To Thine Our Own Self Be True. This is not an endorsement of any leader in Nigeria. I was in Nigeria recently and observed that Nigerians have formed a subculture of always complaining as a means of coping with the realities. I now see these complaints as a quarrel amongst thieves. They robbed a bank and the smartest among them drove off with loot and left the rest stranded. They cannot call the police, so they are left with the infighting which they consider as protest.
Every Nigerian wants good leadership, but none wants to aspire to be good citizens. The negative ordeal I encountered while in Nigeria was never by any one in power. Nigerians are the gods in their little domain. In this domain, they are very dictatorial and callous and exercise power with vehemence in their various jurisdictions. From the trader who will sell you fake goods at exorbitant prices to the policemen at the checkpoint who mete out summary punishment, the rule is to dish out as much pain as possible. There is no sense of brotherhood. There is no sense of “we are in this together, let us help each other “.
Dishing out pain is the culture. You must pay before being served even when you have paid. This is the ugliness that hides before these excessive criticisms of leaders. Anytime a Nigerian comes in contact with a government agent, it is time to be punished. There is no agency in Nigeria where those employed there don’t make the abuse of the citizens the metric of their productivity. Trying to get a driver’s license, you must jump through hoops, trying to get a passport is almost as bad as trying to obtain a visa to another country. In most cases, the visa ordeal is friendlier and there are no bribes involved. Try to clear goods from a Lagos port is like squeezing through the eye of the needle. There are no rules and regulations, just chaos and cruelty that numbs the mind.
A lot of people choose to walk away from the abuse of the government officials and agents, leaving their goods behind. Flying into Lagos airport is the worst ordeal. Every government agency is there including the touts from Ido Park. They are all trying to tell you they are there to hurt you. There is no cordial welcome for a returnee. There is nowhere in Nigeria the citizen does not try to erect his own obstacles. This is very sad.
Are we at war? Why so many checkpoints? Why is the Nigerian criminalized and humiliated daily by agencies that are supposed to serve them? The ordeal of being a citizen in Nigeria can drive one into a mental institution. Nigerians are resilient and quietly watch their country being turned into one huge mental asylum. The madness has become cultural. At the end of all these, the extortionists get together and blame the leaders who are the product of their thievery. This is the problem.
People who have no sense of good citizenship are crying daily for good leadership. Let’s learn to recognize that the microcosm must be organized to care for each other. Imagine that police don’t harass and shake down farmers bringing food to markets. This may lower the price of food and the decay of food due to loss of time at checkpoints will be avoided. Inflation reduced. Let us learn to care, maybe one day we can have someone who cares to assume leadership. Then we can be proud to say that is one of us.
The ratio of the naira to the dollar is not a measure of the Nigerian economy. It is a measure of the lack of productivity of the Nigerian. Blaming the leaders is a subterfuge that subtracts leadership from the people. Leadership is always a reflection of the consciousness of the people. Bad people can only get bad leaders while good people get good leaders. You cannot have one without the other.
Dr Austin Orette writes from Houston Texas
THE LAST JIHAD PART 5A BY DR AUSTIN ORETTE
“If you cannot question or interrogate it, then it is a lie “Of all the religions in the World, Islam is the only one that you cannot interrogate. Those who do are violently killed by adherents of Islam, who proclaim they are fighting for Allah. My question to the preachers of Islam has always been: If Allah is great, all powerful and all merciful, why does he need weak humans to fight for him or defend him?
All over the world, Islam is fighting one war or the other in the name of Allah. The major reason is that they want to impose their teaching on people who just want to be left alone. They tell us Islam is a religion of peace. All we see around us is contrary to this claim. Any attempt to interrogate and question the teachings of Islam is met with fatuas and murderous rage and violence.
When Muhammad started as a preacher in Mecca, he didn’t have followers. He moved to Medina and started interacting with Christian and Jewish scholars who contributed to some of his knowledge. When he could not convince them of the veracity of his claim about his Allah, he left and went to raise an army to conquer them. This is why the beginning of the Quran is similar to the Torah and the Holy bible.
In his last 4 years in Medina, he had some vision that he was not sure if they came from God. Those visions were apocalyptic. The gentleness of the first part of the Quran was gone and has been transmogrified into a monstrous recreation of human existence. It was in these last four years he captured the Jews and Christians and forced them to his ways of teaching. Many were slaughtered. Those who did not convert were taxed and called Dhimis. The Dhimis are taxed but cannot testify in any disputes and Muslims are allowed to cheat them in any transaction. They are not protected unless they pay Jizia (An Islamic tax for unbelievers), which is another tax or protection. This system had to be repeated every time a new territory was captured and subjugated. The booty from the wars was given to his warriors and followers. This is how Islam was spread across the world with a Sword until the Islamic empire fell with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1924. A lot of people were set free.
Mohammad himself said he cannot tell whether his later visions were from God. The attempt by Salmon Rushdie to question the satanic verses led to a Fatua on him and was almost killed in a gruesome attack by a fanatical Muslim. He lost an eye during that attack. He was a Muslim who grew up in a Muslim family.
As it stands today, anyone who questions the ways and whys of Islam is marked for death. Millions of Muslims who don’t want to be Muslims anymore cannot come out and say it. Their own family will execute them.
I grew up in a Christian household. My childhood was very idyllic. As a child going to church on Sundays was a treat because we also use the Sundays to visit relatives and eat some nice and tasty food. On my way to church on one Sunday day, I saw this group of women wearing white wrappers and dancing. The dance and music fascinated me and I forgot Church. At the end the dancing and incantations they served some nice meal. I enjoyed the meal and lost sense of time as I enjoyed the food. No church for me that Sunday. One of the best goat pepper soup I ever tasted. My childhood Friend who missed me at church saw me. He reported to my mother that I was eating unclean food because those people were pagans. I was chastised. After that incident, I devised a way to hide my visit to that idol worshipper’s shrine. Somehow, I got the timetable for the meals. It was a new world for me. I will stealthily go there and eat one of the best meals. I will go to Church and smuggle myself out without my friends noticing. Gradually they all joined me and our demand for the pepper soup could no longer be satisfied. Our parents found out and it was all over. No more goat pepper soup on Sundays. We had a stern warning that that food is forbidden food. I was confused. I asked if that was the same food eaten by Adam and Eve? There was no answer. I became very skeptical. How can the good people who were so kind to me be regarded as bad? No one attacked the traditional worshippers. As a child I was confused and very curious. I missed the pepper soup, but most of all I missed the love those people showed me at the shrine. I started hanging around if I could run errands for them. I could not eat their food anymore but I wanted to serve them in some capacity to show my gratitude for their love and care. I was precocious. Not once did they put pressure on me to adopt their religion. It was the Christians who were putting pressure on them to convert to Christianity. Coincidentally I started asking more questions about the Bible. Why would the Bible say this good people who gave me so much love will end in a lake of fire because they did not believe in Jesus? The cruelty and unfairness of such a scenario tormented me. My curiosity became feverish and exponential. I will ask the Sunday school teacher questions like: God created Adam and Eve. They had two children named Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel. Who did Cain marry since Adam and Eve and Cain are the only ones alive? The answers given did not satisfy my curiosity.
Studying the bible in secondary school as I grew older created more questions. Throughout this period of inquiry, no Christian person in my surrounding gave me any reason to feel that my life was in danger. These inquiries led me to the conclusion that whoever God is, will reveal itself to me. I was told to believe but I wanted to know. In my heart I know a just and kind God would give me the answers I am seeking. I was searching for meaning when a verse in the Bible flashed through my mind. The verse says: Those who worship God must do so in truth and Spirit. I went back to the Bible and read Jesus’ Sermon on the mount, and I came to the absolute conclusion that all I need to be close to God is Love. All the religions talk are just rituals to mystify the masses. I came to the understanding that all we need to do in this world is love our neighbor and God is an essence that is in every one of us.
Dr Austin Orette writes from Houston Texas
THE LAST JIHAD PART 5B BY DR AUSTINE ORETTE
“For everything under the sun, there is time. There is time for peace and there is time for war’’. They will always lie to you. The Fulani Muslim will raise his right hand and put his left hand on the Quran, look you in eye and lie to you. He is practicing Takiya which is allowed by their religion. The art of lying to further the cause of Islam. You will never be at peace with Islamic fundamentalists. It is always a lie. “
Africans have a better understanding of religion. There is nowhere in traditional African history you will find Africans going to prove that their god is superior by killing other Africans. Africans fought wars of conquest for material things and territories. Fighting for Heaven was not part of their geography. That was for angels. They did not fight wars of religious imposition. They have a clear understanding that God is big enough for everyone.
The African traditional worshippers believe that no house built by man can accommodate the majesty and fullness of God. They did not indulge in the grandiosity of calling any place they constructed, the house Of God.
The concept of holy wars was brought to Africa by foreign people like the Fulani Jihadists. After experiencing aspects of religion in my childhood, I came to the firm belief that I don’t need to be introduced to any god filled with human passions of rage and revenge. God is love. That is enough for me. I don’t need to kill or hurt anyone to prove my loyalty to God. God is not in any book. God is not in any building. God is closer to us than our heart beat. The God essence is in every creature of God. We are compelled to give God’s love to all creatures of God. This is where I vehemently disagree with the Fulani and Wahhabi brand of Islam.
They consider their wrath to be the same as the wrath of God. They should direct that wrath towards solving the poverty, ignorance and disease they have created in the North. They should leave the South out of their map of conquest. If they love God as they claim, there is so much work for them to do , to repair all the damage they brought to the North of Nigeria. Eternity will not be enough for them to repair the damage they have done to the Hausa people of Nigeria. If they love God, they should concentrate on the rehabilitation of the Hausa men, women and children they have destroyed in the name of Islam.
The Fulani are the first to bring holy wars to Nigeria and they have never had a change of mind and strategy since then. These wars intensified when they started being used by invaders to push their tribal and religious domination. They have no love for anyone who is not a Muslim or Fulani. God is Love. This love can be found in all religions and the loneliest places. This love gave me security and the wings to fly. This is the love that made Mary Slessor to stop the killing of twins in the Niger Delta. I believe in this love and the sanctity of life for all people. This is my belief and because of this love, I will not impose this belief on the Fulani who think differently.
I consider it sacrilegious for them to force me to accept the doctrines that led to the wanton killing of Deborah Samson and others in the land of the Fulani.
If the Fulani are sincere, they should spend their energy to clean up the children of the North they have destroyed and turned to weapons of mass destruction for Nigeria. They should adopt the Almajiris and rehabilitate them instead of using them and Sharia as weapons of war.
These children are cast away as refuse and made to beg for their survival. They are married away when they could barely walk. The rate of child abuse and neglect in the North is mortifying. About 15 million children in the North of Nigeria are destitute and malnourished. They are moribund and homeless. If the sight of children did not draw on their hearts and make them to show love to children, then it means the religion they are willing to kill and die for has no empathy in their doctrines. What is a religion if it cannot hear the cries of suffering and dying children? Whatever they do or say is nothing but power grab.
They are deaf and dumb to the destitution and misery they created in Hausa land and they are bent on expanding this misery to the South. We have a duty to stop them. Islam in Nigeria is a political movement of the Fulani. It has nothing to do with those of us in the South. Their push to force Sharia into the South is nothing but an act of war. We can never reason with any people who consider us less human because we don’t subscribe to their religious beliefs.
In this wise, those in the Middle Belt and the South of Nigeria must be prepared to defend themselves from those who will not only kill us in the name of their God but also lie to us in the name of their god about their intent.
A military head of state told Obasanjo that he has not seen and not privy to the constitution when he was asked to produce it when Obasanjo was being propped to be president. This was a lie. He knew that Sharia was part of that constitution that was written without the consent of Nigerians. The General knew that if this was revealed before the election it will cause chaos. As soon as Obasanjo was sworn in, the constitution appeared. Did the constitution appear from heaven? Everything the former head of state did or said was deliberate. He followed the Fulani manuscript of TAKIYA. He was one of the architects of that fake document. After that election, that fraudulent constitution was revealed and the core north declared they are Sharia states, based on the sharia that was fraudulently embedded in that fraudulent document. This is classic TAKIYA in Islamic practice where Muslims are obligated to lie to unbelievers to further the cause of Islam.
Recently, Northern Fulani Muslims have been going on television to say they don’t know what restructuring means. This is another bold face lie. They know we were restructured in the First Republic and all we are saying is adopt the ways of the First Republic. They would rather confuse this with nebulous terms like “lack of good leadership “ because they want to continue with this odious system that enables their thievery and ability to import criminals and terrorists into Nigeria to cause unrest. are so duplicitous they think we don’t know Sharia is a form of restructuring. They want us to fund Sharia with our labour and wealth in our terrain. They are gamblers. They want to continue the centralization that gives all powers to the Fulani in all cadres of government so they can control the economy and wealth of Nigeria and use it to empower the caliphate. If they don’t achieve that, they will set up their parallel government of Sharia where a northern monarch is the Prime minister of all Nigeria Muslims and every mosque their military command post.
They tell us Islam is superior to our culture. The Europeans who colonized us did not go this far in their grandiosity. We cannot be in the same country with those who will use lies as instruments of statecraft. The Caliphate has used fictitious population figures to advantage the caliphate. All over the world, the coast is more densely populated. This is true in the Republic of Benin and Cameroon but reversed in Nigeria.
The Fulani Islamic movement in Nigeria is about conquest. It has nothing to do about heaven. It is about the oil which Fulani believe is their gift from God as a Muslim nation like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The Fulani has been at war with us, but we don’t know it.
All the negative indices in Nigeria are what obtains in a war-torn country. To say otherwise is hiding our head in the sand.
All the uncertainties in Nigeria are deliberate creation of the Fulani caliphate. Just like the creation of the Almajiris in the North. Gradually they are beginning the total Amajirification of Southern graduates. They have made them jobless and penurious. They are hungry and their clothing is becoming tattered. The females are selling themselves at any price to the members of the caliphate in Abuja. The caliphate has no interest to engage in solving the perennial problems of Nigeria. Their end point is the total subjugation of the non-Muslim populations of Nigeria and makes them second class citizens as obtained in most Muslim countries. Their plan is to weaken the enemy by destroying the institutions they believe in. They would create more problems to distract and confuse us. All money marked for development are stolen and directed to the Fulani treasury for their conquest and purchase of Southerners into their camp. They have opened all the borders in the North for the Fulani fighters to come in as they gradually intensify their position. Their loss of central power to accelerate this process has rendered them apoplectic. The mere adjustment of the tax bill to reflect productivity pushed them to accelerate Sharia in the Southwest. To them, this is war and the camp of the enemy must be divided. This is why they push for Sharia in the South west. Divide and conquer is their MO .This is why in the past fifty years, they used their government and military people to erode any semblance of a functioning state. They created the hardship in Nigeria. They want every Southerner to Japa so they can take over the land. Those left will be too weak to fight. We are in a war zone. We must draw a clear red line they should not cross.
Imposing Islam on us is a red line. The progress made in Nigeria was through their military surrogates who usurped power. This has emboldened them. They use the military to enrich their people, they use the military to push Nigeria into OIC. They used the military to smuggle Sharia into the constitution.
They are talking about war and secession. On the question of secession they are bluffing. They are parasites who cannot live without their host. In war, we should take them seriously and prepare for one. Our preparation should start by us in the South telling our children to refuse any posting by the NYSC to the North. There is no security for them and the NYSC is a source of cheap labor for indolent Northern states who consider education a haram and deliberately render their citizens illiterate and ignorant .They spend more on pilgrimages to Mecca than they spend on education. Using our children as cheap labor is a tax that is imposed on non-believers. The Fulani considers this normal based on the tenet of their religion. It is a form of Tax the unbelievers must pay in an Islamic society.
The NYSC should be converted to one year of full military training as it was initially conceived when the caliphate thwarted this plan because they wanted their Islamic army to have a monopoly on weapons. All military commands in Nigeria must be decentralized. Police and other security institutions must be regionalized. We have to fight to preserve our way of life and reject any form of religious compulsion or imposition.
The next phase is to encourage the Hausa and other tribes that have been oppressed in the North to use their numerical advantage to deny the Fulani any political position in the North. I f you cannot elect a Hausa person, look for the nearest indigenous Yoruba, Igbo or Biron or Igala. The Fulani must not be allowed to hold power in Nigeria. They must be ostracized from our body politics until they prove their allegiance is to Nigeria. They are a cancer in our body politics. The Fulani Caliphate erroneously believes that a Christian is docile. This is going to be their undoing. Christians are not known for shedding innocent blood like that of Deborah Samson. Wanton killing is not part of Christian theology. Christians will always fight to defend themselves. In the eleventh century when the holy land Jerusalem was conquered by Islamic warriors who prevented Christian’s entry into the Holy land, Pope Urban 11, cried to Christendom, the Christians fought and took over the Holy land. These battles were called the crusades. Since then the holy land is open to anyone of any faith, including Muslims to visit. The Nigerian civil war was fought and won by southerners and the people from the middle belt. Most of the generals of Northern extraction were colossal failures as they confused the civil war with Islamic jihad. They have to be pulled from the war front due to their extreme cruelty that violated the laws of war. This is their weakness. The whole of North Africa was black. All the places in the Bible like Turkey were Christian enclaves. Today it is difficult to find a black man in Egypt and also difficult to find a church in Constantinople. This is what the Fulani are aiming for.
It is our responsibility to make them understand they are in the wrong century; we must make it our duty to wake them up from the toxic intoxication of their religion. We cannot do this by preaching alone as the toxic brew of their religion makes them think they are fighting for Allah. They are fighting for domination. There is nothing more sinister than a person who kills in the name of God. Be prepared. We have a duty to defend ourselves.
Dr Austin Orette writes from Houston Texas