The foolish warriors – Part 2

The Nigeria middle class is the fertile ground for the promotion of all of the divisions sowed by the ‘ruining crass’. They are the ones that you would find on the internet fighting the battles of the ‘ruining crass.’ They are the ones that have embraced religiousity as a refuge from the harsh realities of their existential lives, and they are the ones that have failed to make use of their education and learning, to teach, instruct, and guide the lower classes with whom they interact daily. They are the ones with the capacity to recognise the several iniquities of the Nigeria State. They are the ones acquainted with its evil wickedness. These ones have eyes, but are willfully blind. They have failed to discern that the evil befalling them are visited on them by their own, and they have bought the hate: hook, line and sinker.

For these foolish warriors, the solution to the Nigerian problem is simple, and as simpletons they have believed: divide Nigeria, and be done with it already. The dangers of the simple solution have never been better illustrated.
NOTE: I understand the pains and frustrations behind these agitations, and I am not promoting or counseling inaction, but beyond people talking about war, have they factored in the fact that talks inevitably follow wars, before they might be ended? Why is it so cowardly to offer alternatives to wars, whilst everyone is demanding war, when the only way to end that war, would be to speak to each other and then work out the peace deal?

The war fronts would be our doorsteps, and most of the keyboard warriors would be in their own homes outside Nigeria, keeping scores and watching cable networks. But those of us that have either elected to stay in these blighted lands, already living as though we are in a war zone, would find ourselves truly at war, and would have stumbled into the still avoidable calamity because of our collective idiocies, and even more ironically, because of our moral cowardice.

The same Nigerians, who have refused to engage with the system to peacefully demand citizenship, but are happy with indigeneship, whilst eyeing promotion to the ‘ruining crass’, are the ones promoting and demanding the break-up of the country that they wouldn’t fight to birth. It is lost on them that it is easier to gain everything they have imagined from their tribal homelands, in a restructured and equitable Nigeria State that has citizenship for all of its citizens.

The Nigeria ‘ruining crass’ is not going to miss the Nigeria State. As I have sought to establish, the rulers of Nigeria have committed several crimes against the Nigerian peoples, and they are afraid of the day when they might be asked to explain their crimes. They have concluded that the destruction of the country would assure that they wouldn’t have to account for the evils that they have perpetrated in the land. Our ruiners are pyromaniacs; burning down the State erases the huge crime scene the country is. If Nigeria would be saved from the impending catastrophe, it would be Nigerians of all ethnicities, languages, and biases that would have to collectively save the State from itself. It is the victims of Nigeria’s several afflictions that need Nigeria to survive.

Those named Nigerians have never been allowed to become citizens of Nigeria. The governance systems have been structured from its beginnings to think in terms of the tribe; the delineation of rights have been based on tribal and ethnic foundations. It is not for nothing that the Nigerian Bill of Rights, found in the 1960 Independence Constitution, arose from the agitations of the minority ethnic groups, and was a recommendation of the Willink Commission on the rights of the minorities. Nigeria was founded on indigene-ship, and Nigerians have never been citizens in the true sense of the word.

The foolish warriors have fought against each other, in the army of the evil rulers, for the benefit of the evil rulers, and in preservation of the evil rulers and governance systems that have mutually assured their enslavement. If the foolish warriors shall incline their eyes, if they would behold the evidence of their own eyes, they would see very quickly that whilst the Fulani elites might be responsible for the architecture of their oppression, the beneficiaries are not the Fulani peoples, but a class of people drawn from every nook and cranny of the Nigeria State.

The overarching ambition of the Nigeria ‘ruining crass’ is to steal. The overarching ambition of the Islamist jihadists is to push their vile interpretation of Islam across the country, and the dream of the Fulani peoples across the Sahel, is to find a homeland, a place to call home, and a refuge from the hardships of being a nomadic people, in a region where they are effectively a minority. These ambitions have collided at a critical point in the history of Nigeria, and they have found oxygen in the person of a Nigerian president, whose base instincts and reflexes are nepotistic in the extreme.

Do not Die in their War
THE foolish warriors are those that would fight and die in the wars of their oppressors. The wise warriors are those that would fight for the birth of the Nigeria nation; the ones that would embrace the non-violent path to the birth of the Nigeria nation; that would speak to bridge the divides; that would act to heal the wounds; that would demand for others everything that they have desired for themselves. History beckons the ones that would dare to desert the ranks of the foolish warriors.
Concluded
(Being the Preface to the book, Imperatives of the Nigerian Revolution, by Dele Farotimi, which is due to be released on May 1, 2021).
Farotimi is a lawyer and civil rights activist based in Lagos.