Tudun Biri —– “If 5000 airplanes land safely, that is not news. Until one of them crashes.” – Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee (1921-2014)
Tudun Biri is a rustic community located a couple of kilometres westerly of the Kaduna Airport in Igabi, the host local government area of not only the permanent site of Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) since 2007 but huge swaths in the training hub of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) including the Command and Staff College at Jaji that also houses the headquarters of Nigerian Army Infantry Corps otherwise known as Infantry Center & School.
A generality of hapless denizens therein couldn’t have hoped for a more secure environment with such gallant neighbors more so that it is inclusive of the erstwhile war camp of the famous Queen Amina and her hilltop rock throne overlooking the sprawling rural settlement of the ancient settlement of Turunku before the establishment of the present-day Zaria named after that heroine’s mother, Zariya.
Unfortunately, not so for Igabi. Theirs is not unlike the fate of close proximity in Rabbi Haim’s, “allegory of the long spoons.”
This writer joins all Nigerians of goodwill in extending condolences including a hand of fellowship to the survivors at Tudun Biri wishing the injured speedy recovery and healing from their physical and psychological injuries.
Indeed, the same fraternal to fellow Nigerians of Garbatau, Ganfeto and Hawan Mata villages at Bali local government area in Taraba State who had earlier in the day on that same fateful Sunday, December 3 lost 33 persons to coordinated attacks and systematic scorched earth tactics to “unknown gunmen.”
The same litany of woes with various degrees of horrifying details pervade virtually every nook and cranny of our nation. Unfortunately, this is despite our armed forces whose primary responsibility is to wade off any external aggression on our territorial integrity have been receiving a chunk of the federal budget for decades.
Truth is they are obviously, “overstretched and involved in asymmetric combat duties and policing responsibilities in about 33 states, outside their professional remit.”
Due to a massive shortfall of personnel the policing ratio in Nigeria is put at 1 to 1000 citizens, as against the UN benchmark of 1- 400 persons with an estimated, “100,000 police personnel protecting Nigerian VIPs, in a transactional abuse that is at the expense of the larger populace.”
With only 1,537 police divisions in Nigeria’s 774 Local Government Areas serving a population of over 200 million, there is no record of security presence at the location of the recent collateral damage.
In the same vicinity of Tudun Biri of Afaka ward on March 11, 2021 a reported 39 students (23 females and 16 males) of Federal College of Forestry Mechanization were abducted and held hostage only to be released in batches after a total 55 days.
Despite the best and gallant efforts of our uniformed indeed un-uniformed officers and men there is a myriad of systemic challenges and a multitude of deeply entrenched issues short-circuiting the fight against insecurity.
The Amnesty International report entitled Nigeria: Stars on their shoulders blood in their hands: War crimes committed by the Nigerian military (2015) is a very disturbing read.
Is the recent collateral damage at Tudun Biri is a microcosm for elite failure in the North?
Perhaps even its aftermath “Pulaaku initiative” is another example of Arewa’s elite hypocrisy often dispatched by a fire brigade approach instead of through a concerted strategic approach.
Arguably, the key drivers in the North’s (approach) can be mainly traced to the previous 8 years of “Northernization without agenda” under President Buhari.
In 2021, Prof. Attahiru Jega asked, “Anything you can think of, the terrible statistics come from the northern part of this country. And why is it so?”
“The major indices of these crises manifested themselves from the northern part of this country, whether it is poverty, youth unemployment, security challenges, maternal mortality, out-of-school children, lack of girl-child education and early marriage as well as the challenge of reproduction of our females,” the onetime INEC czar added.
Jega then concluded, “We have so-called leaders who are selfish, who are not selfless, greedy, who have a narrow vision in terms of how this country can develop, not to talk about the region where they come from. They really lack intellectual capacity to be classified as leaders.”
What exactly is the “Pulaaku initiative” as enunciated by VP Kashim Shettima?
According to the nation’s Number Two it is President Tinubu’s, “unique response as a non-kinetic solution to the challenges in the North West. It is a complete package including houses, clinics, schools, veterinary clinics, empowerment initiatives, solar energy and so on.”
The Vice President added, “The beneficiary states are Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, and for the purpose of equity and justice we deliberately included Niger and Benue states. Tudun Biri will be the first beneficiary.”
It could be recalled that in January 2023 the national coordinator of Moggal Fulbe Pulaaku, Sani Juli endorsed the Tinubu/Shettima ticket while addressing the representatives of its membership from the 36 states including FCT in Gombe with Govenor Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya and director of Community Support of the presidential campaign, Dr. Abdulahi Ahmed Maiagogo present.
Meanwhile, “The word “Pulaaku” serves as an unwritten code of conduct and body of ethics for the Fulani people. It is an abstract noun that comes from a combination of the words Pullo – another term for Fulani, Fulfulde – the language, and Pulaade – which means to act like a Fulani.”
While the name of the embattled settlement Tudun Biri can be loosely translated as – high ground for monkeys, the use of animal imagery in Hausa cosmology depicting the monkey is extensive ranging from the admonition, “Maganin biri, karen Maguzawa” (A reckless action deserves an overreaction) to the advisory, “Ba a yiwa biri burtu” (You don’t get the best of a person by going about it the wrong way) and the question, “Ina ruwa biri da gada?” which translated in Pidgin English shares the same meaning as (Wetin concern aeroplane with flyover bridge) it is however the moral in G.P. Bargery’s page 117 entry in his 1934 edition of A Hausa-English and English-Hausa, “Kada ka yi mini biri-boko” (Do not try to mislead, hoodwink me) that begs the question of whose report should we believe?
This is because in sharp contrast to all official proclamations, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi insists the incident that led to the collateral damage at Tudun Biri was not a mistake.
The need to carefully navigate through the conflicting narratives cannot therefore be overemphasized. Already across the nation in not a few beer parlors and many a tea seller’s table various tall tales are also being recklessly bandied about by those, “furtively religionizing and regionalizing the Tudun Biri mass deaths.”
In retrospect, ahead of the 2019 presidential election while sounding off his address at a campaign stop in Gusau, former President Buhari declared, “What I actually want is for everyone to feed well and as for those who want to continue with their “fitna”, (they) can go ahead.”
With the word “fitna” an Arabic loan word in Hausa meaning crisis deployed in a state as besieged as Zamfara, Festus Keyamo Esq. on behalf of the then candidate explained, “What the President meant was actually a joke taken out of context.”
Was former President Jonathan similarly a joker for expending N15 billion for Almajiri schools now in ruins?
May the Pulaaku initiative not be another expensive joke;
“The economy, security, stability and health of the north and south are intricately intertwined, and persistent violence and grinding poverty in any part of the country threaten the long-term progress of the whole.”
– Prof. Leena Koni Hoffmann of Africa Programme, Chatham House in Who Speaks for the North? Politics and Influence in Northern Nigeria (2014)
Irrespective of our differences in Nigeria we are all in this together.
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