Nigeria as a country has never had enemies worst than its own people who refuse to reason beyond geographical, religious or ethnic boundaries. The recent unwelcome happenings across the country have never been more ugly in Nigeria than now, from the dreaded Boko Haram sect unleashing their terrorism in the Northeast to the marauding bandits in the Northwest kidnapping and mayheming people in their villages at will, coupled with serious criminal elements among herdsmen that are creating discord with automatic weapons in the Southwest, to the people waiting like time bomb in the East parading as Biafra.
Literary speaking, Nigeria is on fire and unfortunately issues like the second #EndSARS protest is also coming at this point acting more of a fuel to the ongoing crises than a solution. Our situation reminds me of a story of three thieves by our IRS teacher in secondary school, three friends agreed to coordinate a robbery and get a lot of money together, according to them it would be more protective since they would be watching each other’s back and give a hand whenever the need arises. They agreed to share money gotten in the robbery equally.
However, after a successful outing of their robbery in which they got a lot of money, the two friends sidelined the last person and sent him to buy them food to eat before sharing the money. Unfortunately, he added poison to the food he bought anticipating them to eat and die so he could have all the money for himself, little did he know that his friends have also planned to kill him on return to divide the money between two of them. And they beat him to death after he brought the food, the first person having been stronger also decided to kill the second one to have all the money alone instead of sharing it, but after murdering the other guy he decided to eat the food before taking the money alone, and he died from the food poisoning.
We must remember at this point, the story of a father who shared sticks to his children and instructed them to break it, which they successfully did, but surprisingly none of them could be able to break the sticks put together, it means we are stronger together and that the strength of unity can even break an iron. If we seek to destroy each other we might all die but when we all unite we become unbeatable.
Consider this three people and the children as Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, the truth is we all have no other country than Nigeria,and by virtue of the crises we have on our table as a country at the moment, we already have more than enough to deal with. No one among us can kill another and live in peace, we are at the time to decide either to live in peace or die, we must leverage our commonalities and understand our difference to be able to live in peace.
Martin Luther King has never been more right in our contexts than today when he said “we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” This is the time for us to unite and identify our common enemy as a country and people bounded together by fate and destiny, our enemies are not Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa for that matter, we must put aside our primitive thinking and wake up from the long time slumber that blocked our vision from seeing our true enemies spread across all ethnic extractions and regions, there are predators who are always ready with their fangs wide open to bite upon any slide opportunities that present itself.
This issue originally started when Ondo state decided to give all herdsmen notice to leave the state, despite agreeing that there are bad elements among herdsmen, it’s also the same thing in all other tribes in the country. It’s a wrong decision that is clearly guided by tribalism and all this Ibadan killings are simply a manifestation of that disastrous decision. Instead of giving quit notice to all the Fulani, they could have sought to collaborate with peaceful Fulani in the community to identify the criminals and bring them to justice, but sending an entire tribe out of a state or region speaks more of a regional issue than safety. The newly formed security outfit Amotekun is also not helping matters as they are already overstepping their bounds and even confronting police officers in the states. We have Fulani and Hausa people who have been living there for more than 60 years and this people were still chased out for the crimes of few people bearing there tribes.
Government especially of Oyo state must as a matter of urgency launch an investigation to find the perpetrators of this madness, for an example to be made out of them in the court of law and disclose all plans of compensation to the properties vandalised. I believe that all Nigerians have equal rights in the shores of their country regardless of their origin, the value for human lives should never be selective. People must know that taking the law into their hands under whatever guise has consequences, and that government would not fold it arms while some criminals instigated by hatred and guided by tribalism are destabilizing all pillars of peace.
For those people thinking of going into full scale war, I want to use this medium and point them to the Rwandan genocide. It started by empowering some tribes in the pretenses of self defense. The case of South Sudan is not a different story. They are still fighting and killing themselves even after getting the much desired said freedom, the current realities of Nigeria is questioning our ability to learn from our history and the mistakes of many countries, the value of human live is far more expensive than any tribe or religion talkless of geography, only the living goes to mosque or church and speaks in Yoruba or Hausa.
We must avoid general labelling of particular tribe or region as criminals, scammers or terrorists. We have reached a crossroads to decide for our self “peace or violence” for me I have chosen peace because I have seen what wars can do to people here in Maiduguri, and I still see on daily basis how life in internally displaced persons camps looks like, not even the whole world can handle an explosion of more than 200 million IDPs not to speak of our neighbours so we are on our own, let’s go for peace.
Gambo, a program associate, Centre for Advocacy, Transparency and Accountability Initiative, Maiduguri, Nigeria, writes via @Musagambo143 on Twitter.
