There can be no doubt that the Fulani love to dominate any geographical space in which they operate if they are allowed to get away with it.

There is nothing unusual about that.
All human species love to dominate their geographical space – if they can get away with it.

Humans, most especially, insist on dominating their ancestral space, both as a mark of sovereignty, and as a guarantor of self-determination.

The peculiarity of the Fulani, however, is that they have no clearly defined ancestral space.

Nomadic in nature, they are found everywhere in Nigeria but ancestrally belong to nowhere in Nigeria, much like the gypsies in Central Europe.

Unlike the Gypsies who remain on their own, doing their own thing, wherever they are found in Europe, the Fulani make it a point of duty to grab land and power, and dictate terms to their ethnic hosts, wherever they are found in numbers greater than one.

Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to find a raging conflict in West and Central Africa in which the Fulani are not directly or indirectly implicated.

Make no mistake about it, the Fulani are incredibly gifted in the art of intrigue and politics, On the African continent, they are probably the most gifted ethnicity in that realm. At one point in the West African and Central African sub-regions, you could count at least five ethnic Fulani presidents and vice-presidents.

The Fulani have been presidents or vice-presidents in major Anglophone and major Francophone countries in West Africa (e.g., Nigeria) and Central Africa (e.g., La Republique du Cameroun). So, you cannot claim their feat was solely aided by the British, as is alleged in Nigeria. Something is going on here, worthy of serious scientific query.

For an ethnic minority in every country, they find themselves in Africa, this is no small feat. It is one that demands keen scientific study and appraisal. I wonder if any PhD dissertation in the field of Political Science has undertaken this kind of research.

Of all the countries in which they have turned up, none has been as accommodating to the Fulani like Nigeria, and none has been so thoroughly abused by the Fulani, like Nigeria.

Indigenous Nigerians have been extremely accommodating to the Fulani.

Despite not being an indigenous ethnicity in Nigeria, the Fulani have led Nigeria at least three times as civilian President, if you include the highly regarded but short-lived presidency of the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, who some claim was Shuwa Arab, or from some other tiny Chadic migrant ethnicity.

To put this in proper context, the Igbo, a major and formidable ethnic grouping in Nigeria have not had the privilege of producing a civilian President in Nigeria if you discount the ceremonial presidency of the late Nnamdi Azikiwe.

This is another topic worthy of serious PhD dissertational studies in Political Science. Considering their population, is the Igbo under-representation in the count of Nigerian Presidents due to lack of political skills among the Igbo, or is it due to a systematic gang-up against the Igbo by the other Nigerian nationalities?

Be that what it may and discounting the memorably progressive contributions of the Yar’Adua Presidency, the long tenure of the Fulani within and around the corridors of power in Nigeria, has not led to Nigeria’s progress.

On the contrary, their last stint of occupancy of the Office of President during the Buhari Maladministration led to incredible regression and decline of Nigeria and laid the groundwork for the cataclysmic miasma within which Nigeria is currently marooned under the spectacularly underperforming Tinubu Maladministration.

For a presidency that was publicized as having built Lagos, which was once the capital of Nigeria, and arguably the biggest mega-city in Africa, no one in his right senses could have predicted the shockingly abysmal performance of the Tinubu Maladministration in office. So much so, that placed alongside the Buhari Maladministration, the Tinubu Maladministration make the former Maladministration look like star performers.

Going by his abject performance in office as President, it is either Tinubu was already a spent force at the time he grabbed power from the rightful election winner and became President, or he was never a force to be reckoned with at any stage during his long political career.

The major architect of Buhari’s downfall, performance-wise, was his obsession with creating Fulani dominated ethnic spaces within the ancestral geographical space of indigenous Nigerian ethnicities.

So obsessed was Buhari with this quixotic, territorial quest of his Fulani ethnicity that the man who claimed to be fighting corruption, and who once proclaimed that if Nigerians do not kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria, took his eyes completely off the ball by not only superintending the second most corrupt Presidency in Nigeria (bar Tinubu), but he also paved the way for and handed over power to the most corrupt Presidency in Nigeria’s history, the Tinubu Maladministration. Talk of fighting corruption!

Previously blinded by their nearly unanimous hatred for the Igbo, many Nigerians including the majority Hausa ethnicity are slowly but surely coming to the realization that the Igbo are not the primary cause of their backwardness and Nigeria’s problems, but co-victims alongside themselves, thereof.

Nigerians are coming to the realization that parasitic leadership, not reserved to any ethnicity, but cutting across and afflicting all ethnicities, lies at the root of their problems.

As proof, going by his trenchantly defiant utterances to the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria when they recently came calling at his office, the Tinubu Maladministration which manifests parasitic leadership style par excellence, instead of changing their leadership style, will do anything, including and up to sinking Nigeria, to retain their leech-position and maintain their power for a second tenure of four years.

The Tinubu Maladministration concretized the Muslim-Muslim presidency in Nigeria.

That precedent has now been seized by a rabidly trenchant Muslim cleric, possibly of Fulani extraction, as proof of Nigeria being a majority Muslim country, where no Christian dare dream of becoming President or Vice-President.

So, the expansionist Fulani or their minions would not want a Nigerian Christian to become President or Vice President in their own country, which is a constitutional entitlement, but would want the Fulani who are nominally majority Muslims, to occupy the ancestral lands of Nigerian Christians for ranching, which is an action alien to the Nigerian Constitution?

This must be a major embarrassment to Tinubu’s Christian supporters including his First Lady, who if this religious disenfranchisement stands, automatically become co-victims of the evil they conspiratorially plotted and foisted upon the Igbo.

Trashing around looking for firm ground on which to found their political comeback, the Tinubu Maladministration have seized the opportunity of becoming agents of Fulani territorial expansionism by announcing their plan to build ranches for the Fulani in six “pilot” states in the majority Christian Middle-Belt of Nigeria.

We condemn and reject this move, in its totality, both unreservedly, and unequivocally.

It is another manifestation of the kind of mal-administrative tendencies championed by Buhari and amplified by Tinubu, both parasitic leaders.

You cannot seize tribal lands belonging to a specific ethnicity and convert it to the private and permanent use of people from different ethnicities, without their consent.

Ranching is a private business, not a federal venture to be funded by the public Treasury for the specific benefit of a particular ethnic group.

Parasitic leadership exhibited by leaders who contribute nothing positive to their host country but exploit their privileged position to suck the lifeblood of the host country, thereby incubating future problems, either for personal pecuniary benefit (Tinubu), for personal political benefit (both Tinubu and Buhari), or for ethnic benefit (both Buhari and Tinubu), is Nigeria’s greatest problem.

Let us close this intervention by making one clarification and by giving one piece of advice to the Fulani.

First the clarification. Not all Fulani are expansionists, but all territorial expansionists in Nigeria are Fulani. Let that sink in.

Second, it is not a crime to seek to become dominant within your operating space.

However, in this 21st Century, you should deploy science and technology to become dominant, not banditry and not territorial expansionism.

Here is the advice. Instead of seeking to dominate their ethnic hosts and co-citizens of Nigeria using the instrumentalities of banditry and Federal Government-assisted territorial expansionism, the expansionist Fulani will be better served by seeking instead to dominate scientific knowledge and technology, and everything else will be added unto them on a platter of gold.

This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If in doubt, investigate how Ukraine a much smaller country is currently dominating Russia, a much larger territorially expansionist nation (Russia is twenty-eight times larger than Ukraine in terms of landmass, and almost four times larger than Ukraine in terms of population).

We are 👁 👁.
Anthony Chuka Konwea, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE