By Charles Ogbu.
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating now, President Muhammadu Buhari is an incurable ethno-religious Jingoist and a fulani supremacist with a feudal mindset. As far as he’s concerned, the North, specifically the Fulanis, owns Nigeria with the whole South as a conquered territory.
When a Fulani Muslim or any Northerner is involved in corruption, Buhari views that the exact way a man views the action of a son who takes his father’s money which is his by right as the son of the father. But when a southerner is suspected of corruption, Buhari sees that with the anger a slave master feels when a mere slave steals from him.
Examples abound:
Till today, Buhari has continue to swear that Abacha did not steal. Dasuki is not in prison for any 2billion dollars arms fund. He’s in jail for his role in booting the Daura born ex-soldier (Buhari) out of office in 1985. In Olisah Metuh’s trial, he was handcuffed and his request to go treat a spinal cord problem abroad denied even when former Kano state governor, Attahiru Baffarawa, facing the same charge, was allowed to go pray in Mecca for one whole month.
The case of Ibe Kachikwu is a further testament to the criminal disdain which the Sons of Danfodio hold for all Southerners.
Make no mistake, Ibe Kachikwu’s humiliation in the hands of the Feudalists IS NOT an isolated case. If you think it is, then you are mistaken.
As I type this, vice President Yemi Osinbajo is going through worse indignity at the hands of Abba Kyari and co. Most of the things he says like when he described those asking for Restructuring as hungry people looking for appointment etc, were not his thought. Ngige, Ogbonnaya Onu and every Southern minister in Buhari govt is passing through one humiliation or the other in the hands of Arewa men who ordinarily are not qualified to hold their bag.
They were all given an unwritten option which is to either be in office as obedient slaves creating the impression that there is a regional balance in appointment and be collecting salaries with the attendant humiliation OR resign. And because they are all integrity-challenged men with no principle, they accepted the former.
The only reason Kachikwu is still in office is just to keep maintaining the lie that Niger Delta is represented in Buhari’s govt so the Creek boys will keep being deceived.
The day Buhari took the AK47 assault rifle from Kachikwu (NNPC Director) and handed him a catapult without even a stone (junior Petroleum minister) was the day he should have resigned if he had any honor in him.
Buhari is the Petroleum minister. Baru is the NNPC boss. As I type this, a mega power project has been launched in Kaduna for the Northern region. Rail-lines connecting the North to even Niger Republic are in progress. Northeast Development Commission is heavily funded. VAT, which is sourced mainly from Alcohol, has a special % going to the North even when alcohol is banned in the Sharia North. Last week, there was a report in the Guardian that NNPC compels firms to pay a monthly sum of 100million to fund Northern projects.
Meanwhile, in the Niger Delta region, Ibe Kachikwu’s region, the main region producing the oil, what you will be greeted with is an environment unfit for even non-living things. No good water for fishing or drinking, no clean air to breathe, no land to farm on, no nothing!
All because of oil exploration in the region.
Nature blessed you with oil. But all you have to show for it are pains, miseries and death while those who do not have even a litter of “condemned” oil in their land are the ones owning all the oil wells in your own backyard and using them to develop their place and still treating your sons and daughters like subhumans.
An Ibrahim from Sokoto can own oil blocks in the Niger Delta and make billions without doing any work but if a Tompolo from Niger Delta gets contract to secure oil pipeline in the same Niger Delta, he will be hunted like a common thief and his father brutalized, leading to his death.
Yet, we are all busy chasing shadows.
How far about Ogoni Clean-up, the same Ogoni struggle for which Ken Saro Wiwa and others were hanged?? After deceiving the people with noise about cleaning up Ogoni, the Oligarchs simply turned to their own region.
If the Niger Delta youths do not force the Caliphate to clean up their region now and develop it with the same zeal with which Lagos and Abuja were developed, is it when oil looses its value that they will do it??
In no distant time, even if oil hasn’t dried up then, it will no longer be the beautiful bride it is today, considering that most countries are turning to alternative source of energy far removed from oil. When that time comes, you can be sure the Core North will have finished developing her region. The question is, what will be the condition of the Niger Delta region then?? We can all guess correctly, can’t we?
Those of you sitting quietly and waiting for Nigeria to be restructured so you can all take control of your resources, you are on a very long thing. The North WILL NEVER allow for any genuine Restructuring without a well coordinated RADICAL push from the South. And you can NEVER get Restructuring through the existing constitutional framework. Even if you borrow lawmakers from 2 or 3 states in the North and add to the entire federal lawmakers from the South, you will not get up to the 2/3 required to change the atrocious apartheid manual masquerading as the 1999 constitution.
So I ask, how does the Restructuring group intend to get it?
Those of you who think Buhari’s unsettled but unsettling grudges and unmitigated hatred is for the Igbos alone, you are grievously mistaken. Down South, we are all Dwarfs in the eye of the “Giant” Fulani supremacists even when “Height Enhancer” is ours by right. Ndigbo are not even the shortest of the Dwarfs.
Any southern tribe boasting of having a better deal in Nigeria than the other is as criminally moronic as a Dwarf boasting of being taller than a fellow Dwarf instead of striving to be the Giant which he’s created to be.
Shame, isn’t it??