Insecurity In Nigeria: The US Should Call A Spade A Spade

Quite fortuitously, I stumbled on an undated letter online, written by one Sandra Clark, the USA embassy official on African  Bureau Affairs to a Mr John Gregg of Chicago, Illinois. Astounded by the bare-faced mendacity of the contents, I was so livid that Ms Clark could pen such a missive-a maelstrom of half-truths, lies, sycophancy and praises for supremacists—on the insecurity situation in our dear country, Nigeria. Buhari’s publicists all over the world could not have done a better job in laundering the  image of his regime that everybody has conclusively lampooned as the worst in the history of this country.

It is utterly gobsmacking, insulting and appalling that Ms Clark appeared to know more about Nigeria than Nigerians do themselves. Invariably, she is more Catholic than the Pope!  She painted the  regime of Mr Buhari in glowing terms, eulogized its efforts and absolved it of any remotest complicity in the many tragic cases of murders by the Fulani herdsmen and kidnappers occupying all the forests in Nigeria now when there were  incontrovertible evidences to the  contrary so apparent in the minds that pretend to the least of rationality. She even justified the occupation of the trenches as the reality of the climatic changes in the world! The letter was a serpentine nest of beautiful nonsense to deceive the whole world. It was also an oily veneer of excessive obsequity slathered over a contemptuous arrogance. It was a vivid portrait of how a friendly country betrayed and is still betraying us as a hapless people through the prevailing ethos of moral entropy. With all modesty, to me, the letter should be viewed as having a symphonic range of disapprobation by all men of goodwill.

As a guest of President Trump in 2018, President Buhari, in the full glare of the world press, lied  that the Fulani, accused in many murder cases, were carrying only sticks to tend their cattle for folliage. He blatantly defended his kith and kin as never carrying guns or any dangerous weaponry. Perhaps, it was this bunkum that Ms Clark bought—hook, line and sinker— to twist facts as fiction; downplay the many cases of blood-chilling, horrendous killings, insult our collective intelligence, assail  our humanity and further sacrilegiously and perfunctorily dance on the graves of the victims of these state-sanctioned murders. Her reasoning on this insecurity situation was fatally warped and incongruous with the realities on ground.

A neutral mouthpiece  who was not promoting the petrifying ideologies of Fulanization,  Islamization and ethnic cleansing should have had some introspection and circumspection about the  gravity of every word that she penned if there was no nicodemous dalliance with the tiny murderous lots who have  maimed, annexed land, burnt houses, raped women and girls in the full glare of their  shackled husbands/ fathers before  killing them. Many indigenous farmers  have taken an undeserved holiday and kept a respectable  distance from their farmlands; many have been displaced and living in indescribably squalid conditions in IDP camps. The horrors of these Fulani herdsmen in the last  7 years could neither be wished away, forgotten in a hurry nor assuaged by any amount of pecuniary gratifications. In spite of all the evidences, Ms Clark and her paymasters pretended to be living in another  planet without the paraphernalia of monitoring equipment and social media footages of the barbaric crimes committed by these killer-Fulani marauders against humanity! This is gallingly annoying. The man dies in every man who keeps silent in the face of tyranny.

When president Buhari knew that he only lied to the  USA and himself, he changed  the narrative and blamed the orgy of violent attacks on the mercenary militiamen of the late Muhammar Ghaddafi of Libya who infiltrated Nigeria in droves. The self-indulgent murderers were not only murdering  their victims with psychotic relish on their own accord in many cases, they  were protected by the state security networks. It was these documented cases of murders by the Fulani that  made former President Trump’s administration put Nigeria on the list of Countries of Particular Concern where cases of state-sanctioned murders or religious persecutions were rife. But, in a knee-jerk manner and without getting the truth about the horrific scenes in Nigeria, the Biden’s administration yanked off Nigeria from the list thereby cruelly licensing the government of Nigeria to continue to  look the other way while murderers continue to shed people’s precious blood.

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The United States of America that should play a neutral role in the affairs of a friendly ally like Nigeria, help solve the lingering crises through technology transfer and the rampaging, inveterate murderers checkmated in their  gruesome murders, chose, unfortunately, to hobnob with the tiny mongrels thereby encouraging  them to kill more victims. The many victims killed in Benue, Oyo, Kaduna, Ondo, Enugu, Anambra and many other States of the federation are mere fractions of the actual victims that these rapacious murderers killed in cold blood with much gusto and braggadocio. I had to personally write the CNN when its reportage on the horrendous  murder of worshippers in a Catholic church in Owo, Ondo State recently was initially scant before a wider coverage was accorded it.

A deeply-sorry Biden commiserated with the George Floyd family and other black families who lost their  dear ones in abhorrent circumstances in the USA, ruffled feathers with Saudi Arabia which until recently it considered a pariah State on the allegation of state-sanctioned murder of Jamal Khasshogi in 2017  but maintained a stony, deafening silence to the dastardly killings of many innocent,  indigenous people in Nigeria and failed to call Buhari to account. What a sheer ambivalence! Do hundreds of Nigerian lives being butchered on daily basis  by these murderous goons actually matter to the USA? It’s arcane to understand why the USA would give Buhari a clean bill of health despite all the available evidences  that  he allowed his kinsmen to waste many innocent lives while some arrested Fulani criminals were promptly released on the ‘orders from above’?

The Buhari regime  has consistently justified these atrocities by his kinsmen euphemistically as farmers-herders clashes.

Buhari has been an unrepentant defender of  the  Fulani herders in their  dastardly and barbaric philistinism against their hosts. His larger-than-life image and popularity pre-2015 have fizzled out and his love for Nigeria has whittled down to the extent  that many now dub him the president of the Fulani. In the  wake of the horrific mass murder of innocent,  indigenous people in Benue State, Buhari stated inter alia: “I ask you in the name of God to accommodate your countrymen”.   His  spokesman, Femi Adesina, desperate to keep his job, at a time blandly made an inflammatory statement to the indigenous people to choose between their land and their  lives. All these statements from the  Presidency have inflamed so much passion among sane minds.

The ghoulish Fulani murderers have a sick fascination with death and are carrying and brandishing all manners of weapons to oppress, kill and terrorise indigenous people while the  law enforcement agents working in cahoots with them are always looking the other way and any non-Fulani persons seen with the least sophisticated guns are promptly arrested. The supremacist agenda, formulated and being systemically  executed are frighteningly sickening.

The USA, the United Nations and some western powers are behaving like the decadent and unpopular Roman Emperor Nero who fiddled and looked the other way while Rome was on fire in 64 A.D. Nigeria is the most populous black nation on earth. Any war emanating from these  present atrocities in Nigeria consequent upon inaction and aloofness of the western power to nip it in the bud—at all costs—will spell doom for the entire world. Can the world stand tumultuous refugees from a country of more than 200 million people? The USA needs to call a spade a spade. This is no time to secretly massage the ego of Buhari. This is no time to sit idly by, dish out glib rhetorics and watch Nigeria go up in flames. It is not too late to do the right thing. Nigeria cannot afford  to go through another civil war without fatal consequences.

–Afelumo, a Physician wrote via: [email protected]