In the summer of 2009, I joined a group of a few writers and human rights organizations in condemning the extrajudicial killing of Alhaji Buji Foi, a former commissioner under Ali Modu Sheriff as Commissioner for Religious Affairs in Borno State, with my article “The Drums of War.”
These extrajudicial killings of Mohammed Yusuf and Buji Foi under the Yar’Adua administration drew severe condemnation from international human rights campaigners and are widely cited as a major turning point that radicalized Boko Haram into a full-scale, deadly terrorist insurgency.
You might say, what has that to do with Maisango’s arrest? I had interacted with Maisango on this space, challenging his radical promotion of Hausa-Zalla. My irk wasn’t against any ethnic nationality promoting its cultural union, rather against using such interest through hatred and division.
If history is anything to go by, the radicalization of Boko Haram and the terror of Fulani bandits could be traced back to injustices meted out on them, even though that would never excuse both for their atrocities. There is a collective failure, at all levels, in the North culminating in the insecurity we find ourselves in today.
In all of humanity, to my knowledge, I dare say no two different ethnic groups have interwoven and melted into each other as the Hausa-Fulani. Some Hausa Zalla advocates are pointing the finger at colonialism as the main construct of the two tribes being identified as one. That is far from the truth. Whoever studied history can see how the accommodating Hausa culture is prone to assimilating whatever it comes into contact with, hence the rise of Ajami, Hausa as the lingua franca of West Africa, and many more.
The challenges facing Hausa-Fulani today transcend any ethnic nationalism as we have become the poverty capital of the world, with the highest youth population who are both illiterate and unemployed. The millions of almajiris, born out of myopic ethno-religious manipulation, are enough of a challenge for all of us. Yet, all of a sudden, the Hausa Zalla advocates came out of nowhere to further fuel hatred and division among a people so mixed up that nothing on earth could delineate them.
One can clearly see the unseen hands of the Western agenda of depopulation, Christian and atheist bigots manipulating the narrative and guiding it towards a violent climax that would not augur well for anybody.
Some feelers are pointing to Maisango as an Atheistic adherent who hides behind Islam to foment the division. In one of my arguments with him, I drew his attention to the fact that whoever truly professes the Islamic faith transcends fetish tribalism, which Islam came to destroy 14 centuries ago, and I quoted several verses of the Quran, which he ignored.
Maisango and his co-travelers’ bud needs to be nipped as soon as possible before they send this region into more agonies. We all remember how the mere word “Cockroaches” led to the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s.
Lest we forget, whether you believe in any religion or not (Atheist), we either believe all of us came from Adam and Eve, or we believe in the science of evolution that all life emerged from a single cell. Our diversity is a source of exploration and development, not for hatred and division. Unless we see each other as humans and unite as a human family and strive together to fight all forms of injustice, regardless of the perpetrator, we would continue to be the slaves of neo-colonialism that turned us into slaves against each other while we collectively continue to worship our elites as they supervise the looting of our commonwealth and the destruction of not only our peace but our lives.
