From the Eagle Square, former military, Muhammadu Buhari, put forward some awkward truths and evaluation of Nigeria's current ills on Saturday. His best lines, clear-cut and caustic, could have been more, but here are the best 10 in no particular order.
1. There is an unprecedented fall in the nation’s standard of living and an astronomical rise in the standard of dying.

2. Anarchy is knocking on the door of many sections of this country and the Federal government has not demonstrated that it has the good sense to understand what is going on, or the competence to check it.

3. The patience of this nation and the various communities within it has been severely tried and stretched to its limits. And there is no end in sight.

4. Some areas of the nation are virtual war zones in a country supposedly at peace.

5. Marauders of every description armed to the teeth with all manner of sophisticated armaments roam the national landscape with total and murderous impunity.
More: http://www.kopnomi.com/2013/05/10-best-lines-from-buharis-speech-on.html

The Fulani establishment has been the driving force of our politics and has unequivocally set its agenda for the past 41 years.



Fulanis depart from a premise of greater entitlement to power in Nigeria than the rest of us. This attitude is inspired by racist-supremacist instinct similar to the Tutsi natural resentment of Hutu leadership in Burundi and Rwanda or the Tuareg rebellion against African rule in Mali and Niger from the 1960s to as recent as the mid-1990s.



The Fulani establishment could build alliances like ‘Hausa-Fulani’, ‘Muslim North’, ‘North’ or ‘Nigerian Muslims’, their game-plan has been always to secure Fulani supremacy in our polity. This politics requires that "external" enemies must always be found against which to define the common identity they seek to share with their chosen allies. Therein lies the danger of perpetual crisis in Nigeria.



And Fulani politicians are superior to their counterparts in the rest of Nigeria. Fulanis have been shaped by thousands of years of battle with the harsh forces of nature to be more clever, more canny, more aggressive, to have sharper instincts of survival and sense of perception. And our leaders do not understand them. Imagine fighting against an enemy you do not know well!



An example of our faulty perception of the North and Fulani politics is provided by the speech delivered by Chief Abraham Adesanya at the "first Alhaji Abdulrahman Okene memorial Lecture", organised by Gamji Members Association (GAMA), in Kaduna on 15 August. In the speech, which after a critical reading would make a Yoruba look foolish, the Afenifere chief said:



"You have invited me, the leader of Afenifere and leader of the Yoruba to be your special guest of honour. History will record that this is the first time in Nigerian political history whether ancient or modern when a descendant of Oduduwa will be honoured in such an environment so closely and so warmly associated with a descendant of Othman Dan Fodio."



Chief Adesanya speech writers elevated Dan Fodio to the rank of Oduduwa, placing a Fulani man who died less than 200 years ago on the same level of the mythical cultural hero of Yorubas.

They also chose an event in honour of Okene, an Igbira man, to seek dialogue with the Fulani power establishment. Yet Okuns and Igalas, both Yoruba poeples, have been living with Igbiras for thousands of years, far, far long before Fulanis first appeared as destitute nomads in our horizon.



We have overindulged the insensitivity of the Fulani elite and thus have emboldened them to act with impunity in Nigeria.



The Fulani Oligarchy has fought the popular clamour for fundamental changes in our polity almost to a standstill. The governors of the southern states have abandoned their call for state police, although it is the most logical solution to the problem of crime in Nigeria. On resource control, they have told us that people do not have any claim to resources for "merely sitting on them". They have cowed the proponents of a Yoruba traditional leadership institution in Ilorin with the threat of imported violence.



Yet against our loud protestations they have introduced an autonomous judicial space in Nigeria with sharia. And, to boot, they have a local police to enforce the Islamic penal code (Islam was the chief weapon in the Fulani conquest of Hausa country and culture, and their other fiefdoms in the North, and sharia amounts to an aggressive reassertion of the religion as the chief agent of cultural unity in the Fulani-ruled North and the Muslim North as a whole). They claim they have the right to practise their religion the way it suits them, but we have no right to adopt measures we consider appropriate to safeguard our lives and properties.



The Fulani Oligarchy in its traditional form is an outdated system that resists social progress. It is a system that inculcates subordination and acquiescence and these have come to characterise the society and polity of the Fulani-ruled Muslim North.



Nigeria will not move forward until the Oligarchy is defeated like in Cameroon. Yet we are disadvantaged in the battle against this force of backwardness because our leaders are too given to in-fighting, too self-centred, too prone to being satisfied with little achievements. Our scholars are busy fighting for better conditions of service instead of enlightening their people, our popular intellectuals are confused ideologues, our prominent social critics keep quite to avoid being labelled tribalists. Gani Fawehinmi is a tribalist, Professor Peter Ekeh is a tribalist, Tiv generals are tribalists etc. Fulani intellectuals and journalists use the label so often that it seems only Fulanis because of their facial features transcend ethnicity and tribalism.



Fulani supremacist politics is comprehensive. Their few newspapers have well-programmed content. Their few intellectuals pursue an ideological objective: the Fulani supremacy in our politics, and they are very effective in working for their race in Nigeria. They co-ordinate with their traditional rulers, politicians, top civil servants, military officers, both serving and retired. Arewa has successfully mobilised into its membership almost all the prominent retired military and police officers in the whole North. This kind of co-ordination is lacking in the South.



Bola Ige’s death marks a turning point in the struggle for a peaceful, stable Nigeria, free from the choke-hold of Fulani power supremacy. A general in this war has fallen and his demise has dire implications for the nation.



The message of Bola Ige’s death is that we must be ready to do an all-out battle with the idea of Fulani supremacy in Nigeria. We must stop shying away from a fight. Our politicians must seek allies in the North, we must undercut the influence of Fulanis in its regional politics. Our journalists must become conscious of this evil idea of Fulani supremacy in our land, our students must be sensitised to it. Our civil servants, policemen, military men and women, the whole of the civil society must be awaken to this obnoxious ideology of racial superiority. Only this encompassing mobilisation can defeat the Fulani Oligarchy which is the hinderer of our progress in Nigeria.



Fulanis are not invincible. Southerners must only stop lumping all Northerners together for condemnation for our problems. The South must reach out to the North. Kanuris and Yorubas, for example, are related peoples. All ethnological studies of Nigeria since the beginning of the 20th century have always pointed this out. Why can’t Yoruba intellectuals help to make political capital out of this? Why can Southern Christians not reach a strategic consensus with the Christian North, not against Islam but against Fulani-inspired political Islam?



Until the politics of Fulani supremacy is correctly recognised for what it is; a cancer in our nation, we will not be able to move forward.

@Bombay, do you think anybody reads the junk you keep posting here and there?

@Seun, you should have a way of preventing spammers from accessing your platform.

OsunOriginal: @Bombay, do you think anybody reads the junk you keep posting here and there?

@Seun, you should have a way of preventing spammers from accessing your platform.

Guy, go drink garri.

This speech reminded me of his inaugural
speech when the democratically elected
government of President Shagari was
removed by the Military of which General
Buhari is the number one beneficiary as a
Head of State. This is where religions and ethnicity started in Nigeria polity. 2) The region that sophisticated arms and
ammunition are the order of the day that
had him once as their former Military
Administrator of the State. Education
down to the grassroot was not encouraged
and the end product of what the People now is "western education is sin" aka
Boko haram. While former leaders like late
Pa Awolowo and Ogbemudia etc made
sure that education is a key to freedom
was seriously taken into practice in their
respective zones and state. Is he blaming others for not being able to read the
future? 3) On security; He was a Military Head Of
State that promised Nigerians adequate
security, but failed to protect himself as
HOS and was removed from Dodan
barracks by Gen IBB and late Gen Abacha
without a single bullet wasted. Is this the same General Buhari that is promising
Nigerians of security or it's just a political
statement to deceive Nigerians? Would it not be proper to use Nasarawa
state as a case study to show Nigerians
the meaning of good governance,
development, anti-corruption and
adequate security been a state with a CPC
Governor as Gov Fashola of ACN helped to boast his party than what Sen Ahmed
Tinubu could not do? Ousting PDP from power is rather selfish
and a clear sign of desperation to fulfill an
ambition so far failed as all the opposition
parties in their respective states are yet to
show Nigerians what the true meaning of
good governance is at their state level, so how can they offer what they have not
yet practice at the centre? What manner of
miracle will that be? It's political deceit! America has long forgotten about their
post-elections challenges and focusing on
National growth for the general good of all
it's citizens, but in Nigeria, it is political
meetings and distractions from 1999 to
2019 simply because an individual was not allowed to rule again and he still has the
guts to talk about insecurity and lack of
development in some section of the
country: is that what Elder statesmen do in
other developed country? How can you condemn a party with
22million votes and celebrate your own
12million votes that was conducted by the
same authority at the same date? Speaking with both sides of the mouth is a
system of politics that Nigerians should be
afraid of. A system that if it doesn't favor
you, then it must be condemned is wrong
and should not be encouraged eg Edo
Guber polls where Gov Adam passed a vote of no confidence on INEC, but when the
result came out in his favor, he gladly
accepted the process as credible. What a
propaganda it was. The time to put all hands on deck for a
better Nigeria has started ever since and
no one man or woman can achieve it
without the support of other like-minds
and the opposition today is a marriage of
strange bedfellows just against PDP and not for the general good of good
governance across Nigeria.

The real (APC) Arewa Peoples Congress now you know your new political party.You have been freed but you want to go back to bondage.

Tinubu the new Akintola selling the Yoruba race for a bowl of porridge.

@Bombay it was not only Akintola that sold out the progressives to the Fulanis of the 1st republic, Zik and his NCNC did likewise when they agreed to form a coalition with the NPC thereby becoming the junior partner in the government when they could have been the senior partner in a coalition govt with AG. That singular act altered the course of history of this country. If Zik was Prime minister and Awo was ceremonial president, the Jan 66 coup, the july counter coup, the annihilation of southerners in the North, the Biafran war and all other things that have set us 100 years backwards could have been avoided.