I have read Dr. Umar Ardo’s epistle, “The Fulani Are Not The Only Migrants Into Nigeria.” I read it not just as a commentary, but as a timely historical intervention. I must state unequivocally that it is one of the most intelligent and courageous pieces to emerge from Northern Nigeria today. Dr. Ardo is not just a Fulani man defending his ethnic stock. He is a trained historian and a formidable authority in Northern Nigeria’s sociopolitical and economic history.
He is a public intellectual who has consistently chosen evidence over emotion. He has chosen truth over convenient revisionism. In an era where ethnic entrepreneurs have weaponized history for political profit, Dr. Ardo has done what true scholarship demands.
He has replaced sentiment with facts. He has replaced bigotry with archival memory. He has replaced the politics of exclusion with the science of historical accuracy. For that, he deserves profound recognition from all who still believe in an honest Nigeria.
His central thesis is unassailable. Migration is not an exceptional attribute of the Fulani. It is the shared heritage of virtually all peoples who inhabit Nigeria.
Dr. Ardo proved this meticulously. He traced the Bayajidda legend which anchors Hausa state formation to a migration from Baghdad through Kanem-Bornu to Daura between the 9th and 11th centuries.
He referenced A.E. Afigbo’s documentation of Igbo multiple origin traditions. These include eastern oriental memories and Niger-Benue confluence movements.
He recalled Tiv traditions that trace their origins to the Congo. They arrived at Swem on the Nigeria-Cameroon border only around the early 1600s. He cited the Jukun-Kwararafa epic whose chronicles place their departure from Yemen through Kordofan and Lake Chad to the Gongola and Upper Benue by the 13th century.
He documented Chamba organized migrations from the Adamawa highlands and Tikar region in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This was under the pressure of the Fulani Jihads. Through these facts, Dr. Ardo has established beyond doubt that Nigeria is a nation of migrants who became natives.
And truly, as I have always believed, all tribes were at one point immigrants. Even Adam [AS] left heaven to inhabit the earth. Therefore, no group can claim absolute autochthony or eternal occupation of any piece of land.
However, history also teaches us the doctrine of first occupancy. This is the principle of first come, first served. This principle is recognized in customary law, in modern property rights and in international jurisprudence. While we all migrated, we did not migrate at the same time.
That is why we must respect the sensibilities of first-comers while accommodating late-comers. But the critical question is whether historical priority should become a license for contemporary exclusion.
The answer must be a resounding no. If we weaponize who came first in a country whose amalgamation is barely 112 years old, while our migrations are five hundred to a thousand years old, we will have no country left.
That is why the more progressive question, as Dr. Ardo rightly framed it, is not who migrated. The question is how do we live together after migration. That is where deliberate statecraft, tolerance and institutionalized accommodation become imperative.
To move from historical truth to national survival, we must reimagine citizenship around four deliberate pillars. These pillars can heal our wounded federation.
First, we must enthrone community service as a new citizenship creed. We must replace the divisive question of where do you come from with the unifying question of what have you contributed.
For instance, the Fulani should be judged not merely as herders, but as providers of animal protein, dairy and leather that sustain the national economy. The Hausa should be seen as merchants and custodians of trans-Saharan commerce. The Igbo should be seen as industrialists and innovators. The Tiv as the food basket of the nation. The Jukun and Chamba as resilient guardians of Middle Belt heritage. Citizenship should be earned by service and not just by ancestry.
Second, tolerance must be institutionalized not as mere moral preaching but as strategic state policy. Farmer-herder conflicts have claimed over 10,000 lives in the last decade according to SBM Intelligence.
These conflicts are not fundamentally ethnic problems. They are resource governance failures. Accommodation therefore means modern ranching, equipped grazing reserves, livestock corridors, and standing inter-community dialogue committees at every Local Government level.
Third, peace and peaceful coexistence must be treated as a development imperative. No investor, no school, and no hospital thrives in a war zone. Every ethnic group in this country has buried its dead. Peace must be defined not as the absence of disagreement. It must be defined as the presence of justice and credible mechanisms for resolving disagreements without violence.
Fourth, we must institutionalize respect for values and harmonious interdependence. We must respect each other’s religious sensibilities, cultural norms and traditional institutions.
We must build bridges instead of walls. We must teach our children that their neighbour is first a human being, then a Nigerian, before being Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Fulani, Tiv or Chamba. Both the Quran and the Bible preach neighbourliness.
Nigeria is not alone in this dilemma. The lesson from Malaysia is profoundly instructive for us as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious post-colonial state.
Like Nigeria, Malaysia comprises Malays [Bumiputera 69%], Chinese [23%], Indians [7%] and indigenous groups. Like Nigeria, it experienced horrific ethnic bloodshed in the May 13, 1969 racial riots between Malays and Chinese.
Those riots claimed hundreds of lives and nearly destroyed the country. Yet Malaysia chose a different path. It rejected indigeneity as exclusion. It constitutionally recognized Bumiputera special position without expelling Chinese and Indians who were largely 19th and 20th century migrants. It granted them full citizenship.
It adopted a national bargain through the New Economic Policy of 1971. The policy created affirmative action for economically disadvantaged Malays while guaranteeing Chinese and Indian economic participation. This created shared prosperity instead of winner-takes-all.
It criminalized ethnic incitement through a strong Sedition Act. The Act makes inflammatory ethnic politics a serious crime. It invested heavily in inter-ethnic national schools and a national service program to forge a Malaysian identity above ethnic identity.
Today, with all its imperfections, Malaysia has moved from a poor, riot-torn nation in 1969 to a $430 billion upper-middle-income economy. It achieved this precisely because it chose accommodation over expulsion, dialogue over demonization, and nation-building over ethnic cleansing.
In conclusion, I align fully and unreservedly with Dr. Ardo’s thesis. Anyone who wants the Fulani out of Nigeria should leave first and the Fulani will follow them out, just as they came first and the Fulani followed them in.
But I wish to take this reflection further. This is a sober, thought-provoking and deeply reflective call for national action. It should haunt the conscience of both the elite who manipulate history and the commoner who suffers its consequences.
Let us all, in humility, agree that we are migrants. Our ancestors met others on this land. They fought, traded, intermarried, and eventually built communities that the British later drew a circle around and named Nigeria.
Having agreed on that undeniable truth, let us now resolve to become Natives of Peace. History will not judge us by who arrived first. It will judge us by what we did with our togetherness.
It will judge whether we turned our diversity into strength or into graves. It will judge whether we taught our children to count the contributions of their neighbours or to count their tribal marks. It will judge whether we, the present generation, had the courage to break the cycle of hate that our fathers could not.
The choice is stark and urgent. We can continue to weaponize indigeneity and watch Nigeria burn in endless cycles of reprisal.
Or we can choose tolerance, justice, community service and harmonious coexistence. We can build a Nigeria where no child is ever asked when did your ancestor come, but rather what will you contribute to make Nigeria great.
That is the only Nigeria that can endure. That is the only Nigeria our children deserve. And that, ultimately, is the Nigeria we must all now stand up to build.
