Chief Bola Ige and Genocide in Rwanda and Nigeria

By

Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, Ph.D.

In an interview, on pages 2-3 of the Weekly Trust, of 6-7th July 2001 [see http://www.gamji.com/trust122.htm ], Chief Bola Ige, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, denied having called the Hausa-Fulani the Tutsis of Nigeria. He was quoted as having said that it “was Abacha’s military Government that I called Tutsis of Nigeria and I have no regrets.” Chief Bola Ige had in the same interview said that it was, Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, and myself “who in the last two or three years have been carrying this propaganda. They started it because they thought I was going to be a candidate for the presidency and they were going to use it against me in the North. When I did not contest for the presidency and I was appointed a minister, after some months, they started putting this out.”

I shall take Chief Bola Ige on each of the statements quoted above, starting with my motive for exposing his support for the Rwandan genocide and his advocacy of genocide against the Fulani in Nigeria, in the period 1996-1998.

The Motive.

Historians have amply demonstrated that genocide is not organised by ordinary people. The conception, planning and implementation of genocide have always been carried out by those who control all, or a fraction of state power. The ordinary people are psychologically prepared for it, over a long period of time. In the process, the historical origins of the target group are falsified or fabricated. All sorts of stereotypes are given the stamp of scientific authority and complex issues are given simplistic explanations. The trials of the Rwandan genocidaires have brought this out clearly. The high level planning, which includes massive mobilisation for its execution, ensured maximum carnage before the international community, woke up from its slumber. Thus, in the Rwandan tragedy, between April 6, 1994, when the killings started and July 17, when the present Rwandan Patriotic Front government took-over power, about eight hundred thousand Tutsis, and some moderate Hutus, were brutally massacred. It has been estimated that about 75% of the total Rwandan Tutsi population were annihilated in the hands of the Hutu extremists. This is one of the most horrible tragedies of the 20th century! It is one of the most brutal assaults on humanity on the continent of Africa throughout history!

Not even the Nazi killing machine matched such brutal efficiency. The rate of massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda has been estimated to be five times the rate of the slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis. The man who presided over the 100 days massacre was Jean Kambanda. He was not an ordinary man, but an economist and a banker, who was a leading member of the extremist Hutu party, the Mouvement Democratique Populaire. This movement came to power in April, 1994, after the President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed, when his plane was shot down by Hutu extremists, who were opposed to the Arusha Agreement, the implementation of which President Habyarimana had accepted at a regional summit in Dar es Salam, on the 6th of April, 1994. From the 8th of April 1994, when Jean Kambanda became the interim Prime Minister, to 17th July, 1994, when the government was driven out of power, he chaired the many Cabinet meetings where the heinous crimes of the “final solution” were planned and eventually executed. He personally ordered roadblocks to be set up to apprehend Tutsis who were massacred. He also used his powers of a Prime Minister to dismiss the Tutsi Governor in his hometown of Butare and appointed a Hutu extremist to pave the way for one of the most terrible mass killings of Tutsis during the 100 days killing spree, which he argued, was “an indispensable weapon in the fight against the enemy.”

The purpose of studying history is not for fun, but to learn from it. Ignoring the lessons of history could be suicidal, as the Tutsis found out in 1994. For, in the fifties and sixties, they suffered such tragedies in the hands of Hutu extremists. In 1963, the Kayibanda Hutu extremists’ government massacred thousands of Tutsis. Like it happened in 1994, “Ministers were sent to prefectures to supervise the self-defence operations of the population which resulted in a large scale massacre of Tutsis.”

As a political scientist, I know the dangers of power. I know that, if power falls into the hands of genocidaires, people filled with racist and tribal hatred, it is very dangerous, as the examples of Rwanda have amply demonstrated. Having followed the political career of Chief Bola Ige since my secondary school days, I know how dangerous he could be if a mistake is made to trust him with power. My motivation for wanting to stop him is derived from this knowledge of him. More so knowing fully well that genocide is not a spontaneous action of the street mob.

Moreover, election is a matter of choice. Political parties normally present programmes and candidates to the voting public. When faced with choices, the rational voter will first of all examine the programmes of the parties in contest, where one has been attracted by the programme of a political party, one would want to know whether the party has even the capacity to implement its programme. The rational voter will also dig deeply into the character, both moral, and otherwise, of the leaders of the parties, as well as its candidates. If they were once in government what were their performances, their actions out of governments, their utterances on national and local issues? It is the sum total of these and others that should determine the voter’s choices. This is the yardstick I applied not only to Chief Bola Ige but all the potential candidates. I make no apologies for it. It was my duty as a citizen and as a political scientist.

Bola Ige’s Past
Chief Bola Ige’s utterances, his party’s close association with the terrorist and racist, Odu’a People’s Congress, and his actions since the sixties, whenever he was in some position of power, especially his vindictiveness while in power in Oyo State, in the seventies, demand extreme caution in dealing with him. He comes out as a person to whom power is not to be entrusted. As Governor of Oyo State, he ordered the execution of an accused, even when the case was in the Supreme Court, on appeal. He presents himself as a principled politician while his practice shows the contrary. During the 1983 General elections, Chief Bola Ige was one of loudest critics of NPN rigging. Unknown to the general public he was the number-one rigger. It was later established in a court of law that he had ordered the Government Printer in Ibadan to secretly print, illegally, FEDECO forms, in order for him to win the Oyo gubernatorial election against Dr Victor Omolulu Olunloyo. This was brought out clearly in the judgement given by the Hon Justice Aniogulu of the Supreme Court in January, 1984, on Chief Bola Ige’s appeal. According to the judgement of the Honourable Justice, Chief Bola Ige:

“Having, however, set the ball rolling in the direction of falsification, by getting his Government Printer to produce these forms without authority of FEDECO – denials in that respect notwithstanding – it would hardly lie in the mouth of the appellant to complain about the outcome of the jiggery-pockery. He who comes to equity must come with his hands clean. The two courts below have found against the conduct of the appellant in printing the FEDECO documents; those concurrent findings may not, except for serious reasons, be disturbed in this court.”

In the United States, a lawyer who employed an illegal immigrant was not confirmed by the Senate when nominated to the post of the Attorney General of the USA by President Clinton. In our country, a Senior Advocate, who falsifies state documents and who sends to death an accused person, while his case was pending on appeal in the Supreme Court, is now our Attorney General and Minister of Justice, the third most powerful official in the country!

My only regret over this matter is that there was not sufficient mobilisation on the issue of his support for, and his advocacy of genocide, to block his confirmation as a Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, by the Senate. For, as my publication, Chief Bola Ige and the Destabilisation of Nigeria, revealed, he had shown, in his column in the Sunday Tribune an extreme pathological hatred for the Fulani, as I shall proceed to once again demonstrate in this response to his interview. There was every justification to prevent people like him from taking Nigeria and Nigerians on “The Road to Kigali” as he, Chief Bola Ige, and the editors of The Tribune, The Punch Tell, Tempo, and the other Afenifere publications have been coldly threatening in the period, 1995 –1998.

The Tutsis of Nigeria.

Chief Bola Ige took extreme liberty with the truth when he said in the interview that, “it was Abacha’s military Government that I called Tutsis of Nigeria…,” In fact it was not the Hausa-Fulani he labelled the Tutsi. It was the Fulani. He was always very clear about this. He even tried to fabricate history to present the Hausas as victims of the Fulani, whom he labelled “Nigerian Tutsis.” In an article, on page 2 of the Sunday Tribune, of September 7, 1997, titled, “Whose National Question?,” he wrote:

“It would be stupid of the Yoruba or the Igbo to expect the Hausa and their Fulani masters to give up the power which the British manipulated for them and which the military regime..to maintain (even though their interests do not coincide).”

In the booklet, Chief Bola Ige and the Destabilisation of Nigeria, the contents of which are on the Ceddert’s [ http://www.ceddert.com/Article9.htm] and other websites, I reproduced six pages of photocopies of the actual texts of “Uncle Bola’s Column” in the Sunday Tribune. I made sure that these photocopies of the original text of his columns are published as an exhibit of the evidence of his advocacy of genocide. I knew he will try and deny it, given the type of politician he is, once he realises the grave implications of what he had written, and the fact the he is likely to be put on trial for this.

In his column, in the Sunday Tribune of September 4, 1996, titled “Up Nigeria!!!” on the victory of the Golden Eaglets against the Brazilian national team, in the semi-finals of the football event of the Atlanta Olympics, Chief Bola Ige wrote:

“First who asked our athletes to wear those almajiri dresses in Atlanta at the opening ceremonies? I felt insulted that Mary Onyali and others should be asked to wear a dress which is like those herdsmen and beggars wear in Northern Nigeria. There was hardly any difference between the contingent from Niger Republic and our own. Even the athletes from Benin Republic and Togoland showed off better than we. Or is this part of the native colonisation of Nigeria?”

Was Chief Bola Ige referring to the military when he made these statements? How did, “herdsmen and beggars” constitute the Nigerian military?

Let us look at another quotation from Chief Bola Ige, in his Sunday Tribune column of February 16, 1997, which further confirms that he was far from attacking the military under Abacha, but was inciting genocide against the Fulani:

“Since 1960, has our bane not been that the “Tutsis” of Nigeria (who are minority of minorities - in population, in education, in management skills, in the economy) have held Nigeria at the jugular, scheming political manoeuvres that make them hold on to power at all costs and in all circumstances? The result, of course, is that all “non Tutsis” of Nigeria are not ready to trust their future to such minority who have never exhibited true Nigeria nationalism…The young people do not trust the authorities, and the way they see Nigeria is vastly different from how the “Tutsis” of Nigeria want Nigeria to be”

Was the military in power in Nigeria in 1960? Where were General Sani Abacha and all the officers who served under him, and in his government, in 1960? They were at school.

Nowhere did Chief Bola Ige’s ethnic chauvinism and his hatred for the Fulani come out clearly than in his article titled, “Whose National Question”, referred to above. In that article, the Chief wrote:

‘when the brothers and children of those who wanted confederation of Nigeria in 1953, now pose as the arch-gospellers of Nigeria’s “indivisible” unity…They do so because they think they are the Tutsis of Nigeria, and imagine that all Nigerians must be ruled by them till kingdom come. All sensible and rational people all over the world acknowledge that there are certain axioms about how people should live. If a country is multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious, its constitution MUST be federal…At the risk of being misunderstood, it seems to me that the reason the Tutsis of Nigeria cannot understand these simple axioms is that first, they are an immigrants uprooted group scattered all over Nigeria without any defined geographical boundaries; secondly their culture has been lost to a “religious” culture so-called which unfortunately does not enable them to appreciate the culture of other people, not even the Habe–Hausa culture, thirdly they are insignificant in numbers they have to attach themselves to others and appear as part and parcel of those they parasite on; and finally, they have had the fortune of military rule in Nigeria for almost thirty years and have succeeded in manipulating the military for their own purposes”

One does not require the intellectual prowess of a Cicero to know that Chief Bola Ige was in, in this instances no way referring to the Abacha regime nor the Nigerian military. He was referring to the Fulani, and inciting genocide against them.

Striking Similarities

When one examines Chief Bola Ige’s articles together with other articles that appeared in The Punch and The Tribune, Tell, Tempo and the other Afenifere papers, as well as utterances by his colleagues in the Afenifere, striking similarities appear between what they were trying to do in Nigeria and what the Hutu dominated Kayibanda, Habyarimana and Kambanda regimes did in Rwanda in the early sixties, throughout the eighties and the early nineties, to psychologically prepare the minds of the ordinary Hutu for the mass slaughter of Tutsis.

According to Emmanuel Gasana, and others, in preparing for the massacre of Tutsis in the sixties, the Kayibanda, Hutu-dominated, regime “mounted intensive and omnipresent propaganda claiming that the Tutsi were foreigners who had repressed the Hutu people in serfdom for four centuries and that the revolution and the republic were the expression of the victory of the Hutu majority over the feudal minority Tutsi. The official ideology was propagating the idea according to which all Hutu were poor peasants and all Tutsi were feudal oppressors…Consequently, ethnic antagonism was portrayed as an obvious fact, as fated. These speeches, which amounted almost to conditioning people to violence, led the population to internalise the racist biasis of the regime foundered on an antagonistic vision of the Tutsi.” All serious works on the Rwandan genocide have corroborated this.

Whereas the Tutsis were presented as inyenzi, “cockroaches,” by the Kayibanda’s regime, Chief Bola Ige labelled the Fulani as “parasites”. Whereas to Kayibanda, Habyarimana and Kambanda, the Tutsis were foreigners, to Chief Bola Ige, the Fulanis are, “an immigrants uprooted group scattered all over Nigeria without any defined geographical boundaries…” Whereas to the Kayibanda, Habyirimana and Kambanda regimes every Tutsi is an oppressor, to Chief Bola Ige, “since 1960 our bane has “been that the “Tutsis” of Nigeria (who are minority of minorities - in population, in education, in management skills, in the economy) have held Nigeria at the jugular, scheming political maneuvers that make them hold on to power at all costs and in all circumstances.” The fact that the Fulani are nowhere in the Nigerian Armed Forces and do not control the army, did not prevent Chief Bola Ige, for mischievous reasons, from this distortion of Nigeria’s historical and contemporary reality.

Is it surprising that, since 1999, Fulani pastoralists as well as Northerners, lumped all together as Fulani, who are resident in the southwest have been violently and brutally attacked on a number of occasions. Between 1999 and 2001 the OPC and other ethnic chauvinists have attacked them no less than nine times in Shagamu, Lagos, Ibadan and Abeokuta. In one instance, in May, 1999, it was on the excuse of a rumour that, President Obasanjo, who, unlike his Yoruba kinsmen, they had massively voted for, had died in Abuja. On pages 20-21of its publication of 5th July 1999, The Tell reported the violence in Lagos as ”vitriolic” and when the leader of the Odu’a People’s Congress, Dr Frederick Fasehun, whose militia were in the forefront of the violence was asked why they unleashed such a violence on the innocent, he was reported to have coldly “reminded” those who asked him, “of an Igbo proverb…” thus, “It is only when someone kills a madman that people will know he has relatives”

Endorsing the Rwandan Genocide

In, Chief Bola Ige and the Destabilisation of Nigeria, I pointed out that the Chief, “in fact, endorsed the genocide inflicted on the Tutsis by the Hutu extremists. He even protested against the detention and pending trial of the Hutu extremists arrested for genocide”. In the really shocking piece titled, “River of Human Beings”, published in his column, on page 2 of the Sunday Tribune of December 1, 1996, Chief Bola Ige said that the crimes of the genocidaires pale into insignificance compared with their detention! The Tutsis, like the Fulani, were also transformed into “native colonialist” for keeping “60,000, yes SIXTY THOUSAND, Rwandans holed up in a couple of crowded and smelly prisons on charges of murder and genocide. In a country where there are probably a score or a few lawyers to prosecute…”

Justifying the genocide, he wrote,

“Buyoya of Burundi, Kigame of Rwanda and other Tutsis in uniform are doing what their brothers in other parts of Africa are doing. They, a minority, want to dominate the majority. They forget, because of temporary power, that sooner or later, an oppressed people throw off yoke. Tutsis and their brothers in other parts of Africa seem incapable of learning the wisdom which white Afrikaners learnt very well in the last ten years; that if a minority does not quickly reach an accommodation with the majority the days of the minority will not only be numbered, they may soon become nights and that quickly.”

Falsification of History

Answering a question in his interview in the Weekly Trust of 6-7th July, 2001, to the effect that he was being accused of ethnic hatred because “the idea sprang up from relationship between the Tutsis and ethnic cleansing” Chief Bola Ige’s reply was instructive. It exposes his mindset. He said:

“No, no, no. Tutsis, they were in the minority. They still are in the minority in Rwanda and Burundi and they control the government. They are in minority and they are mostly in the army. That is what I said. The Tutsis in East Africa are in the minority dictatorship holding the majority down.”

This answer shows how much history is distorted and twisted in the mind of Chief Bola Ige. In the first place, the Tutsi elite of Rwanda was not in power in 1963, when the Kayibanda regime organised the massacre of the Tutsis. They were not in power in 1993 when they were massacred by the Habyarimana’s regime. They were also not in power when about 850,000 of them were massacred in April 1994 by the Interim Government led by Jean Kambanda. How could they have constituted a “minority dictatorship holding the majority down” when they have not been in power since independence? The Rwandan Patriotic Front, which they established, only came to power in 1994 when they drove the genocidaires out of power? The Tutsi’s have never been in power in the Democratic Republic of Congo when they were massacred by the Interhamwe supported by the Mobutu regime.

In his determination to prepare the minds of Nigerians for a repeat of the Rwandan tragedy in our country, Chief Bola Ige, conveniently falsifies history. In any case, can genocide be justified just because a section of the elite that belongs to a particular ethnic group happens to be in power? Were the children massacred and the foetuses destroyed in the wombs of their mothers also oppressors? How can such a prominent member of the World Council of Churches like Chief Bola Ige, who has gone around parading himself as a “progressive” politician for decades endorse such brutal racism?

The Road to Arusha

Fortunately, for all of us in this country, for the rest of Africa and the world, Nigeria and Nigerians, inspite of the campaigns of Chief Bola Ige and The Tribune, The Punch, Tempo, Tell and the other Afenifere papers and magazines, did not embark on the “Road to Kigali” in the years 1996 – 1998, as they so much wanted. Instead, Nigerians embarked on the path of trying to build a democratic and united country, playing its part in bringing together and unifying all the people of the African continent, in spite of the terrible tragedies such as those as in Rwanda, which Chief Bola Ige tried to justify. His utterances amounted, according to specialist legal opinion, to a crime against humanity for which he should be charged before the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, or at Arusha, together with the editors of The Tribune, The Punch, Tell and the Tempo. Some journalists of Radio Mille Collines, have already been indicted for incitement to genocide and these Nigerian journalists shall soon have to also be indicted. So far, George Ruggiu, a Rwandan journalist, is serving 12 years in jail for his broadcast for Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines in Kigali, Rwanda where, few days before the massacre he broadcast a venomous tirade inciting genocide against the Tutsis, as Chief Bola Ige, and his editorial fellow travellers, did against the Fulani in Nigeria in 1996-1998.

In an article titled “May 1997 Be Tough” which appeared on page 2 of the Sunday Tribune of 5th January, 1997, Chief Bola Ige wrote”

“I do not deceive myself into thinking that my activities are not watched. And I do not fool myself into thinking that there are no traps set for me, even by those who pretend to be friends. The result of course is that I have to be very careful in every thing I do.

There is no doubt, therefore that, Chief Bola Ige is conscious of what he does. And as I pointed out in the booklet, Chief Bola Ige and the Destabilisation of Nigeria, he, as a SAN, cannot be oblivious of the provisions of the international law on genocide and incitement to genocide, enacted by Resolution 260 (A) III of the General Assembly of the United Nations, on 9th December, 1946, which came into effect after its ratification by 120 members states on 12th January, 1951. In case he has forgotten, Articles III and IV of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defines crimes of genocide that are punishable and those who are liable. According to Article III:

“The following acts shall be punishable:

a Genocide;

b Conspiracy to commit genocide

c Direct and public incitement to commit genocide

d Attempt to commit genocide

e Complicity in genocide

Those who are liable, according to Article IV, are:

“Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

Well said.

Adamu,

You can send Ige to jail. He deserves worse and hopefully some of your people who take delight in murder will also go down.