Says FG passive as ‘Fulani herdsmen take over our lands, kill my people’
All roads lead to Gboko, the traditional headquarters of the Tiv ethnic nationality in Benue State, as a new paramount ruler, Tor Tiv V, HRH, Prof James Ornguga Ayatse, mounts the throne today.
But it’s a mixed feeling for the monarch, who, while expressing deep pains and frustration over the incessant killing of his people and destruction of farmlands allegedly by Fulani herdsmen, proclaimed that with his ascension to the throne, God was set to liberate Tivland.
Ayatse, a former vice chancellor of Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi, and pioneer vice chancellor of Federal University, Dutsi-ma, Katsina State, is sad that the Federal Government turned a blind eye as Fulani marauders killed his people, destroyed their homes, and took over their farmlands.
In this exclusive interview with Saturday Sun at his private residence in Makurdi, he warned that the prevailing hunger in the country might nosedive into famine if urgent and appropriate remedial measures were not taken. He spoke with MURPHY GANAGANA.
You were an academic, who rose to the position of vice chancellor of two federal universities. Now, you have mounted the throne of your forefathers as the Tor Tiv. Would you say it was a dream turned reality, did you know you would be the Tor Tiv someday and planned for it?
Thank you very much. I am by the grace of God, elevated to the position as the Tor Tiv, the fifth. That means I am the paramount ruler of the Tiv nation worldwide. What I can say is that it’s the doing of the Lord; I didn’t expect at any point in time in my life as an academic, that I would end up being a traditional ruler, being a paramount ruler of my people. I never thought about it, I never dreamt about it; it just came as God wanted. So it wasn’t a deliberate plan, something that I set out to do and worked towards, no. If you asked me some five months ago whether I would be the paramount ruler of the Tiv nation, I would say no, but here I am. I came in, indicated interest in the dying minutes, and then got into the race, and I was elected by an overwhelming majority; out of the 46 kingmakers, 39 voted for me to be king. So, it is God’s doing.
In Tivland, do you need to have a royal blood before being eligible for election as Tor Tiv?
Well, for the Tiv nation, you ascend the throne as the paramount ruler by rotation. The Tiv nation is made up of six ruling houses and they take turns; once it is the turn of a ruling house, any eligible person can actually contest. So, we operate in intermediate areas, we have six of them. We have Gwer, we have Lobi, we have Jengba, we have Jeichira, we have Kwande, and then Sankera. So it rotates around these ruling houses. And also, Tiv is known to have two sons; there is Chongu, there is Ipusu, and it alternates. If a Chongu person has it this time, next time it has to be an Ipusu. But then, that would now move to another intermediate area; that is the way it operates. The last Tor Tiv was Chongu and when they were looking for his successor, they searched among the Ipusu, and I was chosen, but from Kwande, which has not had a turn before.
I understand you worship with the Deeper Life Bible Church. Would you be able to manage the conflict of ideology, beliefs, between you Christian faith and the performance of traditional rites?
You are wondering; well, if you really understand the Christian faith, you will know that kingship actually originated from there. When God chose Abraham, he told him that kings will come out of your loins, so it has biblical origin, and when the Israelites wanted a king, God chose a king for them. And when the first king disobeyed God, He chose a replacement, King David was God’s choice. So, all along, God is the one that chooses kings. And when you talk about traditional, people that are of God, tradition is all around God. When Solomon became king, he started well, but later on disobeyed God and the commandment of God was that he shouldn’t multiply wives, he shouldn’t marry wives from the strange nations around them, but he went ahead and married so many wives. The Bibles tells us he had 700 wives and 300 concubines from strange countries and they brought their gods, the gods they were worshiping, so as he became old, he now joined them to worship their gods; that was when idolatry was introduced. And when people talk about tradition, they are making reference to idols, they are making reference to witchcraft, they are making reference to cultism; they are making reference to activities and actions that are evil, that are destructive, that are not open. In Israel also, you discover that God raised kings that destroyed those practices. Josiah was one of them who destroyed those idols and brought the people back to the worship of the true God. So you see that kingship is a thing of God; but we must realize that any good thing that God gives to his children, the devil would want to go and corrupt it. And what people do not know is that once the devil corrupts it, they run away and leave it, so it becomes the thing of the devil. But really, it is meant for the children of God, and the children of God must be bold enough to go and reclaim what is theirs. Kingship was created by God, and even the Bible says when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice. God wants people that fear him, that honour him, to take position of authority, so that the people will rejoice.
So, my election as paramount ruler of the Tiv nation is because God wants to take over the land; because I will not be involved in idol worship, I will not be involved in witchcraft, I had already told them that I will take my oath of office with the Bible, which I believe in, and is binding. So, I am going to stand and rule in the fear of God; I will not be involved in the traditional things of the devil. My position is very clear about this; if there is conflict between the devil and God, God will be supreme.
Your majesty, it is obvious your people are already setting an agenda for you. What do you set out to achieve as you mount the throne?
Well, I have heard a lot of challenges, I have seen a lot of challenges, but I have thought of four key things to do that will address most of the challenges. Number one is to reaffirm the kingship and lordship of God over the Tiv nation. Tiv people are God’s people; in other places, you have the god of the rain, god of the sun, god of water, but there is nothing like that in Tivland. So, all I would be doing is to take them back and reaffirm that God is the king and Lord over this kingdom. My second key agenda is to re-establish the unity of the people, and the third is to take them back to agriculture, which is the mainstay; and the last one, is to reform and transform the culture of the land, the tradition and culture of the land.
You mentioned development of agriculture as one of your set targets. Of course, before oil, agriculture was what sustained the north, and it peaked with the period of Kano groundnut pyramid. Suddenly, everything went down and today there is no food for the people. What went wrong?
Well, if you look at the history of the country, we started very well; we were working hard to earn a living, and therefore, that drove us to look for wealth in the soil, in the land, farming. That was when you saw all these pyramids, rice, groundnut, and so on, which we were exporting and making money. Then, we hit oil; oil boom became oil doom, easy money came and people now withdrew from farming. So, everybody is to gather at the national capital and to share money, what has come in from oil, so you hear of allocation of funds. Go to some places, they just sit and share that money; you don’t see anything it is used for. And therefore, with easy money, people now say why do I go and toil and suffer, when I can get easy money. Now, some people go into politics, because of the easy money. Presently in Tivland, a lot of young, able-bodied men, who are supposed to be in the farm tilling, have abandoned the land. They have abandoned farming, they say they are politicians, and all they do is to move from street to street, begging political office holders, and their understanding, their orientation of politics is wrong. So, what has happened is that with easy money, people don’t have to toil, things have become easy. Therefore, the virtue of hard work, the virtue of growing gradually to reach the zenith of your career, the virtues of integrity, virtues of honesty, are no longer there. People want shortcuts; they want dishonest ways of making money. Oil money has ruined our agriculture. There was even a time some of our leaders said the problem was not how to make money, but how to spend it. Now, how could you say something like that if you are a thinking person? All they would have done was to get that oil money, plough it in agriculture; be using the oil money to grow agriculture, using that money to subsidize agriculture. There is a second reason I said agriculture has gone down. Now, for the few people that are farming, it is very difficult to break even. With the easy money, people import agricultural produce –rice, and so on; and the process is cheaper. In developed countries like America, sometimes, they pay their farmers not to produce. So, the cost of rice that lands here is cheaper than the money you use to produce the same quantity of rice in the country; and therefore, people make money doing massive importation, and that has killed agriculture at home, because by the time you suffer and produce a bag of rice, the selling cost is below your production cost. That is why agriculture is going down. And because nothing has been done to promote agriculture, the government set up agricultural universities, but did not fund them as specialized universities. So, they cannot promote agriculture, they cannot promote agricultural technology that would bring agricultural inputs at the doorstep of the farmers. I headed a university of agriculture, but if you go there, the students are not interested in reading core agriculture courses; they want to read Engineering, they want to read things that are outside agriculture, because there is a market for it; there are jobs for that. You read agriculture, it is difficult to get employment, it is difficult to set up yourself because you need capital, you need land; how do you set up on your own, how do you get the loans?
So, anyhow you look at it, agriculture has not been encouraged, and that is why the story has changed. Hunger is in the land now; if the borders are shut today that we should feed ourselves, we have food security problem. Now, there is hunger in North Africa, they need food; presently, the cost of food has gone up and the local rice, for instance is going for about N18, 000 per bag. So, there is hunger in the land. Farmers are producing, but the cost is attracting them to sell; some might even sell including what they should sell for the next season. So, unless something is done, hunger would ravage us. And for us here, what has worsened the situation is that Fulani herdsmen have driven farmers out of their farmlands; they can’t plant, and it is a recipe for hunger. We are calling on the Federal Government to intervene so that we get back to our farms. They’ve taken over our farmlands; they are rearing their cattle there, but you don’t eat meat to sleep. So, there is potential for famine if something is not done.
You spoke of virtues, your majesty. What is the most important virtue of the Tiv culture, what is it that is dearest to the heart of a Tiv man?
For the original Tiv man, what is dearest to him is truth, honesty, integrity, hard work. A Tiv man would not see white and tell you it is black; a Tiv man will tell you precisely, what he thinks, he would tell you his mind. That is the original nature of the Tiv man when you are talking about virtue. In those days, you go to the farm, you harvest yam and leave it on the farm; they never used to bring it home, but nobody will touch it.
Apart from the invasion of farmlands and communities by Fulani herdsmen, there are other challenges, especially ethno-religious clashes mostly in the North. How worried are you?
Well, especially the issue of Fulani incursion, it is becoming a national problem. And I wonder why it is becoming a national problem when we have a Federal Government that is strong enough to deal with the problem. For us in Tivland, the problem has been with us for about four years now. The Fulanis come with weapons and they kill our people; drive them out of their lands, destroy their crops. We cried, but nobody is coming to our aid; and there appears to be a blind eye being turned to the activities of the Fulanis who have taken over a lot of our fertile lands. If you go to Logo, the land is taken; if you go to Guma, the land is taken. You remember that the former Tor Tiv (his predecessor), they destroyed his ancestral home, that land cannot be accessed by the people for farming. If you go to some areas in Kwande, the Fulanis have taken over the land. They’ve virtually taken over and destroyed all the lands in all the border local government areas; they go there, they kill you, they destroy your land.
Your majesty, there is this impression that the influence of the traditional institution has been drastically eroded, perhaps, because traditional rulers do not have a statutory role to perform. Today, we have well educated monarchs like you, among others, and the situation has not changed. What constitutional role would you want traditional rulers to play?
Well, I think this issue had been debated and argued for a long time. Yes, it is important for traditional rulers to have a constitutional role; to have a constitutional role, it means they would be in control of resources to be able to carry out basic roles of security amongst their people; The role of being able to settle some issues over land, and so on. And to be able to do that, they would need a budget, they would need a constitutional provision; because to perform those roles, they must have security agencies answerable to them. So there are complexities, but it is becoming obvious that the roles would need to be defined. As the political class is increasingly being seen as failing the people, in some places, people are turning to traditional leadership as the last bastion of hope, and there is so much expectation. I am elected the paramount ruler of Tivland; the people that come to see me, there is so much expectation from them, that the king should be able to do this, this, and that, but we have no constitutional role. My role is advisory; I can advise the local government chairman, I can advise the governor, but that’s all I can do; I have no executive powers, I have no constitutional role. So, there is the need for a constitutional role.
After a long period of military rule, we returned to democracy in 1999. Almost two decades after, would you say we are practicing true democracy?
Yes, we are in democracy; Nigeria is a democracy, we are practicing democratic governance.
Why do you say so?
We don’t have the military in charge; we elect our leaders, we freely elect our leaders.
But there has been an intense clamour for restructuring of the country. If we were a true democracy, this wouldn’t have been the case?
No, you must find out the reasons people are calling for restructuring.
(Cuts in)…political imbalance, resources and marginalization, among others?
I think people are just clamouring to control the resources they have, it’s all about resources.
Is it a case of greed?
Well, I don’t know whether I should call it greed, but people want to be in control. As far as I am concerned, the clamour for restructuring would never, it will never…
Recently, the Kaduna State government banned the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) led by the detained Sheik El-Zakzakky, from operating in the state. Considering the circumstances that threw up the Boko Haram insurgency, would you say that was a wise decision?
I can’t comment on that.