By ALIYU U. TILDE
The voice on the circulating tape is not that of the former SGF, Babachir Lawal, a 67-year-old, who is among the senior citizens of this country. Immediately I heard it two days ago, I told the person who forwarded the tape to me that this cannot be Babachir because it was a voice of a much younger person with an Hausa accent that does not contain the grains of Kilba, Higgi, Margi or any of the tribes of Adamawa. Each place and people in Northern Nigeria have their unique Hausa accent that reflects their lingual backgrounds. The voice on the mischievous tape rather sounds exactly like one from the obvious areas that are renowned for perpetrating the acts that the tape advocates.
Babachir has denied the tape and is threatening to institute court action. But he is not the only victim. The whole country today is a victim of fake tapes and names developed by ethnic hate agents and religious zealots who want to set the country ablaze just to feed their blood thirsty proclivities. They have been carrying out ethnic cleansing where they are the majority, as the tape preaches, for no reason other than religious and tribal difference. Some communities in the North have been on this sad course for over three decades now.
Hausa Pagans
Of recent, others have joined them from across our border with Niger Republic. They have been using online platforms—of which the most notorious is Jarumar Hausa—to call for Hausas to fight Fulani wherever they find them, calling Danfodio a terrorist, etc. Their identity is easily betrayed by their Nigerien accent that blends in its background French and distorted Sokoto dialect. Their aim is to revive the group identity (‘asabiyya) of pagan Hausa when it is clear that they are not Muslim themselves. Their target is not Fulani. It is Islam. By instigating the Hausa against the Fulani, they think they can break the backbone of Islam in Hausaland. They cannot succeed where others before them failed.
Southern Anarchists
Then there are those who for regional differences want to set the North or the country ablaze. They always see every public unrest in the country or ethnic crisis in north as a golden opportunity to create misunderstanding among northerners or bring the government to its knees. They fabricate lies and misinterpretations on their online platforms in order to incite violence or killings. They are not one bit different from IPOB. One of them, a resident of USA, in 2018 when another crisis broke out in Jos, plainly told me he was happy that Northern Nigeria will also taste war as his people once tasted it. I told him that we can have our differences in the North—yes, sometimes very bloody—but we are too integrated even in blood to go to war. And we did not go to one in 2018. How disappointed he was!
Intervention
Naturally, every patriotic Nigerian will advise that these agents of instability be ignored by the public. However, governments must wake up to this new threat posed by reckless online publications to our national security. This has been my call to the office of the NSA since 2010. Yesterday, the Minister of Information addressed Facebook representatives in his office on how IPOB activities is using their platform as a launch pad for terrorism. They have the Twitter experience to learn from.
But IPOB is not alone. The government needs to come up with a search engine that will pick on the minutest threat of this form and deal with its culprits. It is a goal that it can achieve.
* Dr. Tilde is the Bauchi State Commissioner for Information
