Migration, Sleeper cells and Invasion

Man is suspicious by nature – suspicious of fellow men, suspicious about their actions and motives behind the actions.

Migration is one of the actions of man that triggers such suspicion, especially when it is steady and involves a sizeable number of ‘outsiders’, however defined. It is universal, prompted by the instincts of man for self-preservation in the first instance, and maintenance of perceived advantages and familiar ways of life.

In my early years in the university, there was no visa requirement for Nigerians to travel to the United Kingdom.  Right there in school, for N65 (sixty-five naira), well-heeled students picked rebate air tickets to London, flew on Friday and returned Sunday (if they were sober enough) or Monday. But before I was through with school, xenophobia had seized Britain; she felt swamped in by outsiders and clamped the visa requirement on Nigerians and other Commonwealth citizens. (If you ask who issued visas to their progenitors when they came and colonized these Commonwealth nations, you’d be right. But I grew up to see that there’s no fairness in the world).

Back to the present, the mass shootings by white supremacists in the United States which has become the new normal, with the latest in Buffalo, New York, has something to do with demographic worries in addition to racial hatred. Part of the conspiracy theory that they peddle is that people of races that they hate are growing their populations fast and swamping them in certain neighborhoods.

Demographic changes have outcomes in politics and economy, and man, by nature, wants to preserve whatever advantages he has, especially in these two areas.

The surge of young men from the northern region of Nigeria into Lagos in recent years, has triggered some level of panic, and it’s not unreasonable panic. Initially, these northern youth (which included a sizeable number from the neighboring countries like Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali etc) worked as butlers, manning the gates of homes and offices. Others worked as itinerant shoe menders and the rest supplied cheap manual labor.

It was, however, the inflow of these fellows in the past eight years or so that hit the panic button. With infrastructure not keeping pace with population and vehicular growth, commercial motorcycle transport grew popular in Lagos over the past decade or so. Providing this service became an occupation of choice for these northern youth.  It requires next to no skills and liberated them from the tyranny of seasonal income which subsistence farming in their home region gave them, bringing them into steady liquidity through daily income.

The influx of this second wave coincided with the territorial growth of the Boko Haram insurgency in the north. To the economically minded in Lagos, these northern youth were economic refugees. But to the strategically minded, a lot of them were militarily exposed persons with a latent capacity for violence. Both sides are correct.

That they are internal economic refugees is simply stating the obvious. Boko Haram and lately the so-called ‘bandits’ have taken over the vast lands that these youth used to cultivate. Not only are their sources of livelihood disrupted, but their very lives were also seriously endangered too.

But the security threat that they pose is the one that most people are still coming to terms with. Just a few days ago, a Yoruba nationalist group, blatantly stated it to Yoruba leaders that these people were the advance section of an ethnic army of invasion from the north, masquerading as commercial motorcyclists. The group elaborated that these operatives were funded to provide the two-wheel taxi service, and that in turn, they, together with beggar colonies collectively fund terror networks to which they remit funds regularly. Whilst all of them may not be commandos lying in wait, there are significant pointers to the fact that a sizeable portion of them may not be as innocent and simple as they look.

Back in 2008, a friend living at Iyana-Ipaja area of Lagos told me of their discovery that the Hausa gatemen in their area were holding secret meetings at night. He noted that around 2am every night, all of them would desert their duty posts and gather at specific places where they hold meetings and return to their posts before 4am.  He said that they notified the Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) which said that it was aware of the clandestine meetings and that the people were under observation. For me, that was the first signal.

Next was when kidnap-for-ransom finally hit the west from the Niger Delta. Elements from other areas which had caught the virus earlier, like the east and the Midwest, dominated the urban kidnap scene. But northerners hold the very significant highway arm. Their modus operandi has been to appear in the uniforms of either the police or the army, stop vehicles at their ‘checkpoints’, and then herd captives into the bush where their accomplices that herded cattle in times past take over and move the captives into dense forests till ransoms are paid. Voices of Yoruba ethnic nationality groups have been ringing out telling the Yoruba nation that their forests are all inhabited by hostile forces and that they are surrounded by the Fulani ethnic militia.

Whatever the west has seen from this nascent migration or invasion, the south-east has seen much more. While this militia has been hibernating in the west, it had activated in the east, attacking communities, killing, maiming and raping. This federal government has shown no interest in curbing the outright invasion, and it took the activities of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) to stop the outright overrun of Igbo land. Surprisingly, the federal government that couldn’t arrest Fulanis sacking communities in Benue State and the south-east, showed shocking competence arresting the IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu in Kenya and smuggling him into Nigeria!

By the end of this week when the primaries of the two main political parties, the ruling APC and the opposition PDP for next year’s general elections are concluded, there would be an indication of the likelihood of the continuation of the Fulani risorgimento or its reprieve depending on the choice of presidential candidates. Nigerians are waiting, and a significant portion of West Africa with it. If it goes wrong, Nigerians may swamp out the entire sub-region.