The Justice Ministry needs a better head than the current Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, especially in a nether Nigerian universe of shifting political, social and security paradigms. South West, my hometown, is now the epicenter of a new, explosive and racy geopolitical struggle between saints and sinners, war and peace, freedom and lockdown, wisdom and foolishness, good breeding and barbarism, tact and stupidity.
Coming out of a conservative silo, the theocratic Malami issued a commanding “fatwa” on one of the shining symbols of the triumphal progress of the South Westerners – the creation of Western Nigeria Security Network, called Amotekun. The AG, in a moment of kinship loyalty to his caliphate Fulani paymasters, issued a statement that declared Amotekun an illegal security outfit. His rebranding of Amotekun as an illegal structure has been generating a measure of scorn, anger and derision worldwide. Malami is exercising his bragging right but sadly against the wrong tribe.
Is Malami’s gaffe just another blast from this regime to keep us distracted?
Since we live in a political space of impolite statements, orders, command, control and pronouncements, Malami’s lawyerly declaration is part of the anti-Southerners purge going on under President Muhammadu Buhari government.
To declare a destiny-driven, security arrangement that has solidarised the Yoruba people as illegal, precisely shows the index of how determined the Fulani internal colonisers are prepared to place the Yoruba in a self-confining cage of brutal domination, punishment, repression, control and tyranny. Malami must be told loud and clear that Amotekun is a creation from the pages of our undimmed memories. In those memories are the ghosts of merciless kidnappers who seize our people for ransom. In those memories are the embers of well-armed Fulani herdsmen on a daily nocturnal mission to balkanize the Yorubaland.
In those memories are the illegal cattle rustlers from the North foraging deep into our farms and leaving behind sorrow, tears and blood. Amotekun is an answer to the highway bandits wearing military camouflage who extort, harass, intimidate, rob, rape and kill Yoruba in their geopolitical space. These are part of the birth pangs before Amotekun was conceived and born. Amotekun is meant to provide the rational argument for the protection of lives and properties of the Yoruba tribe which is the number one requirement of any government the world over. Its creation is encouraging hope, peace of mind and a sense of distinct Yoruba identity in a turbulent Nigerian state of permanent insecurity, horror and sudden death. Nigerians, under the current security structure, have seen clear evidence of wasted lives.
Therefore to proclaim Amotekun as an illegal security outfit, Malami and his Caliphate Fulani enforcers are clearly hiding a vulnerability which is yet to be made public. Before the election of President Mohammadu Buhari for his second term, the Yoruba were the caliphate Fulani dancing partners but after the election, the Fulani are now incrementally redesigning their dance routines accordingly.
Politics under this government has been reduced to clannish interest, cabal interest, nepotism and authoritarian soundbites. Under this president, the tenets of true democracy is in a slow motion collapse. He promised to shake the foundation of the stubborn centralism and elitism of our federal machinery and political culture, but that idealism has been abandoned. He promised to retool the social strains of an increasingly unequal and imbalanced federal character, but that idea is also buried. Today, he has made the federal character more moslem, alien, imposing, repressive, ethnicized, unequal and totally Northern Muslims.
However, it has to be documented that Nigeria is the most backward federal union in the whole world both in religion, politics, economic and tribal terms. Through decades of political deceit, the caliphate Fulani has been able to construct a seemingly immovable lexicon of dominant identity around Fulani jihadist nationalism. They are helped, encouraged, and sustained in this dominant orthodoxies by proxies in the south who, through blind greed, soulless selfish interest and political ambition continue to sell their people as chattel slaves to caliphate Fulani overlords. One of these ugly, fainthearted slave sellers has been ‘jagabanising’ to and from Abuja in order to win the heart and mind of the Aso Rock imperial matador who possesses the right and might to anoint our next looter leader.
This bullion man is yet to understand that his influence has been whittled down under the mathematical calculation of Buhari.
I am ashamed as a true born Ibadan man from orita merin and of the valiant Yoruba tribe each time I watch our spineless leaders go to Abuja to receive the scraps thrown at them. It is a shame that we have been neglecting and sleeping on our potentials to become a great Oduduwa nation.
Amotekun is all about the politics of securitization over our people, forests, cultures, farm, highways, churches and homes. The ongoing bloodletting through brutal banditry and kidnappings is evidence of sustained failure of our regular security outfit. It is not an outright call for flag-waving OPC and Oduduwans to seize their moment. We cannot democratize security. It is an emotive and partisan thing in a country like Nigeria where all the federal security agencies have been consciously and consistently been turned into Northern tools to coerce, dominate, oppress, contain and harass the rest of us – the Southerners. The sad trajectory of living under centuries of sustained Fulani intimidation has to stop. Yoruba are not about to divide Nigeria through Amotekun. That will feed into conflict and confrontation. That will lead to a prolong culture of radical disruption.
Amotekun, I must calibrate further, is a symbol of raw cry of social protest against senseless killings of Yoruba sons and daughters. It is not an idealistic bullshit but an answer to a yawning need – the need to rescue, protect, preserve and celebrate life rather than death and destruction. It is created to plug the gap in the security architecture of Western Nigeria.
Amotekun is the earthly, practicality of six Yoruba governors meant to build a security barricade against unwanted, uninvited and wandering Fulani rogues from the caliphate North who readily come to steal, kill and destroy Yoruba homeland and her resources. Habit die hard you might say. Everything from the North to Southerners is always couched in military diktat, command, threat, warning, and veto for all the perceived cowards and their pacifist-obedient leaders who must succumb or lose political and financial patronage of the caliphate Fulani.
For instance, as we journey backward to reenact the horror of the civil war through the ‘Never Again’ conversation co-hosted by Prof. Pat Utomi and Prof. Wole Soyinka, the commander in chief, in conforming to the dominant paradigm, warned the organisers to ‘watch’ their language. Pray what informed such stentorian remonstration from President Buhari!!! President Buhari is blundering from one bad decision into another. His administration is not moving us to a happy unity but into future trouble.
Worse, the caliphate Fulani’s mob department called Arewa Youth Consultative Forum, in a moment of psychiatric seizure, issued a veto and gave six elected Yoruba governors to dismantle Amotekun or war. Jokers like Dr. Junaid Muhammed and Saleh Alhassan, the secretary to Miyetti Allah cattle breeders are jittery over Amotekun and the prospect of one of their colonies – the South West – absconding. Meanwhile, Hisbah, Civilian JTF and other tacky security outfits in the North are still standing strong, immovable and untouchable. Jokers!!!
The South West must now be strong and courageous. The stakes are too high to create more room for naivety. The governors must stand together in unity to lead, protect and preserve the Yoruba nation from nomadic barbarians with AK-47 rifles. We do not need to fall on our knees in groveling obedience to caliphate Fulani dictation because of humble crumbs from their table.
Amotekun must go beyond sloganeering and concretise itself as a further evidence of our genius. Radicalised and violent Fulani Jihadism in Nigeria is constantly mutating, and it is forever seeking more fallen lives. This reflects our unpredictable reality: the regular security forces cannot contain jihadists’ adaptability. The Fulani caliphate jihadists should stop branding a region that wanted to secure its people as deviants. It is annoying and provocative.
The rules of security of lives and property are changing. The timing of Amotekun is perfect. Security issues will occupy us for generations, not even decades, and this, sadly, is the enveloping truth we all need to confront. Amotekun is a security refuge for the Yoruba humanity but if forced, it could as well morph into an infinite symbol of defiance against caliphate Fulani aggression, arrogance, dominance and unmerited veto power. Malami veto against Amotekun is obscene and it shows Fulani caliphate ugly audacity.
. tajutijani@hotmail.com.
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