2027, Northern politicians and Terrorism financing
By Femi Orebe
Some northerners are beginning to sing about how they led Nigeria to its insecurity cul de sac
Six Nigerians – all Northerners – crowd-funded and transferred $782,000 to Boko Haram.
They were all jailed in the UAE only for President Buhari’s Attorney – General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, now an ADC top gun, to dilly dally with their trial.
It is a crying shame that of all the different parts of this country, it is from the North, the least productive part of the country, that some absolutely unreflecting politicians, crazy about power – raw political power – went out of their way to import into Nigeria the terrorists that have now turned Nigeria into a living hell.
It gets even worse when it is the same Northerners who shout the loudest, accusing President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of not taming the insecurity they inflicted on the country .
The late President Mohammed Buhari had further worsened the Fulani onslaught on Nigeria when, at the Aswan Forum in Egypt on Ist January 2020, he declared that visas would now be issued at the point of entry into Nigeria, ipso facto, opening the floodgate of unregulated entry into the country by many outright murderers.
First it was Abubakar Kawu Baraje, a former Acting Chairman of nPDP who exposed these enemies of state when he told the world all they did in 2015 when Northern politicians were so keen on ousting President Goodluck Jonathan, that even top ranking Northern PDP chieftains, the likes of Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu, then Niger state governor, even of the PDP, had no qualms, whatever, in working against the very party that gave them fame and fortune.
Baraje opened up in a statement he titled: “How we brought in Fulani militias from Mali, Sierra Leaone, Senegal, others to win the 2015 election.
Therein he declared as follows:”We are not asking the right questions on how the same Fulani we have been living with suddenly turned out becoming a menace. We must also ask how they got access to guns”.
“The Fulani men wreaking havoc in the country are not the Nigerian Fulani.“The security agencies have not been open about the nature of the problem. “They have made arrests. Why haven’t they told the public who the terrorists are?”
“The Fulani causing security problems in the country today were all brought in to help facilitate victory in the 2015 Presidential election”.
“After the election, the Fulani refused to leave. I and other like minds wrote and warned those we started APC with that what is happening now was going to happen but nobody listened”.
Unfortunately, the man they helped to power – Muhammadu Buhari -was more concerned with preaching Fulani exceptionalism and enhancing Fulani hegemony by literally putting the entire apparati of government in their hands through his very skewed appointments which saw Northern Muslims completely dominate the entire gamut of Nigerian security. Under President Buhari, Fulanis had a field day.
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Fulani murderous herders, the world’s 3rd most dangerous terrorist organisation, according to the Global Terrorism Index, thus did whatever it was they wanted.
Once they refused to return to their countries after the election, it became the business of government to pay them billions of Naira through the auspices of a then state governor who would later self – confess.
Nigerians have basically kept their peace since they learnt that those allegedly funding terrorism whom Malami refused to try were now being tried under the Tinubu administration until ADC’s El Rufai messed things up well enough, accusing the Tinubu administration of hobnobbing with terrorists, feeding them – the reader will understand where El Rufai is coming from, that one of his ADC mates could no longer bear it he had to shut up his trap.
I refer here to the no less loquacious Chancellor of Baze University, Abuja, and Peter Obi’s running mate as Labour Party’s Vice- Presidential candidate in the 2023 election cycle,Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, PhD, intervened.
Nobody can better depict Baba – Ahmed’s anger than Lasisi Olagunju who we shall be quoting at some length in his
column in The Tribune this past week.
He referenced Baba- Ahmed as saying the following on a TV interview:”If Tinubu had not offended El Rufai, we would not have been hearing the secrets we hear these days; very dark secrets couched as bad, wicked allegations. First he accused the ruling APC and its government of financing bandits and terrorists as weapons of politics. Nasir said this and provoked his kinsman from Kaduna, Datti Baba-Ahmed, into making a counter appearance on the same TV platform. From Datti Baba-Ahmed, we heard what the forest heard that deafened it. The man told Channels TV’s Seun Okinbaloye on Tuesday last week that insecurity in Nigeria is “orchestrated and is political.” He said Nasir El-Rufai shouldn’t be the one crying wolf; because he belongs in the pack of the implicated wolves.
Hear him: “Do we understand the gravity of his statement?…What I am about to say is that insecurity is part of APC; insecurity has been APC’s way of getting power. Insecurity has been APC’s way of staying in power.”
He then went into accounts which I pray must not be true. He said, without mentioning names, that a former Nigerian president met with and collected huge sums of money from the late Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, to sponsor extremists in Nigeria’s North-East. Hear him: “Go back in time. Do you remember that a former Nigerian president was attacked by terrorists? It was unprecedented; never in the history of Nigeria did that happen. Why did some young men in the forest in the North-East…what business did they have (with him)? When Nigerian leaders leave power, they are liked, they are loved, they are forgiven all their errors and everything. But, this one, they followed and tried to kill him. Why did that happen?” He asked, paused and feigned crying. Then he continued: “What happened to all the donations leading up to 2015? Why did he decide to run in 2015 after crying and telling the whole world that he was no longer running? What was his link with North Africa? What was his link with Muammar Gaddafi? He is not alive, but others are alive to say it. “I told you about 2015…you see… going after a former president and trying to kill him, what does that tell you? Before that, what had happened? After Jonathan won at the Supreme Court in 2011, the government called for dialogue (with the terrorists) and those young men nominated (the) former Nigerian president. It took three days to repudiate (that nomination). After those three days, go and plot the graph, you will see that between 2012 and 2014, the number of attacks in the North-East skyrocketed.” Datti Baba-Ahmed blamed the escalated terrorist attacks of that period on what he called “hunger, (and) lack of medicine (for the terrorists).” Why? “Because somebody had stopped sending the recurrent expenses of those people who used to come to Kaduna, collect (money) and go back.” He alleged (or claimed) that the funding was stopped as a punitive measure for the young men’s indiscretion of publicly naming their covert funder as their negotiator with the government. “That’s how the cycle went, in protest against ‘why did you call out that name (as your negotiator).’ They (terrorists) couldn’t bear it (hunger) anymore, so they felt the best thing was to go and attack (him). It failed; we are lucky… Jonathan provided him (the former president) with additional cars and money. And it was all about money; all about collecting money.
“The truth is that someone had gone to North Africa and negotiated with Gaddafi; Gaddafi who was an international terrorist said ‘I will help you as I have been doing… I will retire to your country if you become president… He wanted to create a buffer in Nigeria. They gave crazy amount of money to that gentleman (the former president) to go and help these people with the intention of bringing them to fight in Libya. When Gaddafi died, ‘they’ sat on the money. They kept on (giving) the recurrent until (the terrorists) mentioned the name and then they stopped sending the money. Now, all these things are linked. They wanted Nigeria to burn if Buhari did not become the president in 2015. They brought people from neighbouring countries in readiness to remove Jonathan by all means. The desperation to get Jonathan out of power built up and added to what we call insecurity in Nigeria today.”
Let’s leave matters there until the talkative man provokes them enough again to open up another chapter.
Nigeria will outlive these Northern politicians who think nothing of deliberately endangering Nigeria simply because they cannot afford to be out of power for any length of time, even if it is a meaningless power for power’s sake.
