Yoruba, Igboho and the Road to 2023
By Aminu Alhassan Kuba
I used to think that the South West was somehow better than their neighbors to the east. I had admired people like Tinubu and Fashola.
They did very well as governors. They continued doing well at higher level. They occasionally spoke well outside their home.
Some of the traditional leadership also showed some level of sophistication and enlightenment.
This is despite the fact that the press from that part of our country belongs to the lowest level of filth anywhere in the world as far as journalism and its ethics are concerned.
Then Igboho happened. He led a mob on a killing spree. First, against a hapless, helpless, defenseless and vulnerable herders. Then against Hausas and other northerners in Shasha.
Tinubu, Fashola, the Ooni, the Alaafin, the bookish tongue twisting english speaking pretenders to human rights, the ubiquitous high faluting lousy lawyers, the fire brand outrage expressing journalists…., All went to sleep.
Even religious fire spitting professors like Ishaq Akintola that always jumped in defense of Islam either went suddenly quiet or found some reason to rationalize the broadway massacre of babies, women, men and the aged.
Media houses lionized the murderer and called him activist. Newspapers like The Nation owned by Tinubu provided ample space for the defense of the murderous thug.
They went on as if they were the Hutus in the 1990s Rwanda or members of Slobodan Milosovic army in Serbia against the Bosniaks. They just carried on.
Many of them, perhaps majority, Muslims looked on while fellow Nigerians. Fellow Muslims. Were being murdered in broad daylight.
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Their governors, senators, political, religious, traditional opinion and everything leaders had neither words of consolation nor remorse for such pure unprovoked heinous acts of violence by a most despicable thug towards those whose lives and means of livelihood were so brutally terminated.
Instead of rising in unison to condemn Igboho or at least pretend to be sorry that such evil happened in their domain, and by a vagabond amongst them, they began to invite him to parties, to meetings, to political conclaves.
Even a nobel laureate wrote a piece about cows to balm the perfidy. He couldn’t mention the owner because he was a fellow tribesman.
And come 2023, these same fellows want us to not only vote for them but convince the very people they couldn’t protect and empathize with to vote for them to rule over us. How they want us to do this is what I am trying to understand.
In 1999, when there was no killer herdsmen narrative, when there was no kidnapping for ransom, when there was no farmers-herders violence, when there was no Boko Haram, when there was no religious violence…, We were asked to vote for Obasanjo..and by the time he was done with us, every one of the above mentioned evils had become firmly rooted in our land.
And when he was finally forced to leave, he made sure he left behind a combination of a terminally ill man and below average intelligence chronic drunkard at the helm. By the time they were finished with us, Arewa had become the global capital of violence.
Now that we’re at another cross road, I think it’s going to be just plain stupid to yet again offer our heads up for the guillotine.
If you want to understand why, see how Tinubu’s social media goons are reacting to Sunday Igboho’s threats. So it’s not like they didn’t know what Sunday represented, they just didn’t think we were human enough to deserve their sympathy or even empathy.
Therefore, come 2023, let democracy win. Let Arewa be bold enough to present their candidate for election. If this should mean the end of the mistake of 1914, so be it. Only a fool gets bitten twice by same snake from the same hole.
Aminu Alhassan Kuba writes from Kaduna
