Citizen Manasseh Iliya was from Sanga Local Government area of southern Kaduna in Kaduna State. He was killed on August 2014 in Fadan Karishi by Fulani herdsmen who invaded and laid siege on the community.
In that single attack, many Churches including ERCC, ECWA, the Roman Catholic Church, and many more clusters of Pentecostal churches were razed down. Dead bodies littered the community like flies brought down by a powerful insecticide.
According to the elder sister to Citizen Manasseh, Mrs. Mercy Israel, who is my neighbor, Manasseh was killed in the bush on his way to one of the family farms and his corpse was not found until several days later when the bones, the hair, his shoes and his leather belt were recognized by the family search team as the only evidence of his death after wild animals had devoured and finished off his flesh.
Pa Iliya an old man and father to late Manasseh ad Mercy has been bedridden ever since the death of his son while Mrs. Iliya, the mother to both Manasseh and Mercy has since then been down with malignant high blood pressure.
According to Mrs. Mercy Israel, a married woman and my next door neighbor who is the source of my story, Pa Iliya once lost an entire cassava farm spanning into several acres of land to the herds of cows shepherdedby the Fulani herdsmen.
The cows later died of the toxicity of the cassava leaves which they ate. Surprisingly, the Fulani herders reported the death of their cows to the police who invited the two parties.
Most surprisingly too, and with greateffrontery and impunity typical of the Fulani, the herdsmen demanded payment for their dead cows and threatened to deal with Pa Iliya if they were not paid the amount they claimed for the dead cows.
But for the intervention of the police who obtained a written undertaking from the Fulani herdsmen that nothing must happen to Pa Iliya, he would, like his son, been a dead man by now.
Mrs. Israel further said that many of those Fulani herdsmen were “imported” from the Fulani ethnic stock in Niger Republic and were all promised Bajaj Auto cycles and a permanent homeland where they will bring their families to live in, graze their cows, and cultivate the land, if they wished. The only condition given them was to annihilate all human beings in those communities which are Christian communities.
As a matter of fact, a video in the hands of government authorities was said to have been made of this mutiny and the unfolding events. The information as to giving the mutineers a homeland was said to have been corroborated by those of them who were later arrested by both the police and the military.
I was told that but for the timely effort of Mrs. Comfort, the then local government Chairperson who was said to have asked for soldiers from an Army barracks in Abuja to quell the attack, they almost succeeded in their mischievous plan.
My friend Austin, an Urhobo man married to an Agatu woman lost almost all his in-laws in the protracted siege by Fulani herdsmen to take permanent occupation of Agatu land.
By the way, Nigerians are conversant with the chains of mayhem and massacre of children, mothers, pregnant women, men and women of Agatu land in Benue state. The ancestral owners of Agatu land who had given their daughters in marriage to some of the wealthy Fulani herdsmen and sold lands to them where they built houses were almost sacked from both their farms and their homes by their Fulani in-laws, before they eventually used self-help to deliver themselves from the dangerous teeth and claws of the Fulani herdsmen in their midst.
I am not yet done. His Royal Highness, IgweAkor of Nrobi in Uzouwani Local government area of Enugu state had the baptism of fire few years after his coronation. I had met the then Mr. Akor, a former member of the Fourth Estate of the Realm at Abuja in the company of my bosom and long time friend,Igwe Fidelis Ezenwata, the AgabaIdu, 17th of the Abbi Kingdom shortly before the coronation of Igwe Akor.My friend and I had visited the newly crowned Igwe after the coronation event.
Igwe Akor lost most of the food and cash crops in Nrobi farm lands one fateful year to the cows of the Fulani herdsmen. It did not end there. On one fateful night during that fateful year, the Fulani herdsmen swopped on the community and it was rivers of blood as both guns, matches, and other deadly weapons were used freely on their hosts by the marauding Fulani herdsmen.
Not long after HRHIgwe Fidelis Ezenwatatold me of our friend’s misfortune, I read in the newspapers that the dreaded herdsmen had struck in his Abbi Kingdom. I called Igwe Fidelis and he confirmed what I read in the newspapers.
The dastard herdsmen operation in Abbi Kingdom snuffed the life out of a school headmaster who was caught in the web of the aggressive attack.
There are many more cases of Fulani herdsmen attack across Nigeria which happened to many people close to me or close to somebody that is close to me but the space here will not be enough for me to name them.
People reading this can individually recall their experiences or the experiences of the people close to them in the gruesome hands of the Fulani herdsmen across Nigeria.
Before I get over the narration, let me recall a very wicked experience at the hands of the Fulani herdsmen which is well known to Nigerians. This wicked one was meted to a high profile Nigerian, Chief Olu Falae, a former secretary to the government of the federation.
Chief Olu Falae was kidnapped from his farm by Fulani herdsmen who needed to exchange him for monetary ransom because according to the Chief, before the kidnap, he had always allowed the cows of these herdsmen to graze in the open field of grass in the Chief’s sprawling farm. After grazing the cows, the Chief will unlock the farm tap and the cows will drink water to their satisfaction.
Despite this generosity, they still kidnapped the Chief and collected ransom in the attack that claimed the life of one of his police orderlies.
Hitherto, there had been what I may call ‘wholesale’ type of kidnapping, the high profile type involved in by one Mr. Evans and the unsolved riddle of the kidnapping escapades of a top-notch member of the ruling party in his state, Alhaji Wandume, with his military connection, and the murder of police officers who had already arrested the kidnap kingpin.
This was before Nigerians began to see mass participation in a ‘retail’ format of kid kidnappers who showed that they were more ruthless than their fathers-in-crime.
Nigerians were later to discover that most of these kid kidnappers were Fulani adolescents and youths. It was not long, too, before Nigerians noticed the herdsmen connection in the increasing spate of kidnapping across the country.
One single common line of observation in all these narratives is that irrespective of how long you have been with them, or how generously you have treated them over the long period, Fulani herdsmen must wake up from sleep one day and decide to attack you and dispossess you of both your farm land and your home.
In all these narratives, you will discover that I have not mentioned governmentbecause there is no need doing that. But just for the record, the government did nothing that checked the progression of the evils of the Fulani herdsmen.
A 17th century Englishman, John Donne(circa January or June 19) 1572 – March 31st 1637, who was a poet,a member of the order of Freemasonry and metaphysical school, who also was the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London from 1621 to 1631 once exclaimed “ Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind”.
In Nigeria, we have all been diminished, dehumanized and our society rendered brutish by the circumstances of the wanton destruction of lives and properties going on around us.
Either in the guise of Boko Haram attacks, reckless Banditry, Sprawling Business of Kidnapping and Ransom Paying, or the notorious nationwide activities of the Fulani herdsmen, the truth remains that Nigerians have been dehumanized beyond reckoning and the worth of their lives made very cheap.
As children, we always cried and ran away from the scene each time we saw blood. But this is not for children nowadays, who happily sing and dance as human beings are beaten into pulp and lynched with disused automobile tires hanged on their necks and set ablaze with petrol.
How did we get here, to this point, you may ask? There could be many answers to this questionbut the most plausible, yet appropriate and direct answer which I prefer to proffer can be derived from the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Section 14, Subsection 2b of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended keeps the custody of the security of life and property of Nigerians with the government.
That section of the constitution, among other things, provides that the security and welfare of Nigerians shall be the PRIMARY responsibility of the government.
How has the present federal Government protected the security and lives of Nigerian citizens? Your answer is as good as mine.
In what I call the anthropological origin of law, I recognize that all the laws of man derive origin from the many norms which later transform into the customs commonly accepted by groups of people as a uniform and set standard of conduct necessary to maintain peace, harmony and order in their communities.
All the laws of men essentially derive from the need to respect the pristine values of freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to think, freedom of association, freedom of assembly bordering on integrity, freedom of expression without indecentlyassaulting the freedom and rights of others, and the latest addition to the list which is, freedom to access to justice.
All the above laws are known to be natural rights granted by God freely to man and they are regarded in the Legal profession as the inalienable human rights of every man or woman.
Descendingfrom the apex of the organogram of the anthropological origin of law is what I also call the sociological hierarchy of the laws of man.
The sociological hierarchy of law expresses itself in this order of seniority; notably;
- Natural law
- The rule of law
- The people
- The government
Under “the government” as in the executive presidential system practiced by Nigerians, are the three arms, notably the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.
Supposedly and theoretically, there is no primus inter pas (first among equal) in the three-tier presidential system arrangement, so there should not be any senior among the three arms of the executive system of government practiced in Nigeria.
The above expositions expresses one thing: laws first derive from God and then from the society (the people) and finally from the government (the three tiers).
This is to say that God gives life to the society and the society gives life to the government which shares its powers and manifest for purposes of efficiency in a division-of-labor format as the three arms.
Said in another way, the above explanation means that the society (the people) is accountable to God, while the government, through its three arms in the executive presidential system type, is accountable to the people.
In the same way that God at the apex of both the anthropological origin of law and the sociological hierarchy of law, does not keep quiet when the society (the people) goes wrong (commits sin, as in the beliefsystems of all human religions), the people should not keep quiet when the government goes wrong.
Because the people unanimously gave existence to the government, the people cannot fold their hands when government, the elect of the people, decides to deter.
By the sociological arrangement in the hierarchy of powers, the people is superior to the government for which reason the government has no right whatsoever to fault the spontaneous actions of the people who caused it to be, when the government is unable to provide effective governance.
What I propose and have in mind here is a reversed form of the postulation of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679),the English materialist and political philosopher, who advocated absolute sovereignty as the only type of government that could resolve problems caused by the selfishness of human beings. His postulation is called the Hobbesian theory.
I fault Mr. Hobbes’ advocacy because consistent human experience overtimehave shown that absolute sovereignty for government which breed fascism, dictatorship and absolute leadership create greater problems of disharmony, retardation and redundancy for the combined socio-political and economic health of the society and this is far more injurious to the society than the so called selfishness of human beings which Hobbes wished to address.
For the reasons that the Hobbesian theory overrules the four inalienable rights of man as allowed by God and captured in the four components of the hierarchy of law, it can never fly as a valid social order for the administration of human society.
For this reason too, the theory shall continue to reside in the abstracted reasoning faculty of the minds of those people who will want it to be applied across human communities because such an unnatural process can never find its way successfully through the complex dynamics of human existence.
This underlying reason is why absolute fascists or dictatorial governments (as you may want to call them) alwayscollapse miserably when mass and populist pressure bear on them.
Secondly, it is unfair to the society and a wrong judgment for Hobbes not to consider the superiority of the people over the government, which has been exposed in the anthropological origin of law and the sociological hierarchy of law.
This superiority is natural and was set in place by providence and it precedes all academic philosophies on human governance including the one promoted by Mr. Thomas Hobbes.
Though the government muted it, the #ENDSARS protest of 2020 in Nigeria and the present revolution sweeping across the country against the menace of the Fulani herdsmen kidnappers and the government failure to provide effective governance to the people typifies the overwhelming superiority of the people’s opinion over the opinion of the government they brought to power.
Sociologists and jurisprudence lawyers should tinker on this and must find a way, a technical way, to exempt culpability of any offence in the spontaneous action of people from their superior power over the government, when the people lend governance to a blind, deaf, dumb and inept government as is the case inNigeria.
What I mean to say here is that culpability of any offence deriving from the spontaneous actions of the people including revolution and mutiny, to fill a vacuum in governance allowed by ineffective representatives of a government, must not be criminalized. This is a message for the government handlers of the Sunday Igboho’s leadership of the disenchanted youths of Igangan in Oyo state, South west Nigeria.
I have explored this idea further in one of my books titled “A History of Revolutions; Remote and Immediate Causes in Analytical Perspective” where I observed that as a matter of fact, the condition I prescribe is already the situation throughout history and in contemporary life as in those countries where mass verdicts, insurrections or revolutions give birth to legitimate governments. It has happened several times in history. Examples are the Mustafa Kemal (Aturtuk) case in Turkey which gave birth to the sprawling economy of modern Turkey and Lech Walesa’s “Solidarity” political party in Poland which gave birth to a legitimate government.
Be it known also that all the illegal but successful coups in Nigeria derived legitimacy from the success of spontaneous military revolutions (not people-driven) and mutiny.
In Lech Walesa’s Poland, the labor union illegally regarded in the Polish politics by the then government ofWojciech Jaruzelski registered a political party after several uprisings and attempts to step down the government through the occupation of the streets and public places.
The Solidarity political party swept the polls and Mr. Walesa and other Polish Patriots drawn from the organized labor came to power.
But for the unpatriotism of Nigerian labor leaders and the fact that the federal government of Nigeria, obviously as a check and balance on the activities of labor, participates covertly in the election of the officers of the Nigerian Labor Unions, it is not inappropriate to replicate such a situation in Nigeria wherefore the youth of the #EndSARS protest, the aggrieved ethnic nationalities offended by the Fulani herdsmen, the organized Nigerian Labor Union and the diminishing remnants of progressive elements across the country, will form a political party to sweep the Nigerian polls in 2023 and recover the peoples power from the self appointed ruling elites.
The law should evolve to observe the sociologicaldevelopment of man and adjust to check the excesses of the leadership, otherwise, the law will be seeing situations where the natural order in the divine hierarchy of law is reversed, as Mr. Hobbes had wanted, to the detriment of the people for whose conveniences the law was established by nature.
The legal exemption theorized here will be able to justify mass and popular verdicts in the forms of popular and people-oriented revolutions by people to recover the peoples’ mandate which wrongly placed in the hands of political hawks as in the Nigerian circumstance, is being abridged especially wherefore execution of the legal process and impeachment procedure as provided in the constitution has been rendered ineffective by the same elected representatives who, through their actions have become ‘anti’ people.
TO BE CONCLUDED
ABUCHI OBIORA
abuchiobiora @gmail.com
FOR:
Global Upfront Newspapers.
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