The knives are out. The mystery behind Governor Samuel Ortom, Wike’s best friend and second brain, is finally revealed. He hates the Fulani with excessive racial bigotry. After the failed PDP primary, when he and his alter ego were intensifying their attacks on Ayu and PDP, I noted in this column that both men had contradictory motivations; they weren’t fighting for justice, equity or fairness. They weren’t fighting for the South. Instead, they were waging a personal conflict; and their obvious targets weren’t just Ayu or Atiku but the Fulani as an ethnic group.
What many cheering him on failed to grasp is that Ortom and Wike also hate and despise the Igbo in addition to the Fulani. Wike and Ortom are the ones that made it impossible for a South Easterner to win the PDP presidential nomination. They tried everything to impose Wike, but the God factor failed them.
Instead of attempting to bring about internal peace after the failed coup attempt to capture PDP, the conspirators regrouped for the second phase, which involves destroying the party from within. They became reckless with their lying showing scant regard for truth. I have no issues with politicians speaking lies, but I do when they endanger the nation for their own personal political gain. Nigeria is in jeopardy because of politicians like Ortom, who presided over one of Benue’s most clueless governments. As a distraction to his bad governance, he is deliberately pitting his audience members against the Fulani tribe.
Such ethnic profiling is harmful and should have no place in our civilization. To comprehend the danger of Ortom’s anti-Fulani vitriol, we must always look back to the Jewish Holocaust, the Igbo pogrom and the horrors of Rwanda. It’s terrible that Ortom has issues with every Fulani, and even with my friend Zainab, whom he hardly knew, and yet he has a comfortable position as a state governor in Nigeria. By impeaching him, the Benue State House of Assembly will be helping Nigeria’s democracy to survive.
Ortom is most likely a Tiv from Benue State’s Guma Local Government Area. His clan undoubtedly has its fair share of the good, the bad and the ugly. Therefore, it would be dishonest to paint the entire Guma population in a negative light due to the actions of a small number of repulsive and cunning members of their group like Governor Sam Ortom.
Ortom’s unprecedented remark against the Fulani implies that the Fulani ethnic group as a whole represents the herdsmen who have been involved in a fatal war with farmers in Nigeria and that the Fulani have encouraged and approved of their criminal behaviour. This is untrue because I know many decent Fulani who are against the herder’s conflicts with farmers, and governors aren’t notorious for painting an entire ethnic community with the same broad brush. Government officials should be statesmen. Real leaders are strong people of character who bring people together rather than those who focus solely on the issues that separate people. Such a lack of leadership, as Ortom recently displayed, is what has left Nigeria in shambles and fostered unparalleled division among Nigerians, which has now reached its height.
The racial profiling practice has torn Nigeria apart. The Nigeria-Biafra Civil War was caused by the ethnic profiling of Ndigbo in Nigeria after the initial military takeover. The Republic of Biafra, which declared its independence from Nigeria in 1967 because its leadership believed that its people could no longer cohabit with the rest of the country, engaged in the Civil War, which lasted from July 6 1967 to January 15 1970. A military coup, a countercoup, and anti-Igbo pogroms brought on by ethnic profiling of the coup in Northern Nigeria were the immediate causes of the war in 1967.
Ortom ought to think back on Rwanda and how that country forded the bloody rivers that built and watered the path to Kigali. Hutu nationalists in the Rwandan capital of Kigali began the genocide in that country in 1994 through careless ethnic profiling. It began a genocide that swept throughout the nation with astonishing speed and cruelty as local and Hutu government officials incited common individuals to use force against their neighbours.
Extremist sections of Rwanda’s majority Hutu population, encouraged by misinformation from numerous media channels, planned to exterminate the minority Tutsi population and everyone who opposed their genocidal aims. Is this the goal of Ortom’s ethnic profiling for Nigeria?
The world typically doesn’t care when the going gets tough, and Ortom and those who are supporting him should be reminded of this. When Biafrans were being killed, the UN showed no concern. Women and children starved to death as the world watched as two million Biafrans died. And after the genocide in Rwanda, official sources claimed that the UN’s lack of response was due to its wish to avoid getting engaged in a potentially dangerous operation for public relations that may harm the chances of future peace-building efforts. If Nigeria collapses, Ortom and his allies shouldn’t anticipate anything different from a world that has abandoned Ukraine to her fate while thousands of people die in that country’s prolonged conflict with Russia.
Without a question, since the APC came to power at the national level in 2015, the herdsmen-farmers conflict has gotten worse, with Benue bearing the brunt of it most notably. It will nonetheless be improper for a serving governor to claim in public that the killings are motivated by a Fulani ethnic agenda. Atiku Abubakar does not own cattle, identify as a herdsman, or support the horrible deeds committed by herders.
Ortom is aware that non-state actors and criminals are active in some manner of violent conflict throughout the entire nation. Terrorists from Boko Haram, bandits, UGM, OPC, Niger Delta militancy, and other groups are present in the North East, North West, South East, South West, and other regions. However, no one is declaring they would not support a presidential candidate hailing from certain regions of the nation due to the deadly conflicts that have spread there.
It’s also critical to note how the nation’s bad situation and its security have been exacerbated by the weak governance of the current crop of governors. The formation of the Benue Volunteer Guards, or BVG, a security organisation, by Ortom is another anomaly, in addition to the governor’s exceptionally poor track record of governance and the fact that he has accumulated the biggest amount of pay and pension arrears.
Any organization established in Nigeria to perform police duties is a violation of the country’s constitution, which says explicitly that there shall be only one Police Force in Nigeria (see Section 214 of the 1999 Constitution). What Ortom and other governors should do is band together and pressure their federal and state legislators to amend that provision of the Constitution to constitutionally establish State Police and Community Police. This is the only realistic and legal option to grant the states the authority to address policing and security issues through adequate recruiting, right training, and proper arming of such groups, which is not possible under the current constitutional system. However, other governors, like Ortom, prefer to form nebulous security organisations that they arm and send out to pursue their political rivals, worsening the security situation in their states. Since Ortom has utterly failed in the realm of governance, pursuing State Police and Community Police through the constitutional process would have been his lasting legacy.
No one should miss the point of Ortom’s vituperation. He made it quite evident that himself and others are targeting the ethnic Fulani, whom they had all the time used as a smokescreen to conceal their true aim. The future Nigeria needs from 2023 is definitely a future without deficient characters like Ortom. We need leaders that will focus on issues that unite us and not what will further divide us.