by Pius Adesanmi
After the deplorable ethnic clashes and killings in Ile Ife, the wheels of Nigerian discipline and punish moved very swiftly. Leaders in the region appealed for calm and promised justice. The Nigerian Police acted more efficiently than the London Metropolitan Police. I was surprised. The IG moved swiftly. Soon, Ogbeni Aregbesola hinted that there had been or there would be arrests. The police began to brag about arrests.
Finally, the police has now paraded the arrested suspects. Premium Times has equally published the full names of all 38 arrested persons, complete with a photograph of a cross-section of the accused…
Looking at those people and their names, I make bold to claim that they are all foreigners. They are not Nigerians. I believe they are Anago (Yoruba people) from Benin Republic, Togo, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago. I am happy that they have been arrested and I want them to pay for their crimes if found guilty.
I don’t know what Nigeria has done to all these foreigners. Why are they attacking us and killing our people? From Southern Kaduna to Benue to Enugu to Ekiti, every time terror has struck, leaving a pile of corpses, we have been told repeatedly that the attackers are from Futa Toro and Futa Djallon, from Niger, from Mali to Senegal, from anywhere but Nigeria.
Now, Anago foreigners are also doing the same. I have two urgent propositions.
1) The formula that the police has used in apprehending the Anago foreigners of Ile-Ife so swiftly should be applied to the nomadic foreigners from Futa Toro so that Nigeria will not continue to sustain a situation in which some foreigners are more equal than others in appearance and indeed.
2) Since we insist that these attacks are by foreigners and we know their countries of origin, Nigeria should kuku carpet bomb Niger, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, etc, in the case of the Futa Toro and Futa Djallon foreigners and Benin Republic, Togo, Brazil, and Trinidad & Tobago in the case of the Anago foreigners killing our people.
Nigeria should learn to treat “foreign killers” equally by knowing how to arrest them swiftly on all sides. It is bad enough that these horrible killings by “foreigners” are happening. We should not compound tragedy by tolerating a police and a justice system capable of apprehending only one set of foreigners.
No country can know peace if she lives by the golden rule of George Orwell’s Animal Farm…
Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Leave a reply