Fani-Kayode: A Time To Love And A Time To Hate
By Femi Fani-Kayode
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way”- Charles Dickens, ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’, 1859.
Charles Dickens’ famous opening lines in what has proved to be one of the most moving, outstanding and celebrated books in modern history titled “A Tale Of Two Cities” are as appropiate and applicable to Nigeria in 2018 as they were to Victorian England in 1859.
These are indeed the worst of times and the best of times for Africa’s so-called giant.This is indeed the season of light and the season of darkness.
This is the age of tyranny, barbarity, mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, state-sponsored militias, persecution of dissenting voices and wholesale oppression and the age when new giants and heroes rise in courage and defiance and where new beginnings are establshed.
Let us consider the following.
Fulani terrorists that are generally referred to as “herdsmen” are slaughtering the Tivs, the Idomas and the Igede in Benue state and elsewhere yet President Muhammadu Buhari, who is himself a Fulani and indeeed the Life Patron of Miyetti Allah their umbrella organisation, says he is “not in a hurry to make decisions” on the matter and he insists on referring to the killers as his “brothers” who “must be accomodated”.
I wonder how many more people have to be butchered before the King of the North wakes up and recognises the fact that his country is on fire and that, if not put out quickly, that fire will consumme him, his government, his Fulani people and indeed the whole of Nigeria.
It is with this in mind that I viewed the strange appeal by a very dear and respected sister of mine who is from the north but who has resided in the United Kingdom for the last 30 years to show love to the Fulani terrorists, to live in harmony and peace with them and to forgive them for their acts of genocide and other daily atrocities.
Love and forgiveness and the quest for peace is indeed a great Christian virtue but it does not apply and neither can it be offfered where there is no repentence, remorse or restitution on the part of the aggressor.
You cannot forgive and show love or be at peace with a butcher who proceeds to rape and murder your wife and children before your very eyes, burn down your home, steal your land, destroy your religious faith and your way of life, insult your God and wipe away all trace and memory of your family and ethnic nationality.
That would be delusion and madness and nothing but a full-scale manifestation of wholesale cowardice. It would also be a glaring abdication of your duty as a Christian, a man, a husband and a father to protect your family, your loved ones and your community and indeed all those that God has placed under your care.
My first thoughts when she made her “love the terrorists” appeal were whether she ever considered asking the people of Iraq and Syria to love and live in peace with ISIS when they were under occupation.
I wondered whether she asked the people of Somalia, Kenya and East Africa to live in love and peace with Al Shabab.
I wondered whether she asked the people of Uganda to live in love and peace with the barbaric hordes known as the Lord’s Resistance Army or whether she asked the Tutsis of Rwanda to live in peace with the murderous Hutus as they butchered 800,000 of their people with matches in the streets of Kigali all in the space if three weeks.
I wondered whether she asked the people of Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to live in love and peace with the Taliban or whether she asked the people of Libya and north Africa to live in love and peace with Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad.
I wondered whether she asked the Christians of Lebanon to live in love and peace during the days of their civil war when the Muslims slaughtered them from house to house in their hundreds of thousands.
I wondered whether she asked the people of north eastern Nigeria to live in love and peace with Boko Haram or whether she asked the good people of the Jewish state of Israel to live at peace with Hamas, Hezbollah or Daesh.
I wondered whether she urged the blacks of South Africa to love and live at peace with the white Boer setttlers that took their country, stole their land, reduced them to animals and placed them under the curse and bondage of slavery during the cruel years of apartheid.
I wonder whether she urged the world to embrace Adolf Hitler and his Nazis in love and peace before, during and after the Second World War and whilst they attempted to wipe out much of humanity and gassed 6 million Jews and 4 million gypsies and slavs to death in their gas chambers.
I wonder whether she asked the Christian Armenians that had one million of their people massacred by the Muslim Turks to live at peace and in love with their tormentors and oppressors or whether she asked the people of Cambodia to live at peace and in love with Pol Pot’s ‘Khmer Rouge’ that slaughtered one million of their people in the killing fields.
I wonder if she would have asked the black African slaves of the old southern Confederate states of the United States of America to accept their horrific plight and to live at peace and in love with their white slave owners and masters and I wonder whether she would have asked Rev. Martin Luther King to abandon the struggle for black human rights and civil liberties in America in the 1960’s and instead live in love and peace with those that viewed his people as nothing but sub-human chimpanzees and monkeys.
Innocence and a charitable and kind spirit is one thing but naivety is quite another. And to accept injustice, wickedness, tyranny, slavery, servitude, barbarity, genocide, ethnic cleansing and oppression with gratitude and cowardly acquiesence and silence, all in the name of the quest for peace and love, is a curse.
It is better to die a free man than to live as a slave. It is better to die on your feet than live in your knees. It is better to die with honor and dignity and fighting for a noble cause and your freedom than to live in perpetual slavery and indefinate servitude.
Wherever and whenever we see evil and a manifestation of man’s inhumanity to man it is our duty as Christians and leaders to call it out and oppose it vehemently. If you cannot do that then you are not a believer but an intellectual barbarian and a shameless coward that is not worthy of Christ or the great salvation that He offers.
Anyone that visits the scene of the genocidal crimes or that has visited the homes, families and victims of the Fulani terrorists after they have committed their barborous atrocities, as yours truly has done on several occasions, will have no thoughts of love and peace towards the perpertrators of those crimes but only contempt, disdain, defiance and pure and unadulterated hate.
I do not hate the Fulani race but I hate the terrorists amongst them that commit these hideous atrocities.
We are not dealing with human beings or even animals here: we are dealing with ravenous, wild and insatiable beasts. And there can be no love, mercy, fellowship or peace between wild and ravenous beasts and the sons and daughters of men.
I cannot live at peace or in love with those that are committed to violence and those that the bible vividly describes as “men of blood”.
I cannot live in love and peace with those that seek to drain the blood of my people, destroy their heritage, steal their land, wipe out my race, eliminate my faith, deny my God and turn us into slaves and the biblical “hewers of the wood” and “drawers of the water”.
I have nothing but hate for those with such an evil agenda. I hate them with the biblical “perfect hatred” and I make no apology for it.
This is not the time to love: it is a time to hate the terrorists. It is a time to rise up in righteous and holy anger and say “no more” to the hapless and heartless butchers of the night that slaughter pregnant women, that dash the heads of babies against the wall and that cut open the throats of children and infants.
It is a time to hate those that prey on the weak and that attack the old, the ageing and the vulnerable. It is a time to hate and to resist the Nazis of Nigeria that see themselves as the anointed masters, the supreme beings and pure-blooded Aryans of the Nigerian state and the African continenent.
It is a time to hate that evil coin that keeps popping up and keeps plaguing the Nigerian people which bears the face of Boko Haram on one side and the face of the Fulani terrorists on the other.
It is a time to hate those that slaughter the Biafrans, that murder IPOB youths and that “disappeared” Nnamdi Kanu.
It is a time to recognise the fact that the Fulani terrorists are the direct and biological descendants of the war-time mercenary “godogodo’ militias that were unleashed by the Federal forces on the Biafrans during our civil war to kill, burn, rape, steal, pillage, destroy and commit all manner of bestial acts against the innocent and defenceless civlian Igbo population.
It is time to hate those terrorists that are no better than demons and that are the spiritual descendants of the biblical Chaldeans and Amalekites.
The world did not love Hitler and his Nazis. They courageously rose up to his challenge and fought him to the ground. 50 million people lost their precuous lives in that monumental struggle but in the end good prevailed over evil and the forces of light overcame the forces of darkness.
Without that great victory over evil Africans would have been wiped off the face of the earth today and the few that were spared and left alive would have provided nothing but cheap slave labour for the Aryans of Germany and their new world order.
Had the Nazis won that war and prevailed in that struggle, our plight would have been worse than that of the Jews. Yet the world said “no” and fought the great evil with which they were confronted.
They rose up as one to the challenge, cried “havoc” and “let slip the dogs of war”. We can and must all learn from this.
It is time for the Nigerian people to rise up against the pervasive evil that the Fulani terrorists present and do the same.
It is time to hate the terrorists with a perfect hatred and to say “no more” to the slaughter of innocents, the raping of our women and the barbaric and unprecedented destruction and occupation of our ancestral lands by an alien army whose progenitors and ancestors hail from Futa Jalon.
The truth is that there can be no fellowship between light and darkness. The Bible says “what have the childen of light got to do with the children of Belial?”
Like millions of other Nigerians I feel a deep sense of outrage and shame about what is going on in our country today.
The blood that is being shed by the Fulani terrorist militias EVERY DAY is too much. It is barbaric. It is unspeakable. It is beyond human comprehension. It is evil.
Worse still it brings all manner of curses on our people and on our land. It has to stop before people get fed up and start not only defending themselves but also going on the offensive against the perpetrators and their people.
Miyetti Allah and their leader President Muhammadu Buhari must call their Janjaweed herdsmen to order before it is too late.
Nigeria is on the brink of a catastrophic religious, regional and ethnic civil war the likes if which the world has NEVER witnessed.
Such a monumental and devastating confict will do no-one any good and we must do all that is in our power to avoid it at all costs for the sake of our children and unborn generations.
Rather than talk about love we must ALL condemn the evil, the genocide and the ethnic cleansing being carried out by the Fulani herdsmen and we must ask for justice for the dead and the bereaved.
I say this because people are being killed in the most gruesome circumstances every day. We live in a nation where the lives of cows are considered to be more valuable than the lives of human beings.
Where is the love when 808 Christians are slaughtered in cold blood in their homes in Southern Kaduna by Fulani herdsmen on Christmas day in 2016 and yet no-one has been arrested for it?
Where is the love when innocent and defenceless people, including women and children, are being slaughtered in their hundreds and thousands and in the sanctity of their homes in Benue, Taraba, Adamawa, Plateau, Kogi, Kwara, Ekiti, Ogun, Oyo, Enugu, Abia, Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Imo, Anambra, Edo, Osun, Lagos, Borno, Bauchi, Gombe and elsewhere by these same demons?
Are those that were butchered and hacked to pieces by these emisarries of hell not human beings? Did they not have families and loved ones too and did they not have their own hopes, aspirations and ambitions in life?
These are OUR people. We must honor their memories and those they left behind by demanding that our fascist President and his fascist Fulani government arrests and prosecutes their killers rather than talk about love.
I have NO love in my heart for unrepentant Islamist terrorists and heartless Jihadi beasts.
I have NO love in my heart for blood-thirsty, blood-lusting, blood-craving and blood-sucking vampires and murderous ethnic supremacists who love to butcher Christian women and children and who take pleasure in spilling Christian blood.
The bitter truth is this: there can be no peace where there is no justice. There can be no love where there is no remorse.
There can be no forgiveness where there is no repentance. And there can be no future for Nigeria as long as this wholesale and gruesome butchery persists.
