₦airaland Forum

kcnwaigbo:
I pray it comes down to military confrontation

Tinubuadvocate:
Israel government can't do anything in Nigeria this is not Gaza or Palestine Nigeria will turn the whole Israel to graveyard within 3 days.

vedaxcool:
[s][/s]

Terrorists propagandist spotted.

vedaxcool:
[s][/s]

Islamic terrorists supported by me preach hate and bigotry. It is all they have.

Mangekyo:
You IPOBS and the Yorubas are the reason we aren't united. Fact! You guys are filled with pride and hate that doesn't take you anywhere. Meanwhile, our unity is just around the corner. Sane with our freedom too

Skmoda:
Funny as hell....

stonemasonn:
It's the reason southern governors are insisting on power shifting back to the south, that's the only way corrections can be made. As for now the south is losing in all front.
The attack on Ibarapa land by customs had nothing to do with rice smuggling, it was about the suspicion of arms movement.

BKayy:
Christianity in Africa is a scam.
Anybody sitting to be killed because of Christianity is a big fool.
Either convert to Islam or defend yourself

Tomilola360:
get a life. Nigeria and Nigerians do not need this your hate talks.

A slow-motion war is under way in Africa’s most populous country. It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality. And the world has hardly noticed.

A Nigerian Pentecostal Christian, director of a nongovernmental organization that works for mutual understanding between Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims, alerted me to it. “Have you heard of the Fulani?” he asked at our first meeting, in Paris, speaking the flawless, melodious English of the Nigerian elite. The Fulani are an ethnic group, generally described as shepherds from mostly Muslim Northern Nigeria, forced by climate change to move with their herds toward the more temperate Christian South. They number 14 million to 15 million in a nation of 191 million.

Among them is a violent element. “They are Islamic extremists of a new stripe,” the NGO director said, “more or less linked with Boko Haram,” the sect that became infamous for the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Christian girls in the state of Borno. “I beg you,” he said, “come and see for yourself.” Knowing of Boko Haram but nothing of the Fulani, I accept.

The 2019 Global Terrorism Index estimates that Fulani extremists have become deadlier than Boko Haram and accounted for the majority of the country’s 2,040 documented terrorist fatalities in 2018. To learn more about them, I travel to Godogodo, in the center of the country, where I meet a beautiful woman named Jumai Victor, 28. On July 15, she says, Fulani extremists stormed into her village on long-saddle motorcycles, three to a bike, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” They torched houses and killed her four children before her eyes.

When her turn came and they noticed she was pregnant, a discussion ensued. Some didn’t want to see her belly slit, so they compromised by cutting up and amputating her left arm with a machete. She speaks quickly and emotionlessly, staring into space as if she lost her face along with her arm. The village chief, translating for her, chokes up. Tears stream down his cheeks when she finishes her account.

I venture north to Adnan, where Lyndia David, 34, tells her story of survival. On the morning of March 15, rumors reached her village that Fulani raiders were nearby. She was dressing for church as her husband prepared to join a group of men who’d stand watch. He urged her to take refuge at her sister’s home in another village.

Her first night there, sentinels woke her with a whistle. She left the house to find flames spreading around her. Fulani surrounded her. Then she heard a voice: “Come this way, you can get through!” She did, and her putative savior leapt out of the underbrush, cut three fingers off her right hand, carved the nape of her neck with his machete, shot her, doused her body with gasoline, and lit it. She somehow survived. A few weeks later she returned to her village and learned that the raiders had leveled it the same night. Her husband was among the 72 they murdered.

The Christian Middle Belt is a land of blooming prairies that once delighted English colonizers. On the outskirts of Jos, capital of Plateau state, I visit the ruins of a burned-down church. I spot another, intact. A man emerges to yell at me in English that I don’t belong there. Stalling, I learn that he is Turkish, a member of a “religious mutual assistance group” that is opening madrassas for the daughters of Fulani.

That day I crisscross the Middle Belt. Roads are crumbled, bridges collapsed; destroyed houses cast broken shadows over tree stumps and trails of black ash and blood. Maize rots in the abandoned fields. The local Christians have been killed or are too terrorized to come out and harvest it. In the distance are clusters of white smudges—the Fulani herds grazing on the lush grass. When we approach, the armed shepherds wave us off.

The Anglican bishop of Jos, Benjamin Kwashi, has had his livestock stolen three times. During the third raid he was dragged into his room, a gun to his head. He dropped to his knees and prayed at the top of his voice until the thrumming of a helicopter drove his assailants off.

Bishop Kwashi describes the Fulani extremists’ pattern: They usually arrive at night. They are barefoot, so you can’t hear them coming unless they’re on motorcycle. Sometimes a dog sounds the alert, sometimes a sentinel. Then a terrifying stampede, whirling clouds of dust, cries of encouragement from the invaders. Before villagers can take shelter or flee, the invaders are upon them in their houses, swinging machetes, burning, pillaging, raping. They don’t kill everyone. At some point they stop, recite a verse from the Quran, round up the livestock and retreat. They need survivors to spread fear from village to village, to bear witness that the Fulani raiders fear nothing but Allah and are capable of anything.

The heads of 17 Christian communities have come to the outskirts of Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital, to meet me in a nondescript compound. Some have traveled for days in packed buses or minivans. Each arrives accompanied by a victim or two.

Here they are, an exhausted yet earnestly hopeful group of some 40 women and men, keenly aware of the moment’s gravity. One carries a USB key, another a handwritten account, a third a folder full of photos, captioned and dated. I accept these records, overwhelmed by the weight of the bearers’ hope that the world will recognize the horrors they experienced.

Taking the floor in turn, the survivors confirm the modus operandi Bishop Kwashi described, each adding an awful detail. The mutilated cadavers of women. A mute man commanded to deny his faith, then cut up with a machete until he screams. A girl strangled with the chain of her crucifix.

Westerners here depict the Fulani extremists as an extended, rampant Boko Haram. An American humanitarian says the Fulani recruit volunteers to serve internships in Borno State, where Boko Haram is active. Another says Boko Haram “instructors” have been spotted in Bauchi, another northeastern state, where they are teaching elite Fulani militants to handle more-sophisticated weapons that will replace their machetes. Yet whereas Boko Haram are confined to perhaps 5% of Nigerian territory, the Fulani terrorists operate across the country.

Villagers west of Jos show the weapons they use to defend themselves: bows, slings, daggers, sticks, leather whips, spears. Even these meager arms have to be concealed. When the army comes through after the attacks, soldiers tell the villagers their paltry weapons are illegal and confiscate them.

Several times I note the proximity of a military base that might have been expected to protect civilians. But the soldiers didn’t come; or, if they did, it was only after the battle; or they claimed not to have received the texted SOS calls in time, or not to have had orders to respond, or to have been delayed on an impassable road.

“What do you expect?” our driver asks as we take off in a convoy for his burned-down church. “The army is in league with the Fulani. They go hand in hand.” After one attack, “we even found a dog tag and a uniform.”

“It’s hardly surprising,” says Dalyop Salomon Mwantiri, one of the few lawyers in the region who dare to represent victims. “The general staff of the Nigerian army is a Fulani. The whole bureaucracy is Fulani.”

So is President Muhammadu Buhari. In April 2016 Mr. Buhari ordered security forces to “secure all communities under attack by herdsmen.” In July 2019 a spokesman for the president said in a statement: “No one has the right to ask anyone or group to depart from any part of the country, whether North, South, East or West.”

Most Christians I meet express disgust at the vague language suggesting culpability on both sides. Their stories tend to validate claims of the government’s complicity. In Riyom district, three displaced Nigerians and a soldier were gunned down this June as they attempted to return home. The villagers know the assailants. Police identified them. Everyone knows they took refuge in a nearby village. But there they are under the protection of the ardos, a local emir. No arrests occurred.

Village chief Sunday Abdu recounts another example, a 2017 attack on Nkiedonwhro. This time the military came to warn villagers of a threat. They ordered the women and children to take shelter in a school. But after the civilians complied, a soldier fired a shot in the air. A second shot sounded in the distance, seemingly in response. Minutes later, after the soldiers had departed, the assailants appeared, went directly to the classroom, and fired into the cowering group, killing 27.

I also meet some Fulani—the first time by chance. Traveling by road near a river bed, we come on a checkpoint consisting of a rope stretched across the road, a hut and two armed men. “No passage,” says one, wearing a jacket on which are sewn badges in Arabic and Turkish. “This is Fulani land, the holy land of Usman dan Fodio, our king—and you whites can’t come in.” The conquests of dan Fodio (1754-1817) led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate over the Fula and Hausa lands.

The second encounter is on the outskirts of Abuja. Driving toward the countryside, we reach a village unlike the others we’ve seen in the Christian zone. There’s a ditch, and behind it a hedge of bushes and pilings. The place seems closed off from the world. From huts emerge a swarm of children and their mothers, the women covered from head to foot.

It’s a village of Fulani nomads who carried out a tiny, localized Fulanization after the Christians cleared out. “What are you doing here?” demands an adolescent boy wearing a T-shirt adorned with a swastika. “Are you taking advantage of the fact that it’s Friday, and we’re in the mosque, to come spy on our women? The Quran forbids that!” When I ask if wearing a swastika isn’t also contrary to the Quran, he looks puzzled, then launches into a feverish tirade. He says he knows he’s wearing “a German insignia,” but he believes that “all men are brothers,” except for the “bad souls” who “hate Muslims.”

Later I encounter Fulani near Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, which is in the south on the Gulf of Guinea. North of the city is an open-air market where Fulani sell their livestock. I am with three young Christians, survivors of a Middle Belt massacre who live in a camp for displaced persons. They pretend to be cousins buying an animal for a family feast. As they negotiate over a white-horned pygmy goat, I look for Fulani willing to talk.

Most have come from Jigawa state, on the border with Niger, crossing the country south in trucks to bring their stock here. Although I learn little about their trip, they eagerly express their joy in being here, on the border of this contemptible promised land, where they expect to “dip the Quran in the sea.”

There are “too many Christians in Lagos,” says Abadallah, who looks to be in his 40s. “The Christians are dogs and children of dogs. You say Christians. To us they are traitors. They adopted the religion of the whites. There is no place here for friends of the whites, who are impure.” A postcard vendor joins the group and offers me portraits of Osama bin Laden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He agrees the Christians will eventually leave and Nigeria will be “free.”

Some professional disinformers will try to reduce the violence here to one of the “interethnic wars” that inflame Africa. They’ll likely find, here and there, acts of reprisal against the Fula and Hausa. But as my trip concludes, I have the terrible feeling of being carried back to Rwanda in the 1990s, to Darfur and South Sudan in the 2000s.

Will the West let history repeat itself in Nigeria? Will we wait, as usual, until the disaster is done before taking notice? Will we stand by as international Islamic extremism opens a new front across this vast land, where the children of Abraham have coexisted for so long?

Mr. Lévy is author of “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World” (Henry Holt, 2019). This article was translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy.

TripleOh7:
Nice portrait.

I understand that you think white people are gods.

We who live in their various countries know that they are mere mortals like you and I and nothing special there.

Kurukuzio:
������. I can see u are pained. Because he decimated the ESN����

theTranslator:
We are the giant in Music

olaolaking:
You said Aba yari is a thief and corrupt politician. You also said fools know that is true. But you know it. Meaning that you are fool. I only translated what you said by yourself to you. Why are you so dull? Son of a b*tch!

Notasyouthink:
So you believe oyigboupdate aka udele n'eri ozu lies?? If so you can as well believe that I am the father of jesus.

Nonsense!

olaolaking:
Since you know this, it means you are a fool. Na you talk am by ursef

Tyrants tend to disarm their citizens before they unleash slaughter upon them. They use state power to confiscate the private weapons of their people to render them vulnerable and defenceless. That started happening in earnest in Nigeria in early 2018 when the Police chief, IGP Ibrahim Idris, directed state Commissioners of Police to immediately disarm militias in their states. By “militias” he really meant community vigilante groups and traditional hunters. This directive was met with much public condemnation, but their objections were ignored. Disturbingly, IGP Idris, a Fulani, was quite silent on whether his directive would apply to Fulani herdsmen known to carry sophisticated weapons, namely AK47s, and accused of killing indigenous peoples across the country.

Police chief Idris had made it clear which document had empowered him to issue his directive. It was the imposed and illegitimate 1999 Constitution. Idris had said,

“… No State government in this country has the responsibility to approve prohibited firearms to any Nigerian under any guise.

And I think it is the responsibility of CP’s of commands to put close watch to the activities of some of these governors that are arming individuals against the laws of this country.

All of us are aware about these prohibited firearms.

You cannot give approval to any individual to own a pistol. You cannot give an approval to any individual to own an AK-47, rifle.

These are prohibited weapons and only the government has that authority to give that approval…”

(Source: “Police IG, Idris Declares War On Vigilantes, Militias In Nigeria”, Daily Post, 02/02/2018)

We know that several genocides had been preceded by gun control and gun confiscation. The Ottoman Empire, today’s Turkey, spent two years killing Armenians, a mainly Christian people after first disarming them to make them defenceless. Armenians needed government permission in order to carry guns, and were “rigorously prohibited from possessing firearms.”

Similarly, Jews in Nazi Germany had been ordered to hand in their guns. Once disarmed and defenceless, Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) took place. Nazi mobs attacked Jews, killed many, and destroyed their businesses and Synagogues. Jews were blamed, and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps. Life conditions worsened for Jews in Germany as Hitler’s “Final Solution” of genocide was carried out.

In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Hutus began arming themselves and observers could see that something sinister and deadly was about to happen. When the time came, Hutus started to slaughter the mainly unarmed Tutsi civilians. In just 100 days between 800,000 – 1 million Tutsis were massacred.

In Nigeria, various foreign observers have analysed what is going on, and their views coincide with what Nigerians can see is happening, and are experiencing. Using just one example, in December 2019, renown French philosopher- writer Bernard-Henri Lévy having visited Nigeria warned that, “A slow-motion war is under way... It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality.” He described the perpetrators as “Fulani raiders” and “Fulani extremists” in his article titled, “The New War Against Africa’s Christians” published in the respected Wall Street Journal. He mentions “Fulanization” where a village originally belonging to indigenous Christians had been taken over by nomadic Fulani, who now claimed the land as theirs.

To appreciate the Fulani menace to Nigerian communities, here is more from Lévy:

“…Westerners here depict the Fulani extremists as an extended, rampant Boko Haram. An American humanitarian says the Fulani recruit volunteers to serve internships in Borno State, where Boko Haram is active. Another says Boko Haram “instructors” have been spotted in Bauchi, another northeastern state, where they are teaching elite Fulani militants to handle more-sophisticated weapons that will replace their machetes. Yet whereas Boko Haram are confined to perhaps 5% of Nigerian territory, the Fulani terrorists operate across the country.

Villagers west of Jos show the weapons they use to defend themselves: bows, slings, daggers, sticks, leather whips, spears. Even these meager arms have to be concealed. When the army comes through after the attacks, soldiers tell the villagers their paltry weapons are illegal and confiscate them.

Several times I note the proximity of a military base that might have been expected to protect civilians. But the soldiers didn’t come; or, if they did, it was only after the battle; or they claimed not to have received the texted SOS calls in time, or not to have had orders to respond, or to have been delayed on an impassable road…”

What Lévy describes has been corroborated by witnesses and surviving victims, plus by several UK and USA government reports and hearings. The countrywide killings by armed Fulani herdsmen and Islamist terrorists is happening when Nigeria has a Fulani majority in government leadership positions and they head essential national civil service agencies. Critically, the heads of all security services are Fulani. Not surprisingly, the Fulani-led central government denies all accusations of ongoing genocide. However, leaders whose people are facing the slaughter such as retired Brigadier General David Mark (former Senator) and retired Air Commodore Jonah Jang (former Senator) have insisted that a genocide is happening after the massacres of Agatu, and Barkin-Ladi respectively. In addition, former defence minister and retired Lieutenant General T.Y. Danjuma called the killings "ethnic cleansing," and charged Nigerians, especially Christians to defend themselves, saying, "If you depend on the armed forces to protect you, you will all die."

More recently, Newsweek’s article of 21st June 2021, titled, “Why the West Ignores the Nigerian Genocide” stated,

“…The Fulani are cattle herdsmen working with Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group intent on ridding Nigeria of Christians.”

That assertion matches up with the Fulani agenda declared by Bello, a Fulani and Premier of the Northern Region in 1960, when he said that Nigeria would be an “estate” of the Fulani and the south would be a “conquered territory” whose people would never be able to control their future. The 1999 Constitution, a forgery imposed on Nigerians and with suspect origins, does just that. It empowers the stated Fulani agenda, and is being used to execute genocide against the indigenous peoples. That has been made easy by using the 1999 Constitution to disarm the people, since only the security agencies can carry arms and ammunition. Under Buhari, a Fulani, all heads of security agencies are also Fulani.

Nigerians must obviously repel the Fulani, settlers and immigrants who are intent on killing them in order to grab their lands. Indigenous peoples of the South and Middle Belt formed an Alliance, the NINAS Movement so will ACTIVATE their right to armed self-defence, denied them in the imposed illegitimate 1999 Constitution. Having already Repudiated that Constitution by Declaration of Constitutional Force Majeure on 16th December 2020, the right to armed self-defence is achieved by insisting that preparations to general elections in 2023 be stopped since the peoples no longer tolerate living under the conditions spelled out in that Constitution, and will not renew its life which is what elections do.

Ndidi Uwechue is a British citizen with Igbo heritage from the Lower Niger Bloc. She is a retired Metropolitan (London) Police Officer, she is a signatory to the Constitutional Force Majeure, and she writes from Abuja.

http://saharareporters.com/2021/07/17/indigenous-peoples-nigeria-can-stop-fulani-led-genocide-against-them-right-now-ndidi

2023NaijaVoter:
Will the 'British Legal Team' relocate to Abuja, Nigeria when the trial starts?

Do they have a license to practice law in Nigeria?

Who will pay their expenses and legal fees?

What has MNK done for the UK to garner these lawyers time and attention, that is unless he's an undercover British agent working in their behalf to politically destabilise the former colony?

Does MNK pay taxes in the UK?

How does the The British Government feel about dual citizen bail jumping fugitives?

oilyngbati:
1. The Nigerian army has not totally eradicated boko haram because the army is dominated by northerners, Hausa/fulani to be precise, so the zeal with which they’re fighting boko haram won’t be as much

So don’t misconstrue this as weakness and think the army won’t go full scale on you if you engage in any nonesense.

The decimation of your ESN/unknown gunmen by the police, not even the army should have been a concern to you.

You should be wondering how your ‘mighty’ ESN/unknown gunmen was eradicated within a few weeks by Abba Kyari and his boys on the order of the president.

Also boko haram has advantage of having a sitting president who is from the north and won’t want to totally destroy the region because of some few terrorists. Your case will be different,,,, the military is made up of predominantly northerners, president is a northerner, hence your region will be totally destroyed. These are basic things that your iponk brain can’t comprehend.

2. Stop hiding behind Igbo tag to perpetrate your evils in Ipob. Ipob issues are different from Igbo issues. Your issues are a one conman affair, nnamdi cownu’s.

3. I never made any threat to Igbo lives in the north as I’m Igbo myself, but one whose brain is very intact and not sold or beholding to ibini ukpabi of the terrorist nnamdi cownu.

akanke79:
I must tell you,Lawyers are the same everywhere in the world,it is all about the money.The British govt will pay them handsomely.

akanke79:
Lawyers trying to cash out.

OyigboUpdate:
GodHatesBigots KillMNKnow

I see u both share your views o. They want to kill this popular IPOB man Prince Darlington as he is mentioning names of Cordinators stealing their money

Captain8:
igbo 2000 soldiers that could not even last 1month before they finished them recently..
ibo cant fight any war...

Tinubuadvocate:
Your parents will be thinking they have son.

Captain8:
igbos should stop the followings...
1)force people into biafra cult...
2)land grabbing..
3)not knowing territory..
4)provoking south..
5)baby factory..
6)drug pushing..
7)dominating attitude..
and see your lives will never remain thesame

HedwigesMaduro:
More like the pig of Africa.