Former Nigeria’s envoy to Canada and Mexico, Prof Iyorwuese Hagher is a blunt Nigerian who tells it as it is. In this exclusive interview with Saturday Sun, the erstwhile Minister of Steel spoke on his January 5 open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, which went viral three days after; the current herdsmen-farmers’ crises and the heating up of the polity, among others. He spoke withIHEANACHO NWOSU in Abuja.

You seem to understand the herders-farmers’ conflicts; kindly provide some insight?

I am a scholar, a professor of development theatre, in my intellectual career it is my responsibility to study communities and phenomena and I have over the years made it a point of duty to deal with issues like crises within the communities and I have been involved in observing the phenomena of ethnic crisis, communal crisis, farmers’ crisis, within the middle belt which has been subsisting for decades now. I have been a peacemaker, a peace builder, I am a total pacifist; I hate violence in any form including verbal violence. So, in observing the trend of the crisis between herdsmen and farmers within the middle-belt area from 2013; I was alarmed when I noticed that in 2015 there was a sudden jump in escalation of the incident that increased since President Buhari took over in 2015, I noticed that this escalation was based on a systematic process where it was not just all Fulani herdsmen and the farmers. There was now a new dimension to the crisis, the new entry was commando-style execution, gruesome murders of the farmers, the barbarity which showed that there was a disturbing trend towards the genocide that was now the possibility and the reality. As there was increased violence because much more than the usual struggle of the incident of cows being killed and therefore the grazers come in respect of the killing of their cows or that a cattle has been rustled and then they come pursuing revenge over the loss of cattle.

There was an upsurge in attacks in which the target communities in Southern Adamawa, Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa , Plateau, Southern Kaduna and Taraba states was where I found the phenomena that was really disturbing. The equally disturbing scenario was that in most of the places where these attacks were being unleashed, it seemed to me that they were mainly where Christians settled and  when I looked at the fact that when President Buhari took over he had a very efficient approach towards the Boko Haram. So, I began to study the possibility of the Boko Haram having diffused itself to become a Plan ‘B’ because the herdsmen terrorism was no longer the usual clashes, this was terrorism at monumental scale, this was terrorism; that was a world class definition of terrorism. The herdsmen became the force classified as the 4th most deadly terrorist group on earth. I was alarmed that it was not just this area but it was a proliferation, country wide where herdsmen were conflicted and I became equally disturbed to learn that the organization had the sultanate and the emirate of Northern Nigeria which were Fulani in origin and also the President of Nigeria was even considered as a patron of the Miyetti Allah and I said wow! This is a pretty heavy stuff and I began to analyze the conversations that were going on that time and I became alarmed and disturbed because they were too few structures on ground to prevent the genocide, structures like an effective legislature, an independent judiciary, an effective national human rights institution or independent media or a neutral security force because the more I studied about the phenomena, the more I discovered that the police and the army that were supposed to be neutral security forces were recording incidents in which the arms used by the insurgents were coming from the Nigerian armoury and the corruption that began to be unveiled of politicians and the easy supply of arms across the country, with arms market all over; if you go to Niger, you buy an AK47, it is completely on display, if you go to certain parts of this country you will see arms being freely sold. I studied the motivation of the leading actors and there was considerable motivation because the issue of land in the middle-belt and the fertile land that is irrigated by the River Niger and the River Benue. The desertification has taken place in the north and global climate has affected this area and no less than 20,000 cattle looking for water sources especially in the dry season, looking for grass and then I looked at the phenomena of displaced people of Nigerian stock in Darfur, in Libya who are pushed to come back; who are herds people and if they came back, what would be means of their livelihood, these people are fighters for decades, they have been fighting in those environments and as they fight in those environments, the psychology of instability is already imbedded in them, they are insurgents and wherever they go, insurgent mentality prevails in their mind. They want to come back to Nigeria, they reach out to some Nigerian leaders, Nigerians lived for years in Darfur and now Northern Sudan doesn’t want us; they are making slaves of us, where do we go? The only place we can settle is in the Benue valley, people who are there are not even Muslims, so it makes it easy, considerable motivation for ethnic cleansing and the borders are porous. So, when I started putting all the pieces together, I saw that it was possible for genocide of unprecedented magnitude to creep in on us in a manner in which we are unprepared. We underestimated the Boko Haram and it grew up like a phantom into a reality, which we were not able to control till this moment effectively.

So, was this the reason for your recent letter to the President?

When I wrote the letter to the President, I was writing to him as a patriot, as a citizen who has experienced not just at the ordinary level as a legislator or a former minister; diplomat. I was writing to him with the eye of somebody who deeply loves this country and know the immensity of expectation for a great and glorious Nigeria by the international community. Nigeria has continued to disappoint the world, if we leave outside this country there is an enormous amount of insult the Nigerians in diaspora receive constantly on behalf of Nigeria. So, the world is impatient of a Nigeria that is still sluggishly trying to contain the most basic element of governance that is to guarantee life and security of the citizens, we are not talking of a country that has failed to provide infrastructure, failed to provide electricity, failed to provide water for the citizens. There are few state capitals in this country that are able to provide water, ordinary drinking water to the citizens not to talk of an infrastructure that has collapsed. There are no roads in this country, I love traveling by road and there are no roads. I recently travelled from Ado-Ekiti to Abuja and the roads were hell holes, I’m not talking about Benue which is on the margin of national consciousness because there is not a single road in Benue that is motorable; when you drive there, you wished you carried your car on your head instead. The rich fly in helicopters, they make use of the most expensive bulletproof SUVs; so, they don’t understand what the masses go through. I had thought that perhaps if Nigerians were provided with security of lives then they would pursue their happiness with whatever they can, struggling and smiling and being told by the leadership to have patience  and they wait but all to no avail. So, I was frustrated and angry that this was so and the main reason I was upset was that when I received a letter from the Presidency, a letter which was dated 28th of September, 2016, I was so excited because as a scholar and a public intellectual, I have written to Presidents both now and in the past because that is what I love to do. If I observe a phenomenon in any African country as the President of African Leadership Institute, I’ll write to that country, sometimes I receive good replies; sometimes not and so I was very ecstatic that my country’s President wrote to me and thanked me for my valuable suggestions towards addressing some critical challenges facing Nigeria. The most critical challenge facing Nigeria in this letter was to stop the genocide which was certainly being read and which I predicted was going to take place in particularly Benue and Plateau states within the next 18 months and so when this genocide took place in the 17th month, I was very angry. I was angry because the loss of one life in a democracy through genocide is one life too many and killing as a genocidal act is different from an ordinary killing. Genocide is a deliberate plan to eliminate a hated group, whether it’s a race or ethnic group or a people identified and targeted and what happened on New Year day in Benue was not an ordinary killing, it was not a communal clash, it fully fulfilled what I had warned about ‘a horrendous genocide that will shock the world.’ I had warned about this because the killings were thoroughly shocking, people sleeping in the night were being butchered and slaughtered; even the Geneva Convention would not accept a normal combat during the war where women and children are being targeted. It is only genocide that kills women and children to stop the procreation of the hated tribe or ethnicity and to stop the future generation. So, I was angry, particularly when I saw the reaction of a country totally numb without a conscience.

We expected sympathy, sympathy for citizens who were killed in their sleep, sympathy with government of Benue state as a result of the invasion of the state, leading to the massacre of individuals, sympathy doesn’t cost anything.

But the President condemned it…

Condemnation is not sympathy; sympathy is to identify with the suffering. The President was condemning at the same time receiving Governor el-Rufai and other governors asking him to go for a second term, the second term agenda became more important than the lives of citizens that he swore to protect under the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria but it was worse because I do not remember any of the northern governors paying a courtesy visit to commiserate with their colleague for that which had happened in the state regardless of whoever Ortom is to them, he is their colleague and it is instructive that the Nigerian Governors should have reacted to this, although it is an ubiquitous phenomenon. Now, nobody cares; the lives of Nigerians are so cheap; nobody cares about Nigerians’ lives. There’s so much lives being wasted in Nigeria, so, I was horrified because I would have thought things would be done in a separate way. The President is well; he’s not sick, he could have taken 30 minutes to fly into Makurdi and pay a condolence visit to Governor Ortom or he could have sent his Deputy instead; the next thing we saw was a Government in denial, these are the things that made me very angry but my letter was not an angry letter.

That means you wrote President Buhari out of anger?

My letter did not express anger, I was deeply disappointed  and I tried to give the President advice that would make him leave a legacy, I did not insult him. In my letter I never mentioned the word Fulani like in my previous letter I tried to situate him and his ethnicity and asked him to protect the Fulani. I am not just talking on behalf of Benue; I am talking on behalf of Nigeria and Africa. When Donald Trump talks bad about this country, it affects me too. How can our leaders be so clueless and visionless, so insensitive and oblivious to the fact that the masses put them there to do a job? It is like when you give a man a contract to do a job and then he does the foundation level and decides to go and build another house without finishing the first one; that is the Nigerian mentality. Go and ask people, who are given contracts, they never end, they always ask for valuation so when I see that in the leadership it worries me. If you are a leader it means that you are answerable to the citizens, democracy is a government of the people, which means those who are in power answer to the citizens of the state. Democracy is a social contract made between the chosen leaders and the citizens in order to protect the masses. If you allow the people that voted you to be killed then you have betrayed democracy.

What you mean is that the Federal Government failed in this instance?