The Past Cannot Be Unlived: On Nigeria’s Historical Revisionism And The Ethics Of Coexistence
By Umar Ardo, Ph.D
Beginning approximately forty years ago, Nigeria entered what I would call the “politics of grievance” – a mode of political mobilisation in which leaders, groups or movements seek support not primarily by offering programmes or policies, but by cultivating, amplifying and organising real, inherited, exaggerated or imagined grievances. They convert perceived injury into political claim, identity and permanent moral currency.
2. The politics of grievance offers its devotees a seductive simplicity: one people, one name, one scapegoat for their societal inadequacies and frustrations. In today’s Nigeria, they made that scapegoat to wear a Fulani face. The phenomenon gained particular currency over the past decade, especially following the defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan and the emergence of President Muhammadu Buhari.
3. We are now told, largely through social media and beyond, that the Fulani are responsible for virtually every problem in Nigeria: that nothing bad happens without them and nothing good happens where they are; that they are foreigners who must be expelled from the supposed “ancestral homelands” of indigenous peoples; be excluded from elected offices, the military and civil service; be stripped of their emirates; and even be prevented from leading fellow Muslims in prayer.
4. The Sultan is maligned, Sheikh Usman dan Fodio rebranded a bandit and the Sokoto Caliphate recast as a criminal enterprise. Some have even produced literature, including legal briefs, calling on foreign powers to intervene and help “indigenous Nigerians” rid the country of the Fulani menace. Most disturbing is that this narrative is no longer merely rhetorical. Active steps are being taken by individuals, groups and, in some cases, public authorities to translate it into reality.
5. This campaign wears the language of justice while practising the logic of collective punishment. Its method is the deliberate and systematic distortion of historical truths; its purpose is to respond to a perceived or real present danger by protecting or advancing some particular self-interests. It is driven by fear, prejudice and inferiority complex. It seeks to poison the mind of the public against the entire scapegoated people until their humanity becomes invisible and every misfortune is attributed to them.
6. Like all propaganda, it presents only one side – the side calculated to generate anger and hatred – while concealing the other side necessary for understanding the truth. Its proponents are what we call in History, victims of the “Kisra Effect.” The earlier they cleanse their hearts of this vice, the better for themselves and for Nigeria. Truth alone can liberate them, but liberation requires the courage to confront the whole truth rather than the portion that serves a preconceived grievance.
7. For truth is always complete. There is no such thing as a half-truth that can constitute the whole truth. The pros and cons of an issue together make the complete picture. When one side is deliberately presented while the other is suppressed, the result is not truth but prejudice. This is precisely what has happened to the argument advanced by the “victims of the Kisra Effect”: they emphasise the history that indicts their scapegoat while concealing the history that complicates their own case. Their argument consequently fails philosophically, logically, historically and morally.
8. By summoning the Christian West – above all the United States – as moral witness to their cause, the architects of this campaign have indulged themselves into a hypocrisy of historical amnesia. The audacity is breathtaking. What is America but one of history’s most consequential products of conquest and displacement? The lands now called the United States were inhabited by the Cherokee, Iroquois, Sioux and hundreds of other nations whose dispossession was systematic and irreversible. The same historical pattern is found in Australia, Canada and virtually every country on earth.
9. Nigeria is no different. The Hausa city-states rose through warfare; the Nupe kingdoms expanded through conquest; and what is now called the Middle Belt is itself a tapestry of migrations, conquests, settlements, absorptions and political transformations. To demand the reversal of Fulani settlement while resting upon the conquest-borne inheritance of modern states is not principle. It is selective historical amnesia wielded as a political weapon.
10. The fundamental error is the assumption that contemporary political communities can be returned to some imaginary historical moment when every ethnic group occupied an uncontested and exclusive homeland. There is no such Nigeria. Indeed, there is no such society anywhere in the world. Human history is a history of migration, settlement, interaction, conflict, assimilation, conquest, intermarriage, displacement, incorporation and cultural exchange. Peoples moved; states expanded and contracted; empires rose and disappeared; languages crossed geographical boundaries; and new identities emerged from the interaction of older identities.
11. The Hausa, Fulani, Nupe, Kanuri, Yoruba, Igbo, Tiv, Ijaw, Efik, Jukun, Idoma, Berom, Babur, Gbagyi, Bachama, Esan, Tangale and hundreds of other peoples did not arrive simultaneously at their present locations, nor have they remained frozen there throughout history. Territories changed hands. Kingdoms expanded. Populations migrated. Political authorities incorporated other communities. Nomadic and sedentary peoples interacted. Trade connected distant societies, religions crossed ethnic boundaries and intermarriage created families whose identities cannot be reduced to a single ethnic category.
12. The notion that Nigeria can therefore be reconstructed according to some supposedly pure map of “ancestral ownership” is politically delusional and practically untenable. Applied consistently, it would not produce justice; it would produce an endless territorial dispute, because every territorial claim would generate another. The moment political discourse asks, “Who was here first?”, it opens a door no modern multi-ethnic state can safely pass through. How far back should we go – five hundred years, one thousand, two thousand? What evidence determines the starting point? Was the first settler necessarily the permanent owner? And what happens when two communities can demonstrate successive settlement in the same territory?
13. These are not merely academic questions. They expose the fatal weakness of ancestral exclusivism. Every generation could reopen the territorial question; every community could manufacture a historical grievance; and every conquest could become a justification for contemporary expulsion. That is not justice. It is a blueprint for perpetual war.
14. Also, importantly, is the moral corruption of collective guilt. Banditry, kidnapping and herder-farmer violence are real and grievous. Their perpetrators must be identified and punished under law, regardless of ethnicity. But to indict an entire people – millions of ordinary herders, traders, scholars, civil servants, professionals and families – for the crimes of armed gangs violates the most elementary principle of justice: guilt attaches to persons and acts, never to bloodlines. Emmanuel Kant taught that a moral maxim must be capable of universal application. The proposition that an ethnic group may be punished for crimes committed by individuals among it, if universalised, condemns every people – including those who promote it.
15. Hannah Arendt similarly warned of the danger of collective guilt as a mechanism through which demagogues transform populations into mobs. Expelling an Emir who adjudicates disputes peacefully, a Pension Clerk, a Civil Servant or a dawn Imam does not defeat a bandit. It merely inflicts suffering on the innocent as political theatre while the actual criminals remain in their forest camps.
16. Third is the futility of the project itself. History runs forward. Expulsion has never produced lasting peace. It produces refugees, counter-grievance and permanent conflict. The twentieth century is a graveyard of such experiments. The truth is that the Fulani are not a foreign army awaiting repatriation. They are Nigerians whose ancestors have lived on this soil for centuries. There is no “elsewhere” to which they can collectively be sent. Worse still, the logic of reversing two-four centuries-old settlements ultimately devours its own authors. No Nigerian community – none – germinated from the soil like the grass and therefore has a history entirely free of migration, domination, displacement or incorporation. Open that door and every grievance becomes a title deed to violence.
17. The vilification of Sheikh Usman dan Fodio further exposes the deeper objective: not merely correcting present injustices, but delegitimising a people’s historical existence. For whatever one’s verdict on the jihad of 1804, it belongs to the same broad historical category as the military expansion of the Oyo Empire, the wars of Kanem-Bornu, the campaigns of the Benin Kingdom, the conquests of Kwarrarafa, the Nupe wars of settlement, the Chamba campaigns and the Ijaw canoe war houses. To criminalise one historical founding while romanticising or ignoring others is not scholarship. It is propaganda masquerading as history. The Fulani people will not accept it; and none will accept it!
18. The wiser path follows from the social contract itself. Citizens surrender the right of private vengeance in exchange for equal protection under law. Nigeria’s Constitution embodies this covenant. The moment we create ethnic exceptions to citizenship, the covenant dissolves and the republic degenerates into competing fiefdoms. And like any other group, or even more, the Fulani a great fiefdom creators.
19. Therefore, pursue bandits as bandits and criminals as criminals – individually and under law. Let the Sultan, the Emirs, CAN, Chiefs, Obas, Northern and Southern ethnic and religious organizations use their moral authority to lower tensions. Let all these rift rats content creators and the so-called ethnic, religious and sectional groups propagating hate and prejudice desist from it. Let the authorities address all contending issues which lie at the heart of much of the conflict justly and through the ambers of the law. Let all land issues be resolved through rational ranching policy, water infrastructure, land administration and impartial adjudication – not through ethnic expulsion.
20. As Isaiah Berlin observed, the good society is not one without conflict, but one that channels conflict through institutions rather than blood. Every nation carries historical wounds. Civilization is measured not by the absence of conquest in its past, as virtually every nation on earth has experienced conquest, but by its capacity to transform grievance into justice and difference into shared destiny. Therefore, it is ridiculous for the anti-Fulani campaigners to ask a conquest-built nation to punish an entire people for having a history of conquest. This is not a way purify society but to dismember it. For the avoidance of doubt: the Fulani are Nigerians – as Nigerian as the Hausa, Kanuri, Igala, Nupe, Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Ijaw, Bini, and every other Nigerian people.
21. There is no road back to an imagined age of ethnic purity, because no such past ever existed. There is only the road forward: one country, equal citizens, law instead of mob rule and neighbours, however different, choosing every day to live together in peace and tolerance. That choice is not weakness. It is the only strength that has ever held a nation together. And that is the only choice to hold Nigeria together.
