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Bikpadan111

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Investopedia

UK Antitrust Regulators Clear Microsoft's Partnership With Inflection AI

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News_Naija

Fulani Terror Train Arrives South-West? (1)

This writer lacks an inherent and indwelling enthusiasm for writing about negative situations and conditions affecting people. My instinctive preference is to huddle up in my happy-go-lucky lane, expressing and hyping up only about good and great stories of people around me, especially about our country, Nigeria. But that sweet and insouciant lane in its solo existence will be a fantasy fawn for a good journalist. A journalist’s duty is all-encompassing. We pen truthfully about the good as well as the bad as they come. Over the last 10 years, I must have written and published hundreds of thousands of words in stories and opinions hovering around negative and terrible happenings in Nigeria. But a recent story I read shredded my spirit and spun me into anxiety and apprehension about what is brewing and ready to make a leviathan landfall in the southern part of Nigeria. And it is about Fulani bandits and their terror train that has now made a seemingly unstoppable transit in the southwestern part of Nigeria. I stumbled on the rendered account of a young man called Prince Eniola Ojajuni. If you dubbed his story a doomsday human experience in the calaboose of Fulani terrorists and their frenetic foofaraw, you are not far from the truth. Ojajuni reportedly leads the youngbloods in the ethnic Afenifere group. In broad daylight, he was cornered, kidnapped, and held in the degrading and debilitating dragnet of terror run by barbarous Fulani bandits in Ondo State. For 12 torturous days, the man was at the mercy of merciless Fulani hatchet men. Ojajuni relayed many things he saw that must make men in government wake up from their slumber. These Fulani hoodlums are often armed and in military uniforms. They deploy drones, track phones, and monitor social media to evade security. According to the young man, these are not amateurs. But who armed them, and who equipped the miscreants with sophisticated weapons of mass destruction? We may never find out. According to Ojajuni, innocent Nigerians pushed into this terror hellhole by happenstance or otherwise receive 72 daily beatings from whips hedged with sharpened objects. Friends, the sweeping bombardment from these invisible and visible armies of occupation is the state of our union today. These Fulani bandits love to suck on the blood of the innocent and then rewarded with payments of billions of naira in handsome ransom by loved ones of the victims. This is the reward for taking men and women from their beds and stacking them up in the jungle until somebody somewhere pays up or prepares to bury their dead.  Fulani miscreants have taken over our land. And men charged with keeping us safe from their onslaughts and assaults hold their arms akimbo, watching helplessly and haplessly. Nigeria, our home. Nigeria, our beauty pageant. Nigeria, our hope now flipped into a piñata of blitz and blitzkrieg by invading men from foreign lands and their colluding homegrown co-aggressors in powerful places. Nigeria, our land now overrun by killer hell-men herdsmen who freely hound our wives, children, and loved ones unhindered, unstopped, and unstoppable by anyone. Who will stave off this surreal siege on Nigeria? Ojajuni’s nightmare is not the first with these bandits in the South-West. Once upon a time, not too long ago, under the regime of Mohammed Buhari, the gory story was about an oba in Ekiti State. His story has proved that nowhere is safe for anyone who lives in today’s Nigeria. Ilemesho Ekiti is a short distance from the then-sitting Governor Kayode Fayemi’s Isan Ekiti.  The Obadu of Ilemesho was the victim. I heard that the oba had a rough run with Fulani herdsmen not long before then. The oba then mobilised against those killing his subjects; raping his women and ravaging their farmlands. He had no success curtailing the rampage of the herdsmen. Security operatives, including the police, reportedly made it clear that disputes with killers were a no-go area for them. But why? I heard that anytime a case involved Fulani herdsmen, there were always ‘orders from Abuja’ to stand down. On this fateful evening, the Oba had just concluded a meeting with his chiefs, after which the marauders walked into his palace with guns. They bundled the oba into a vehicle with his beaded crown and staff of office and gave him marching orders into the thick bushes the herdsmen call home. The herders dealt hard blows to the oba with machetes. The oba’s skin stayed intact; he suffered no cut. I was told they shot at him several times from their AK 47s, but something miraculous happened that the oba did not fall to the rains of bullets. Then they beat him black-and-blue with other dangerous weapons, demanding N100 million as ransom. They sternly warned the oba never to bother herders again even if his subjects were killed, raped, or maimed. No one is sure of the amount of ransom they grabbed from the Oba’s people, but I learned it was staggering.  The oba was let go after spending many days in the bushes far away from the comfort of his palace.  The man ended up in the hospital for one week, nursing wounds he got from machete assaults. The Afenifere youth leader told the world that 55 bandit camps were reportedly already dedicated in the South-West region of Nigeria. What it means is that no one family in our region will again sleep with both eyes closed. Hell is loosed upon the South-West because of these Fulani terrorists. Our government seems to be slumbering off as the terrorists declare victory. If this government is asleep, let us all remind them that this is nothing but a sleep of death! Has Fulani terror and anarchy finally arrived in the South-West? A bally lot of Nigerians will nod in the affirmative. I am in their league. People can feel it. We see evidence of it in the sprawling terror camps and kidnapping episodes. We hear the frightening footfalls. My friends, anarchy is thriving at its peak in Nigeria. Men in authority think this is a jocosity. They think it is a comedy. They think this will come and go like an appearing and disappearing vapour. It will not be until the terror train is derailed and destroyed.  To be continued….