KEN UGBECHIE

Since his deployment of salty and racist language to describe certain migrants, US President Donald Trump, the man who could live for 200 years, so says the White House lead doctor Navy Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, has had his persona ripped apart by a bewildered and roiled world. Trump, usually rabid and rancid though, had in a locker room jive taunted migrants from Africa, Haiti and El Salvador as persons from “shithole” nations.

The use of the word ‘shithole’ riled not a few. The United Nations, African Union, Botswana and a few African nations were quick to denounce the statement and Trump himself. Trump made a half-hearted attempt to deny it but surely, as it now seems, nobody believed him.

The American President would not care, anyway. He has had his say. Some of his Republican colleagues, unable to take it in, repudiated their man who more often than not behaves like a bull in a China shop; out of sorts with the decorum and pristine demands of his office. Trump is a bull, and a bull cannot but bully its way. He bullied his way through the often slippery stacks and turnstiles of corporate America. He bullied his staff, bullied women, groping some inside elevators and at odd places and strangely looks every bit a decent family man.

Trump’s beef with migrants from Africa and his shithole enclaves is that they do not measure up to the American standard. He would rather have migrants from Norway (as if any Norwegian needs America to survive). His fear is that migrants from the so-called shithole nations lower the American standard because largely they come without skill. They add and stress the American welfare scheme, abuse social security and push up the crime tempo in America. Simply put, they add no value. Never mind that Trump’s grandfather was a migrant who landed in America from Germany, did all sorts including carpentry, real estate and other things in-between before America added real value to his life, an inestimable value that Trump stands on today to abuse other migrants.

Yet, while Trump’s acerbic and caustic profiling may bear a sting of racism and contempt for a particular species of humanity, somewhere in Africa, one country is proving Trump right by acting out all the idiosyncrasies and brute quirks of a shithole state. Nigeria, what a country! In one moment of unshackled madness, some Fulani terrorists ran over helpless communities in Benue State and butchered the natives in the most imperious show of savagery. They killed 73 persons in lieu of cows allegedly rustled in the affected communities.

Before the pogrom, the state government had enacted a law prohibiting open grazing but prescribing ranching which is the norm in non-shithole nations. But the Fulani terrorists who use cows as cover to commit horrendous heists said they would not have regard for such law. And they made good their promise by herding their cows all over the communities, destroying farms and ravaging farm produce. That’s what you get in a shithole nation. Some persons are simply above the law, any law. They don’t need to contest the propriety of such law in the court. They simply stamp on the law the way their cows stamp on the farms and nothing happens.

The Fulani terror assault on Benue communities was just one in a litany of such murderous adventures of the nomadic cow ‘herders’. They have killed in Nasarawa, Delta, Plateau, Taraba, Niger, Yobe, Anambra, Enugu and everywhere. That is troubling. But what is more troubling is the attitude of the Nigerian government.

President Muhammadu Buhari compounds the matter with his long-drawn silence and inaction in the face of the orgy of blood-cuddling violence perpetrated by these Fulani terrorists. Rather than take decisive action against the killers, his government is proposing the establishment of cattle colonies around the country. Cattle colony is a ready hatchery for more mayhem. It is akin to forming a government within a government. The same persons who refused to obey the law when they lived among the rest of the people in a state will violate any law once they settle into their colony where they would have formed their own government, and created their own laws and mores.

I am not a fan of Trump and his peculiar fits of tantrums laced with unvarnished racist slur, but pray, what manner of country would tolerate a group notorious for blood-letting and lately, the murder of over 70 persons in a space of 48 hours in their host communities and all that the President of that country could do was to tell the grieving governor to learn how to accommodate his killer neighbours?

It did not bother the President how this special and privileged neighbour that must be accommodated procured sophisticated arms as if illegal possession of firearms has been yanked off our statute books. The President who is also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces did not order military protection for the bereaved and still vulnerable communities in the state in the same manner he deployed military might in the South East where unarmed agitators for self-rule once held sway and South-South where armed militants attacked oil installations, a case of economic sabotage, to vent their frustrations against the system.

As it now stands, Governor Samuel Ortom and his people of Benue have met with the President. They have been asked to love their neighbours as themselves. They were also told that perpetrators of the bloody act would be punished. This is the usual language of the script. We said the same thing to the people of Enugu State, Nasarawa, Kogi, Taraba, Plateau and all others who had been served the bloody broth of the Fulani terrorists. But they were not told how government has decided to give them protection against further attacks. Such indifference from the Presidency emboldens the killers. It is obvious that securing these states which had come under Fulani terror attacks is beyond the police. It requires military might, nothing less.

By the way, why is the Federal Government pushing for the establishment of cattle colonies and not ranching. Does such colony theory not justify Trump’s shithole profiling? The world over, cows are ranched just the same way you own a cocoa, yam, rice or millet farm. In Botswana (which has more cows than Nigeria), Ghana, United States and elsewhere, ranching is the routine, not the creation of colonies. The various governors are against colonies because they do not in the first place have the vast expanse of land to accommodate colonies. By its name, colony denotes a community. There is always a temptation for members of such community to feel alienated from the larger community, in this instance, the state, hence a sense to owe no allegiance to such state including obeying the laws of the state. Because of the penchant of these Fulani killers (I still believe most of them are not Nigerians) to bear arms, unchallenged, granting them colonies would mean the creation of arms colonies, a perfect recipe for insurrection. This is just another bullshit from the ever unfeeling Nigerian governments and it justifies our status as a shithole nation in the estimation of Trump.

Obasanjo gave Nigerians bullshit: spent billions of dollars for electricity but gave us darkness; Yar’adua did same, dribbled the nation with his health status and lacked the honour to resign on account of poor health; Jonathan did same, was too weak to lead and created a colony of thieves. Now, Buhari’s is feeding Nigerians with overdose of bullshit from extreme suffering, weak naira, unprecedented nepotism, incompetence, bloodletting all in a country that still cannot boast potable water and stable electricity. That is bullshit from a shithole nation.