By Young Radikum
History teaches us that empires rise and fall. Inevitably.
Usually they rise on the ashes of an older empire, and in the due course of time, they form the hearthstones of a new era, for the better or for the worse.
Things would begin to unravel not long after the empire had attained its peak - reached its apogee, as the history teachers liked to say. Next there would be a rebellion in one of the outlying provinces, to which the king would despatch an expeditionary force.
The defeat of that expeditionary force would send shock waves all around, revealing the rot, the drift, in the king's court. Of course, more provinces would rebel. And the king's court, blinded by ineptitude, corruption, nepotism, the old ways of doing things, which produces an inborn, blinkered arrogance, would have no useful answers to the unraveling of the kingdom.
So it is with the Fulani empire in Nigeria.
We learn through history that Fulani herders began moving eastward from their Futa Jalon homeland in Guinea into the area today called Nigeria from about the 15th century. With the Niger River drawing its source from the Futa highlands, it made sense to follow its banks full of pasture to wherever they led.
On arrival in what was Hausaland, the Fulani were outsiders, content to roam the bush with their herd. Until some of them picked up Islam, which had been practiced by the Hausas and the Kanuri for several hundred years before then.
Religion, always a perfect tool for empire builders, became the pretext for some ambitious Fulani to make their move. The newcomers to the religion decided that the old practitioners, who retained a lot of their ancestral traditions with Islam, weren't practicing the religion well enough, and needed to be purified with a jihad (a religious war).
That 1804 revolution, which led to the fall of the old Hausa city states, also marked the start of the Fulani empire in Nigeria, wearing the toga of the Sokoto Caliphate we know today.
As nomads without a settled culture, the best they could do was to drive their new subjects as they drove their cattle, putting them constantly under the whip, and ruthlessly exploited by a ruling class that equated all their iniquities with the will of Allah. The cruelty was so outstanding, as the writer Abubakar Adam Ibrahim noted in a recent essay, that the Hausa masses rejoiced when the British defeated the Fulani in 1903. A key difference, they testified, was that where the British paid labourers for work done, the Fulani rulers didn't. They just took whatever they wanted and paid with cruelty.
Being feudal and resistant to change, the British preferred an alliance with them, reasoning correctly that their conservatism will slow, if not stall, Nigeria's (nay Africa’s) development. They've played this retrogressive role faithfully. The ruling Fulani elite realize that as long as they keep their subjects ignorant of life outside their own interpretation of the Koran, so long would their reign last. How much they wish to export that to the rest of the country can only be imagined.
What's more, this mass of humanity, thoroughly indoctrinated to think of their oppressors as their heroes, was also weaponized by their tormentors. They turn them into mobs at short notice to deploy against opponents in the competition for national resources. They also provide the rulers with block votes at elections.
History will note that nurturing this mass of poor and uneducated, unskilled people through the almajiri system of street kids, ultimately proved a double-edged sword that hastened the fall of the Fulani empire.
Nigeria has for the past decade been in the grip of a deadly Islamist insurgency by militants who, like Dan Fodio before them, seek to purify a decadent elite on their way to realizing their power ambitions. It's noteworthy that both the Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf and his successor and actualizer, Abubakar Shekau, were products of the almajiri system. As long as that pool of street children exist, there'll be no end to the violence sweeping northern Nigeria and infecting the rest of the country.
Buhari has so far in his current reign acted like a man anointed to hasten the end of Nigeria and the Fulani empire.
He was among a crop of Fulani military and political elite that rightly read the January 1966 coup as the closest anyone came to ending their rule in Nigeria. Buhari and other Fulani elite naturally derived a lot of phobias from that event and its aftermath. The Igbos in particular, with their individuality and entrepreneurship, intensely feel the drag, the incubus of Fulani elite misrule. The Fulani feudalists, in turn, see the Igbo capitalist as the biggest threat to their unearned privileges.
Biafra as Bogeyman
It's not surprising that Buhari frequently recalls his role in the war to keep Nigeria one for the Fulani. And to raise his hackles all you have to say is Biafra! His entire career was built on the model of "we" versus "them" where people not of the same creed and ethnicity are barely acknowledged as human.
After he toppled a democratic regime in 1983 because its trajectory appeared against his ethnic and religious interests, he had to be relieved of leadership lest he ran the country aground. Repackaged as a saint by desperate politicians doubting his staying power and hoping he would stumble and drop the reins for them to pick up, he has shocked them by staying on to much deleterious effect.
One of the first things Buhari did on taking power in 2015 was to hold a lecture at the Lugard Hall in Kaduna where he announced that the "north is back." Back to what? Back to power, the power to share the spoils of power. Not back to lead Nigeria to economic productivity and development, but to sit at the head of the table and share out the product of the sweat of others like all feudal lords love to do.
By then oil had flowed for more than 50 years, and more was expected to flow. There had been an interregnum of Olusegun Obasanjo's rule that was to end in 2007 but was extended to 2015 after Umaru Yar'Adua's brief stay in office. So the north was back in 2015 to doing what it knew best - sharing and taking the lion share to fritter away.
Then the unexpected factor immediately doomed the regime: the collapse of crude oil prices. It was never planned for, never anticipated, yet it was the reality that faced the regime and immediately spooked it. The Buhari regime has tried to borrow itself out of the mire but is sinking more into the quagmire.
Yet he remains oblivious of his fate as the destroyer. Not minding, he's gone ahead to unfurl his narrow-minded agenda: barefaced Fulani/ Muslim supremacy. He has run the most nepotistic government in the history of the country, appointed only northern Muslims to the helm of all key security commands. They have in turn overseen a national proliferation of a Fulani militia that has unleashed violence across the land without any official censor, in the name of grazing their cattle. He elevates his Fulani people and other northern Muslims as supreme, with others as mere vassals to be subjugated by force. He has zero faith in the constitution he swore to uphold and undermines it with a cynical, gap-toothed relish.
The consequence is that most non-Muslim northerners and the rest of the country have lost confidence in the Buhari regime. Conspiracy theories, made credible by the government's disposition, have spread of a Fulani, Muslim plot to takeover Nigeria. The emergence of Amotekun militia in the southwest and a copycat in the southeast, represent open repudiation of the sectional leanings of the Buhari government.
Even more serious is the emboldening of separatist groups and the sprouting of mini-insurgencies across the length and breadth of Nigeria, stretching the security forces thin. In the military, a corruption industry, discrimination and incompetence have ensured that the trillions spent on defence and security build private estates rather than buy weapons and feed troops.
And the national debt keeps piling up, to the extent that 83 percent of revenue, at the last count, was being spent on debt servicing alone. With a sluggish economy, a predominantly youthful and restive population, managed by an anachronistic regime, it's not hard to see the troubles that lie ahead for the Fulani/Muslim rulers. And as each day unfolds, it's getting more obvious that time is not on their side.
In high places confusion reigns.
Buhari’s administration, like the man, is so stiff-necked that it can't even look up to see a falling roof over their head. That's what happens when empires are about to fall, like the accursed dog, they can't even smell the damned shit.
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