[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t was supposed to be easy for Buhari’s Northern power bloc. The northern domination agenda was about to be fully unleashed on the country called Nigeria.
The Ijaw man has been removed from Aso Rock and the Yoruba-Tinubu power cabal curtailed. The years of planning are over. It’s now time to execute and return the North to its pride of place and make ‘Alhaji’ and everything northern Nigerian ‘king’ again.
Yes! The Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan years and the progress of Southerners must be reversed and the northernization policy of Ahmadu Bello is reborn. Here’s the plot – it’s supposed to be easy.
1. De-commission Boko Haram. Stop the killings in the North East. Grant Boko Haram members amnesty. Pour out billions, of crude oil money, into negotiating with the deadly sect, and declare the Boko Haram war over. Do this without actual battles in the field.
2. Run over to the World Bank and obtain a loan of $2.1 billion to develop the North East.
3. Set up a northern something development commission and use crude oil money and Value Added Tax (VAT) paid by Southerners from products like beer and whisky which, are banned in 19 Northern states because of Sharia Law, and fund the commission to develop the North.
4. Acquire, by executive fiat, for the Fulani grazing land all over the nation. Sponsor your other terrorist militia to carry out killings in the Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria. The killings will make Nigerians so scared, they would gladly welcome the joke of National Grazing Reserves as a solution to the bloodbath.
5. Use “anti-corruption” to ensure the money/capital of southern Nigerians are frozen and seized or hidden from use. Use Sambo Dasuki as the bait – get all southerners who did national security contracts to bring back the money, while leaving Hausa Fulani who benefitted from the security spending and the big guns in Yorubaland like Olu Faleye to go free. With their rich men scampering and in hiding, the southern economy dies.
6. Begin a wholesale and brazen appointments of Islamist Northerners in all positions. If it means bringing out people from retirement, do it. The North must be fully in charge of the key government agencies.
7. Secretly employ Northern youths in the Central Bank of Nigeria, Federal Inland Revenue Service, immigrations, police, military, and so many other agencies.
8. Throw in weak Yorubas into the government to shut them up. Like a Kemi Adeosun for instance, she can be bossed around. Have Nasir El Rufai close-mark the Yoruba veepee. Not to worry about Igbos. They will sell their people over cheques that can bounce. Ask Ngige and Rochas. For the Niger Delta, close-mark the Central Bank boss since we cannot just remove him. And Kachikwu, hmmm. You know he knows the job. We should just keep watch closely.
9. Stop Southerners from getting dollars. Make sure only Dangote and neighbourhood money changers find dollars. Once we truly control the dollars, we control the nation.
10. Kill the Niger Deltans and their militants. Stop the Presidential Amnesty payments to ex-militants and stop payments to the people through the pipeline protection contracts. Pipeline protection jobs used to be given to Northerners, now it’s locals that do them. That cannot be allowed to continue. Secretly, return the contracts to Northerners, while flying the kite that it’s the Nigerian military taking over. Crude oil is a Fulani racket same as the medical drug business is an Igbo racket, and the Nigerian Stock Exchange is a Yoruba racket. Niger Deltans must be made to realise that the North owns the oil in their land. Find and possibly kill Tompolo. Use disgruntled militants in the Niger Delta to implicate Tompolo in one thing or the other. We must control everything!
11. Elevate Sharia to a national law.
12. Intensify the Jihad by kidnapping Southerners, then kill or impregnate them, indoctrinate them to accept Islam and increase northern Muslim population.
13. Kill anyone who gathers in the name of Biafra. Capture Nnamdi Kanu and jail him without trial. It doesn’t matter what the courts say, keep him locked up and plot how he will never leave prison alive. It is not as if the Nnamdi Kanu has an army to fight the nation. It’s invigorating for Northerners to clamp down on Biafra. It helps them re-live the pogroms of the 60s and the slaughter of the Nigerian civil war.
14. Whatever you do, get the people to say SAI BUHARI and call him MR INTEGRITY even if nothing he has ever done in his life, from writing the basic WAEC examinations, to staging coups, to losing billions in every office, be it NNPC boss or PTF boss, to employing only his tribesmen to refusing, to publicly declare asset as promised, and so many other facts that show he has no integrity at all. Just always get people to shout, Sai Baba! And say Mr. Integrity.
Yes, it was SUPPOSED to be easy. But the following happened:
1. The Agatu genocide and Enugu killings only turned Nigerians away from the idea of Fulanis settling in their ancestral land. So, it cancelled our National Grazing Reserve – the cover for our land Jihad.
2. Controlling the flow of dollars also meant that Nigeria’s international backers like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other international financial institutions like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley turned their backs on Nigeria.
3. And what use is the dollar in the hands of Northern money changers when Igbos and other Nigerians cannot buy it and transfer it abroad to buy goods and services?
3. Then the unforeseen – while we were chasing Tompolo – the Niger Delta Avengers – emerged. So the quiet in the Niger Delta during the Jonathan years was a mirage… Militancy has returned with a vengeance and what it took the old age militants years to achieve, the new militants group have achieved them in a matter of weeks. Just like Boko Haram received so much sympathy from Northerners, the new age militants have strong sympathy from the Niger Deltans. In the information age, the age of the Internet, the drama is unfolding in the eyes of the media. It is now very dominant in the minds of Nigerians and the world that the Niger Delta is a powerful region in the country. They feed the country. It is now very clear that the amnesty programme put together by late President Musa Yar’Adua, which Northern elite hate him for, was a brilliant programme that saved Nigeria. Aboki power is no longer super power.
4. And the idea of Biafra just won’t go away.
5. And Dangote finds that with the rest of Nigeria in financial strangulation, there is no money to buy his flour, sugar, cement, juice, water, and macaroni.
6. And with Islamist Northerners in charge of the Nigeria Customs Service and other key parastatals, executing the northern domination agenda, Nigeria’s business sector is plummeting and with that comes reduced revenues.
8. Then Mother Nature (God, the Universe)… A wave of natural disasters hit tomatoes, maize and suddenly, the agriculture industry where Northerners dominate is in trouble. The old agriculture minister, Audu Ogbe surely didn’t help. Owning a big farm doesn’t make someone an agricultural expert, the North is beginning to learn.
9. And the increased poverty of the Southerner is beginning to reflect on their Northern neighbours too. No “free money” to go out for suya in the evening. No money to pay the Northerner living in the security gate. Nobody to patronise a Northerner working as a commercial cyclist.
And so, while they think that, finally, Jonathan is out and they can “take back their country”, a few are already finding out that we are better off when we are all better off.
Ena Ofugara studied law in the University of Benin for some years before leaving Nigeria for the United States where he is studying while working. He has a passion for Nigeria. He has a clear bias for his people of the Niger Delta and he believes the Nigerian system – justice, social, economic – is rigged against his people. So he became a social and political commentator to highlight this injustice. Connect with him on Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
