. The sparrows were targeted because they ate grains and fruits and shortened food supplies. Millions of Chinese took up the campaign with gusto. They went out with their drums and pans and everything else they could use to generate noise and made so much racket to frighten the sparrows and keep the birds from settling down to rest. Traumatised, the birds flew around and around until exhausted, they would fall out of the sky, dead. In this way, millions of sparrows were killed, at least three million in Beijing alone.
By 1960, it was discovered that instead of increasing, crop yields were declining at pace. Rice harvests were paltry and fruits were measly and soon it became clear, China was heading for a disaster. The cause? Well, the sparrows ate grains and fruits but they also ate a lot of insects and locusts. With the annihilation of the sparrows, the swarms of locust and insects multiplied and ate far more crops than the sparrows would have eaten over several lifetimes. The Great Leap Forward became the Great Chinese Famine and by 1961, official figures say 15 million Chinese died from hunger. Others estimate that the true figures were closer to 40 million people. All because someone thought it was a good idea to get rid of the sparrows.
Last week, a viral video surfaced of a man claiming they were evicting Fulani people from Ebonyi State. Several groups denied that such an incident happened. The BBC reported that it spoke to the people who insisted they were sacked from Ebonyi. The focus of my Line of Sight last week was on the manifesting hate for different groups across the country, as was captured in that video. The dust raised by that clip had hardly settled when the even more militant Amotekun vigilante attacked a Fulani settlement in Oyo State, killed a father and his two sons on the day one of the man’s sons was going to wed. They partly destroyed the Fulani settlement and reports say they might have killed more.
Amotekun, the South West regional security network, was established last year to primarily tackle the excesses of criminal “herdsmen.” The agitation that triggered this formation was ignited by the July 2019 killing of Mrs Funke Olakunrin, daughter of a prominent Yoruba leader, Pa Rueben Fasoranti. The suspects? Fulani herdsmen.
In the months since its formation (and we are speaking only months here), Amotekun by its actions and utterances—including extrajudicial killings of civilians, university students, morality policing and claims that it would crack down on indecent dressing and people who ‘bastardize’ Yoruba, is quickly transforming. It is taking on the form and shape of the ethnic militia that triggered and executed the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.
Ostensibly, it was set up to protect a certain ethnic group from another certain ethnic group. Of course, the leadership of the Fulani group have questions to answer about the descent of members of the group into new and dangerous levels of criminality for which they were hitherto not known. But setting up vigilantes like Amotekun to counter the criminalities of one tribe could result in the kind of profiling that dominated World War II and what the Nazis called “The Jewish Question.”
As if that is not recipe for disaster already, Amotekun is behaving like the wild animal it was named after, the leopard, a feral, ungovernable thing. The longer these infractions go on, the bigger this beast becomes. Considering the powers members of Amotekun are keen to abrogate unto themselves, the danger of the group becoming a full-scale ethnic militia without any pretence grows by the day.
With growing criminality among the Fulani, the fact that they have vulnerable populations living in various parts of the country, fear and resentment for them will only grow. One commentator to my column last week suggests that the Fulani are facing the same kind of envy the Igbo faced after the January 1966 coup, considering that Buhari, a Fulani man, is in power. I think the scenarios are different, especially considering the culpability of some herdsmen in the tainting of their own tribesmen. This has led to the rise of anti-Fulani vigilante groups across the country and has provided the raison d’etre for their various existence. IPOB, a few weeks ago, was reportedly training its own militia designed to “protect Igboland from herdsmen.” A convenient excuse, if you ask me.
None of this, of course, would happen if there were no gaping holes the size of a small country in governance. The fact that criminal gangs of Fulani and other decadents are running wild and unbridled across vast swathes of the country, wreaking havoc, committing mass murders, mass rapes, mass abductions and destroying farms, and decimating farming communities without the government arresting them and bringing them to face the law makes the government culpable. The president’s nonchalance of course doesn’t help. The absence of government action has empowered and in some cases mandated communities to rise and protect themselves. Yet, the government has remained unconcerned about these developments, even in the face of glaring ethnic fragmentation of the country and the militarisation of ethnic groups.
Ahead of elections that we all know have the potential to be incendiary in this country, this is akin to sitting comfortably on a keg of gunpowder while picking your teeth.
What has all this got to do with the Great Chinese Famine of 1961? Well, the fact that people are desperate to get rid of something they have been made to fear will not necessarily guarantee their safety and may, in fact, create a problem far greater than the one that they are trying to solve. The Chinese killed off millions of sparrows but ended up importing 250, 000 from the Soviet Union to help return the ecological balance that their bad policy induced. (Not that they seem to have learnt their lessons with their persecution of the Uighur people). The growing desperation to evict certain ethnic groups from certain parts of the country might just equally be disastrous. Peace, unlike wealth or power, cannot be exclusive to a few.
If there is someone in charge of the affairs of this country, this is the time to step up and provide the much-needed governance that would end the criminalities and banditry of certain groups and stem the rising tsunami of hate. Is that too much to ask?
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