Benue State governor Samuel Ortom’s uninspiring performance in office has seen him resorting to shenanigans to avert the people’s gaze upon this obvious fact. For a governor who reportedly has not paid workers’ salaries for 12 months that is the only way to go – create distractions. The assassination scare is the latest.
Dr Ortom became governor on the ticket of the All Peoples Congress (APC) having been rejected by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the party under which he was Minister in the Jonathan administration.
In 2017, two years after coming into office Ortom raised the alarm that hordes of Fulani herdsmen had descended on Benue in order to take over land from the indigenous people. Riding on the wave of the mass hysteria his pronouncements created among people of Benue, the governor signed an Anti-open Grazing Law whose provisions made it practically impossible to practice animal husbandry in the state – even ranching, which he touted as the solution to farmers-herdsmen conflicts. Four years on, there are still pastoralists in Benue, but he rode that “success” to a second term in office, this time as PDP candidate.
The narrative around the assassination attempt on governor Ortom “need not be believed”, in its original form or in totality, as veteran columnist Mahmud Jega put it. The precise number of attackers, their rapid identification as militia herdsmen (read Fulani) and Ortom’s Olympic-standard medium-distance race to safety, all should raise eyebrows. Benue state has been a haven of bandits recently; the death of Gana cannot be said to have seen the end of bandit groups of non-Fulani stock.
With the right parties properly aroused, governor Ortom has since become the pacifier, calling on “leaders to work together as a team, to leave politics aside, to leave ethnicity aside…..” But he could not resist crowing about “how our forefathers stopped them in 1804, they cannot take over our land”, in obvious reference to the Sokoto/Fulani Jihad. He shows poor knowledge of history. For a fact, the Jihad that began in 1804 in Gobir kingdom could not have reached Tiv land in the same year. Second, it took place in Hausa Muslim kingdoms and Tiv land was none of that.
Governor Samuel Ortom is playing dangerous politics, stoking hatred and hostility towards the Fulani among his Tiv people. For him to continue identifying the Fulani as the principal enemies of the Tiv, it betrays something more profound than he is willing to admit – even to himself.
Usman writes from Kaduna
